Sermon Notes: Exodus 23:1-13
Our section of the law today is one that has to do with public trial for those accused of breaking God’s law. In those public trials, God intends to make sure justice is done, so he gives us some instructions to reign in all the chaos that comes from the invasive values of the Serpent and his followers.
We will see in this section we run up on the hard-wired truth of Sabbath again. Sabbath is not going to go away. We are going to have to come to grips with Sabbath. It feels elusive because it can’t be boiled down to, “on Sunday don’t do anything but go to church”. Not to get sidetracked or to miss the point of the text, but to help us get the point of this particular exposition of Sabbath in Exodus 23, Sunday gathering is to celebrate the resurrection NOT observe Sabbath. God has not changed his nature, creation, or time and space. Sabbath is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday as far as “the day” goes, and that has not changed. God did not give us Sabbath for church services. We gather to worship on Sunday because of the resurrection in addition to a rich and robust observance of Sabbath that is all pervasive. If that stresses you out, you have not yet made it through your Bible and started coming to terms with everything it says about the glorious and supernatural gift of Sabbath.
I needed to say that because I don’t want you to pigeonhole the Sabbath to truth and justice alone just like I don’t want you to pigeonhole Sabbath as a day off from work or Sunday worship. Sabbath is an all-pervasive reality hard-wired into creation because it’s rooted in the nature of the all Wise Creator Jesus who made his cosmos and us to dwell in it.
In today’s text God speaks to one component of Sabbath for the land and workers to provide preventative justice in the form of provision for those that are easy to take advantage of.
Somehow and some way, God so wired the cosmos so that when we obey him, we get the counterintuitive results of obeying him.
Sabbath obedience is counterintuitive because sin has set us in opposition to God and his way, and we use faulty logic to talk ourselves into doing things the Serpent’s way and abandoning God’s way then putting that decision on God and calling it “Christian”.
It does not figure that stopping physically, emotionally, and mentally daily, weekly, monthly, and yearly in literally everything in obedience to God and obedience to reality will produce the continuation of supernatural and unseen labor we don’t have to provide and only have access to through Sabbath.
It does not figure that gathering an extra container of manna the day before there would be none would result in losing what we gathered.
It doesn’t figure that if we stop production God will cause increased production to care for those who need to be cared for.
But this is how the Wise Creator Jesus wired his cosmos to work, and to operate against it is to push against immoveable realities, and that might explain why so many of God’s people live worn out rather than energized and, in the flow and rhythm of the kingdom of God.
God has given his law, and to violate his law results in nothing good.
Isaiah 46:8-11 (ESV) 8 “Remember this and stand firm, recall it to mind, you transgressors, 9 remember the former things of old; for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, 10 declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done, saying, My counsel shall stand, and I will accomplish all my purpose,’ 11 calling a bird of prey from the east, the man of my counsel from a far country. I have spoken, and I will bring it to pass; I have purposed, and I will do it.
To violate any of God’s laws of truth and justice puts us working against this Rock of immovability. To walk against God’s wiring of the cosmos is like me putting my shoulder into the side of Stone Mountain and with confidence believing I’m going to move it. I’m just confidently wrong and going to wear myself out and hurt myself.
Let’s see what the Lord wants us to know from his word today.
Let’s read it! Exodus 23:1-13
God’s people are to be devoted to truth and justice. 23:1-2
God’s people are to avoid spreading a false report.
This prohibition is related to a false report about a case that is being tried. The prohibition is so that minds are not poisoned against what is true.
We know this because the second part of the sentence gives us the setting, and that is they are not to “join hands” with a wicked man in being a malicious witness who is spreading the false report.
The word translated “wicked” means one who is guilty.
So, we are to be careful about who we join hands with regarding issues of what is true and what is just.
The information we digest and pass on has great affect for either good or evil.
The tongue is a restless evil, full of deadly poison. So, we are to not join hands with those guilty of violating God’s law and those who may be spreading false information.
Of course, this is in the setting of doing justice when legal matters are in play, and this foundational principle of truthfulness and justice affect not only legal issues but personal and social issues as well. Our personal and social truthfulness is also set from this legal foundational truth in God’s law. In other words, from this legal trial setting, we get our personal and social values of truthful speech.
Therefore, issues of gossip are not left off the table of prohibited speech.
God’s people are to be people who speak true and just fact not untruth making us guilty of spreading malicious words that destroy.
God also prohibits his people from going with the majority when the majority is wrong, and that wrong majority ends up perverting justice.
The word “pervert” can also be translated as “stretch out”, “turn aside”, or “bow”. The idea is that justice, due to malicious and wicked and untruthful words is “turned aside” or made to “bow” before lies.
The Christian’s position is truth and justice not the words of the many who have the slick and delicious yet wicked and malicious story.
Truth and justice are God’s way.
God’s people are to do justice for everyone. 23:3-6
God’s people do justice when we avoid all favoritism. 23:3, 6
We are not to favor the poor when the poor are wrong. Verse 3.
God’s people are not to favor the affluent when the poor have a case against the affluent because the affluent have abused the poor. Verse 6.
God’s standard is truth and justice not one’s economic standing.
We must be careful that we don’t let perversions of theology affect our understanding of God’s word. Liberation theology is a branch of theological study that has been popular, and in many liberal institutions is still operational, that says because the poor are the underdog against the “man” the Bible prefers the poor man against the rich and thus God is always for the poor. There are those in the political establishment who will use liberation theology to justify their Marxist ideology theologically. Watch out for that.
Marxism, at its simplest, is the use of conflict (the dialectic) instigated by the working class to overthrow the ruling class. Marx loved Darwin because he thought Darwin provided a biological basis for his social politic.
Marxism found a home in liberal theology, because its godless, in the 1800’s and it’s still there.
Have ears to hear.
God is for truth and justice even if the poor man is on the wrong side of God’s standard.
Truth and justice applied equally to everyone are God’s way.
God’s people are to love their enemies. 23:4-5
Proverbs 25:21-22 (ESV) 21 If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink, 22 for you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you.
Matthew 5:44-48 (ESV) 44 But I say to you, “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 45 so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven. For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. 46 For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? 47 And if you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? 48 You therefore must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect.”
The author of Proverbs 25:21-22 and Jesus, who inspired the author of Proverbs 25:21-22 to write about blessing one’s enemies, continues his exposition of his word from Exodus 23:3-4 when he speaks in the Sermon on the Mount about loving our enemies.
Don’t start thinking about enemies of the state. That thinking removes us from applying the principle to ourselves, which Moses is addressing. Our setting is in the legal world of cases against those who violate God’s word against others, and Moses is addressing that.
God’s command here is first personal. When we find ourselves in a situation or legal case against one who has wronged us or a situation or legal case against us from someone we have wronged, we must not overlook God’s word.
If we happen upon a situation where we could do our legal opponent harm actively or do them harm passively by ignoring a troublesome situation rather than helping them, we do wrong.
God is concerned that we show mercy to our enemy, and even our enemy’s animal that is burdened. God’s concern for the enemy is rich because he loves so well. God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son.
God is after our heart here that we would act more like him and thus regain some of what it is to be fully human.
Romans 5:6-8 (ESV) 6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 For one will scarcely die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person one would dare even to die— 8 but God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.
While we were enemies of God, burdened under the weight of our rebellion of distrust and host of other violations against God, God shows us love by executing his Son as if he had done what we have so that we can be rescued from his just case against us.
For those of us who have tasted that divine act of justice in our favor, we have no excuse for not showing mercy to our enemies.
This doesn’t mean we have to pretend all is well relationally between us and an opponent. In fact, reconciliation or a meal together may never happen again. But that does not prevent us from doing good to an enemy when we have the opportunity to do so.
God demands that of us, and learning this ethic is part of our sanctification.
God’s people must get justice right and avoid bribery. 23:7-8
God is not going to let the wicked go. He will do justice in the earth.
It is the job of who God has placed in charge of governing to see that justice is done.
That means God’s people should avoid false charges, making sure the innocent and righteous are not killed for false charges.
God’s promise to not acquit the wicked is a warning that those who engage in false charges to get their enemy will be dealt with, and he will be the one to deal with them.
God’s people must not oppress the sojourner in a misuse of the law. 23:9
Oppression of the vulnerable sojourner is a repeated command from chapter 22, but here the command is in the setting of the justice system.
In matters of the law, the people of God are never to take advantage of the foreigner as the foreigner is seeking to fit in and obey the laws of the land.
The law is not intended to oppress innocent people. The law is to bring order where violation has created chaos and lead us to faith in Jesus.
When we misuse the law to wrongly accuse the innocent, we created chaos and do violence to God, and we certainly don’t lead people to faith in Jesus.
God’s people observe Sabbath. 23:10-12
There is legitimate debate on whether verses 10-12 should be included with the section we have included it with.
Most folks put verses 10-12 within a section of Exodus 23:10-19. If one does that, it is fine, and I would not argue with that decision.
The reason I’ve included it here is because the Lord speaks to this particular Sabbath observance through a Sabbath agricultural year, which produces an outcome for vulnerable people that we are instructed to consider in our legal processes.
The Sabbath is pervasive, and I’ll speak to that in a moment, and likely come back to it next week as we will include these verses next week also.
NOTE: It’s a reminder that the Bible is one cohesive metanarrative that tells one story, and we can interlink it all and don’t have to draw our lines in the text too neatly.
Here, the Sabbath practice of allowing their fields to lie fallow in the seventh year has an astonishing consequence. God promised them that if they obeyed the Sabbath agricultural year, they would never lack and, in fact, would have an overabundance. This overabundance was not to be hoarded but shared as a testament to God’s nature and the workings of his cosmos, as well as a source of justice for those who were vulnerable, aided by their fellow Israelites or, in the case of the sojourner, their potential fellow citizens.
Listen to God in Leviticus 25:20-22 (ESV) 20 And if you say, ‘What shall we eat in the seventh year, if we may not sow or gather in our crop?’ 21 I will command my blessing on you in the sixth year, so that it will produce a crop sufficient for three years. 22 When you sow in the eighth year, you will be eating some of the old crop; you shall eat the old until the ninth year, when its crop arrives.
God promises they would have enough if they just trust him and obey.
God provided for the vulnerable through the Sabbath rest of the land.
This true and just provision for the vulnerable was not just for the Sabbath year. In the normal cycle of six years of sowing and reaping, Israel was to make space for the vulnerable to have provision.
Listen to the Lord’s word in Leviticus 19:9-10 (ESV) 9 “When you reap the harvest of your land, you shall not reap your field right up to its edge, neither shall you gather the gleanings after your harvest. 10 And you shall not strip your vineyard bare, neither shall you gather the fallen grapes of your vineyard. You shall leave them for the poor and for the sojourner: I am the LORD your God.
The vulnerable were to be allowed access to harvest to work for themselves because man is dignified in work.
To be able to work to get the results of labor builds man up. Think about Boaz’ allowing Ruth to come and glean as a widower and foreigner. That is what it looked like.
In the Sabbath year’s natural fallow production, the vulnerable would be provided for by the hand of God an abundance of resources to live on and have opportunity to thrive by.
God connects this provision to the previous section on truth and justice because it is truthful and just for us to allow abundance to be accessible to the vulnerable, enabling them to work and build a sustainable life of opportunity.
If Israel was observing the Sabbath of the land, it meant they were observing the Sabbath of physical rest also, so the people, the animals, the equipment all got rest and was refreshed.
Sabbath results in truth and justice socially if we practice it.
Sin has broken our relationship with God, with each other, and with creation, and Sabbath is one of the ways the Lord addresses all three of those broken relationships.
Suffice it to say, there is a place for us to be concerned with understanding how Sabbath observance produces abundance that will provide truth and justice for the vulnerable in the form of sustainable provision and opportunity to gain dignity and upward mobility.
The problem is we don’t believe Sabbath because we don’t practice it, and we don’t practice it because we don’t understand it beyond taking a day off or using “Sabbath” as an excuse for bailing on my responsibilities because I don’t know how to manage myself or my capacity physically, mentally, and emotionally.
We think of the Sabbath more like the Pharisees’ perversion of the Sabbath than Jesus who wove Sabbath into the created cosmos.
Somehow, us westernized humans have lost the art of self-control, and us Christians of that civilization don’t know how to employ the fruit of the Holy Spirit, self-control. We are puppets on a cultural and technological string using theological language to justify our folly.
When we learn Sabbath, social provision might begin to take care of itself.
Don’t make fun, but for all the problems the Amish have theologically and practically, Sabbath, abundance, health, and supply to the vulnerable is not among their issues. These guys provided housing to people in WNC when FEMA couldn’t get out of their own way.
When we deal with the sojourner and our own poor in accordance with God’s way, we witness the kingdom of God’s boundaries expanding into “out” functions. This is where order and the gospel begin to spill out from the people of God to those who need it and the good news of Jesus. There’s an aroma of life among the people of God who obey his word that spreads to other nations God sends to sojourn among us.
But we struggle with order and gospel ourselves.
Sabbath, an integral part of God’s established, created order at the tiniest level, was the culmination of the Lord’s work on the sixth day of creation. He “Sabbathed” (stopped, ceased, rested), making His nature of ceasing to strive and stopping as creation’s inherent nature of operation. Sabbath, therefore, is a creation order predating the Lord’s writing of Sabbath into the Decalogue. In fact, Sabbath’s presence in the Decalogue is evidence it is part of created order.
The Sabbath is evident in the cosmos through the natural cycles of creation. Fruit trees, for instance, know Sabbath and stop producing right on time. Fruit trees have seasons of intricate and powerful work, and those same trees have seasons of being dormant, looking like they are dead when they are not. They are just not in producing peaches season. Seasons are the cosmos’ way of practicing Sabbath just like Jesus designed it to do.
Sabbath is not nothing, it’s different somethings at the right times in rhythm with God’s order in his cosmos.
Animals, too, understand this rhythm and have seasons of reproducing and seasons when they are not reproducing. Their living and surviving don’t stop. They gather. They store. They migrate. They eat. They defend. They mate. They keep on keeping on, but their activity changes. They know when to stop, when to start, and when to change activity in each phase. This Sabbath activity is built into them by the all Wise Creator Jesus.
Agricultural production undergoes Sabbath cycles of production and laying fallow. God told us this and taught us how to observe it and reap the abundance of Sabbath.
However, it is only humans, driven by the values of the Serpent, who refuse to relinquish our relentless striving with no rhythm, no order, no intentionality to rhythm and order, and thus no power. Just worn out and ragged image-bearers.
Sabbath does not mean lazy. Sabbath is not an invitation to NOT maximize God-created capacity. Remember the parable about the soil? Good soil produces some 30, some 60, some 100-fold. Good soil, humans who follow Jesus produce at their God-given capacity. Some are given 5 talents, some 2, and some 1. What will each of us do with what God has given us?
Sabbath is not an invitation to quit what we should do because it’s hard.
Sabbath is not an invitation to disobey God by twisting his word and making it an excuse to disobey him through multiple layers of exceptions that keep moving us away from God’s intentions that help us justify not doing what he said to do.
Sabbath is not merely doing nothing on the prescribed day. That’s how the Pharisees did Sabbath and plotted against Jesus for violating their twisted and exception laden abuse of his word.
Sabbath is a created reality on which the rails of abundant life in Christ are to run.
Sabbath is actively entering into God’s rest physically at his prescribed times daily (Waking to work, stopping to eat, restarting work, going home from work, going to sleep), weekly, monthly, and yearly.
“Sabbath is knowing when enough is enough.” – Logan McAdams
Sabbath is entering into spiritual rest in salvation and sanctification.
Sabbath is entering into mental and emotional rest through exercising the mind of Christ.
Sabbath is not Sunday worship and a nap in the afternoon unless there is a game we want to watch. Sunday is when Christians choose to gather for worship to celebrate Jesus’ resurrection on the first day of the week, Sunday. The Sabbath is sundown Friday to sundown Saturday. Sunday is not the Sabbath day. It’s a workday. Let’s not put on God what God doesn’t put on himself. Let’s not confine Sabbath to Sunday church services and no grass cutting or fishing.
Sabbath is the mental laying hold of the available fruit of self-control in actively thinking on what God tells us to think on which produces emotional rest.
Sabbath is letting go of what you have no control over in favor of trusting God to manage what he’s responsible for to his ends rather than mine. Think and extrapolate from Matthew 6.
Sabbath is living in the realization of full capacity and achieving more because of living in the supernatural stream of God’s way of doing things in Sabbath.
Sabbath is a radical trust in God to do and be for us all he is.
Sabbath is a recognition we are creatures and not God.
Sabbath will produce truth and justice for everyone.
Sabbath is good and peaceful. Sabbath is grooving all of these into a daily rhythm of disciplined practice, and it’s more amazing than I can even articulate at this point.
Sabbath will be a witness on the last day that men have no excuse for not following Jesus because God made his good order and salvation observable in Sabbath. Yet mankind will see it and refuse to follow Jesus, the Lord of Sabbath. They will actually worship Sabbath by worshiping how Sabbath shows up in creation (see Romans 1). And in some instances, those pagans who grasp how Jesus made his cosmos work, live in it better than those who have Jesus, and will spend eternity in hell because they missed Sabbath’s Creator while they lived in the abundance of his provision in Sabbath while we have Jesus and refuse to live in his abundance.
Application
God will not acquit the wicked. Exodus 23:7
Remember, the wicked are the guilty. Followers of Jesus should be the best equipped people on the planet to see that truth known and justice is done.
To leave truth and justice to people who don’t follow Jesus is dereliction of duty.
If you are so inclined, seek out a vocation in every part of the legal system as a person who bears God’s sword for good.
Gospel Truth: If you are not in Christ, you are guilty before God, and you will not escape.
Come to Jesus for the Sabbath of his justifying work and enter a rest the likes of which you cannot imagine. It is a glorious rest to stop having to earn God’s favor and only receive it freely.
Believe that the kingdom of God, through the church, will comprehensively redeem all of creation, and his law gives us a glimpse into what redemption looks like.
Habakkuk 2:14 (ESV) 14 For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
Creation is not going away. God will renew it. All of it was created as good. Sin broke it, and Jesus is restoring it. “He makes his blessings flow far as the curse is found”. – Joy to the World.
Jesus is fixing creation in the gospel of the kingdom, and our task is to join with God in the restoration of all things through preaching the good news, making disciples, and multiplying churches among all nations from all domains of society, and making application of his truth in our domains.
God’s law reveals to us the good order and salvation of God’s kingdom, it gives us a glimpse into restored creation and humanity, and what we are to be producing in our work.
So, when we study the law, we see God’s order and are led to Jesus, and how to operate in our work daily.
In this work, God intends to redeem every part of creation and make it whole again. Eden will be regained. See Revelation 21 and 22.
These laws are not going away but will be downloaded into new hearts that want to follow and obey the full intent and purpose of God’s order.
The spiritual, social, political, and economic functions of the nations will be redeemed. John sees in Revelation 21 the nations bringing their wealth into the City of Jesus Christ, the New Jerusalem, to honor and worship him.
We have a role in that redemptive work. Remember, Moses is God’s disrupter of the Serpent’s rule, and what God disrupts he replaces with good order.
We are disrupters of the Serpent’s rule in our gospel work, but with far greater power than Moses had. We have the fully revealed gospel of the kingdom with Holy Spirit dwelling within us.
Don’t get into your eschatology. You need to look beyond that and not be limited by those categories.
Start with understanding the public square is ours by God’s decree, and if we will go to work tomorrow in the public square, live by the ethics of God’s kingdom we see in his law, make disciples, integrate them into the local church, and repeat that process, we are on the front end of the revolution of God’s kingdom.
Just don’t quit. Keep moving forward. Take every inch the Lord Jesus gives you because it is his and ours with him. Blessed are the meek (those who live in power under control) for they will inherit the earth.
Do this work of the kingdom in and by Sabbath rest.
I’m convinced we can live at created capacity and do it without living ragged.
Matthew 11:28-30 “Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”
We are going to have to come to terms with the understanding “Sabbath” (translated as “rest” in Genesis 2:2) does not mean “do nothing”. Jesus modeled this for us in his conflicts with the Pharisees over Sabbath. God completed his work and rested.
“God’s work was enough.” – Logan McAdams
He came to the completion of the creation, and he stopped creating and started sustaining by the word of his power. God by his action helps us see that Sabbath is not doing nothing.
Sabbath is living in the rhythm of God’s supernatural flow of abundant life that is full of stopping and starting and pausing and disrupting and innovating and maximizing and finishing all by the wise designs of Jesus.
I’m on a journey to learn Sabbath well so that I can finish my race on this side of the eternal kingdom stronger than I started.
Let’s worship.