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| Topic discussed in the recorded discussion | Start time on the recording |
|---|---|
| Q: Don’t we do a lot of these laws in modern society already? | 1:20 |
| Q: Do the laws on lying cover “white lies”? | 3:52 |
| Q: What is the curse of parents in Ex. 21:17? | 14:53 |
| How cursing is similar to allowing sorcerers to live amongst the people of God | 23:06 |
| How sorcery is akin to murder | 25:13 |
| Q: Was a killing of someone later found out to be a sorcerer classified as murder? | 27:11 |
| How the Torah’s instructions on slavery led to its abolition | 29:45 |
| What’s the penalty for murder? | 50:32 |
| Prohibitions against mistreating slaves and recapturing them | 53:01 |
| American slaves who believed in the God of Israel became brothers to their masters | 56:51 |
| How dogs trained to kill can make the owner a murderer | 58:56 |
| Punishments for theft | 1:00:06 |
| Prohibition on loan interest doesn’t include commerce | 1:01:39 |
| God will get angry if He hears about oppression | 1:03:28 |
| Who is the Angel of the LORD? | 1:08:22 |
| When are offerings of Israel an abomination to the LORD? | 1:17:01 |
How important is the Law today?
Despite what some Christian churches teach, there are more laws in the Torah than just the Ten Commandments. A significant majority of the book of Deuteronomy elaborates on how to put the Ten Commandments into practice in our natural interactions with our neighbors.
What about ‘white lies’?
Look at the commandment “thou shalt not lie.” This doesn’t just mean that we should not tell lies. It includes not listening to or repeating the lies of others.
We also must be consistent in our treatment of others. We should treat our enemies with the same sense of justice that we treat our friends. If we are not consistent in our treatment of our fellows, we defame God’s name.
What it means to curse your parents
We are also called to not curse our leaders, just as we are prohibited by the Torah from cursing our parents. We cannot use God’s words as a hatchet to cause harm to others. In the book of Jude, we are told that the Archangel Michael did not dare to curse HaSatan when they were arguing over the body of Moses. Michael simply said that God would rebuke HaSatan in the way that He saw fit. Human beings, who are not as righteous as Michael, but who are also not as evil as HaSatan, should be even more careful about cursing our fellow human beings. We should follow the Archangel Michael’s holy example and leave it up to God to rebuke any leader who is leading others into sin.
Does the Bible condone slavery?
How many of you have slaves? No one! The topic of slavery pops us several times in the Torah. Many think that because slavery has been illegal in America since 1865 that the laws of the Torah addressing slavery are irrelevant to us. This is not true. In many areas of the world, slavery is still legal, or at least tacitly tolerated.
If you live in a nation where slavery is legal or tacitly legal, these rules are still important to consider. How the Torah teaches people to treat slaves is often a much higher and more just standard than the laws of most nations.
There are three groups of slaves in Torah: male Israelite slaves, female Israelite slaves and Gentile slaves. This section mostly address how to treat male Israelite slaves. There are two common ways in which a male Israelite might become a slave. The first way is if he convicted of theft in a court of law. The convicted thief was sentenced to slavery to repay his theft. Whether he stole a modest amount of money or an exorbitant amount of money, the thief is only required to serve for seven years.
The second type of male slavery is of a poor person who voluntarily gave himself over someone to work to save himself from destitution.
When it comes to the female Israelite, the only way she could be sold into slavery is if the father sells his prepubescent daughter as a “slave” to a wealthier home as a potential spouse for either the master of the house or the son of the master. If once the girl reaches marriage age and the master of the house or the son decide they don’t want to marry her, she is free to return to her father’s house. She doesn’t have to buy her freedom and the master can’t sell her to someone else.
The other category of slave is the Gentile slave. If they choose to convert to Judaism, than they are no longer gentile and their slave contract changes from a gentile contract to an Israelite contract and that person must be released after seven years.
The Torah’s built in time bomb for slavery
Let’s look at Jeremiah 34:8-22 and we will learn how the Israelites banned slavery millennia before it was criminalized in the Western world. Jeremiah berates the people of Judah for keeping Jewish slaves against God’s wishes, and predicts that Jerusalem will be conquered because of the people’s disrespect for God.
Once you release a slave, you don’t get to change your mind and enslave them over again. When the Israelites made slavery illegal and then shortly there after, re-enslaved their slaves, God punished them severely by sending them into exile and making them slaves of Babylon for 70 years.
When we make a covenant, God holds us to it. When the United States of America banned slavery in 1865, those of us who are descended from those who made that law, we must abide by that law. If any American ignores that law and enslaves someone, we will bear God’s punishment for breaking that covenant.
Now, I want to go over the laws about murder. Accidental murder, which we call manslaughter, can be forgiven, but pre-meditated murder can’t be forgiven by society. For those who committed pre-meditated murder, execution is the only fit sentence for that crime. The murderer must be executed. Even the murderer of a slave must be executed.
Stealing isn’t just about taking an object, or an animal away from its rightful owner. Stealing someone’s heart, or seducing a person under false pretenses, is also a form of theft and has to be repaid.
The Pilgrims drew their anti-slavery policies from Scripture, employing Torah instructions on kidnapping for slavery (the source for the English-American slave trade) and freedom for fugitive slaves.
Taking the Bible as the guide book to every major facet of life—a map to creation authored by the Creator—the Pilgrims instituted the free market, the institutional independence of the church from the dictates of the government, stronger protections for private property, and public education.[xii] In 1641 they also passed possibly the first anti-slavery law on the continent making “man-stealing” a capital offence.[xiii] In fact, when a slave ship came to them in 1646, the Pilgrims prosecuted the slavers and liberated the slaves.[xiv] Although far from perfect—for all have fallen short and sinned (see Romans 3:23)—those early beginnings of anti-slavery sentiment eventually led to the New England area being the first places in the modern world to abolish slavery, with Massachusetts specifically ending the institution in 1783—a full 50 years before England, which was the first independent nation to abolish slavery.[xv]
“A Tale of Two Cities: Jamestown, Plymouth, and the American Way,” WallBuilders.com, accessed Feb. 27, 2021
When God shouts, we’d better listen
You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. You shall not afflict any widow or orphan. If you afflict him at all, and if he does cry out to Me, I will surely hear his cry; and My anger will be kindled, and I will kill you with the sword, and your wives shall become widows and your children fatherless.
Exodus 22:21–24 NASB
They didn’t have exclamation marks in Hebrew grammar so when they wanted to emphasize a point, they repeated the verb to drive the point home:
אִם־עַנֵּה תְעַנֶּה אֹתוֹ כִּי אִם־צָעֹק יִצְעַק אֵלַי שָׁמֹעַ אֶשְׁמַע צַעֲקָתוֹ
Exodus 22:22 Hebrew Masoretic Text with Westminster Hebrew Morphology
God is very emphatic here in this command that we must extend kindness not only to our fellow citizens but to foreigners as well.
Is the Angel of the LORD an early appearance of the Messiah?
“Behold, I am going to send an angel before you to guard you along the way and to bring you into the place which I have prepared. Be on your guard before him and obey his voice; do not be rebellious toward him, for he will not pardon your transgression, since My name is in him. But if you truly obey his voice and do all that I say, then I will be an enemy to your enemies and an adversary to your adversaries. For My angel will go before you and bring you in to the land of the Amorites, the Hittites, the Perizzites, the Canaanites, the Hivites and the Jebusites; and I will completely destroy them.”
Exodus 23:20–23 NASB
This angel is not the Messiah, because he can’t forgive sins. This is the same angel that Joshua later addresses in Joshua 5:13–15. This is also repeated in Judges 2:1–5. The angel’s only allegiance is to God.
How do we present acceptable offerings to God today?
These are examples of how we can apply the larger principles of Torah in small, practical ways in our daily interactions. God doesn’t give us the right to pick and chose which rules to follow.
“not even if you come to appear before me. For who asked these things from your hands? You shall trample my court no more! If you should offer fine flour, that would be futile; incense is an abomination to me. Your new moons and sabbaths and great day I cannot endure. Fasting and holidays, as well as your new moons and your feasts, my soul hates. You have made me full; I will no longer forgive your sins. When you stretch out your hands to me, I will turn away my eyes from you; even if you make many petitions, I will not listen to you, for your hands are full of blood. Wash yourselves; become clean; remove the evil deeds from your souls before my eyes; cease from your evil deeds; learn to do good; seek judgment; rescue the one who is wronged; defend the orphan, and do justice to the widow. So come, and let us argue it out, says the Lord: even though your sins are like crimson, I will make them white like snow, and though they are like scarlet, I will make them white like wool. And if you are willing and listen to me, you shall eat the good things of the land, but if you are not willing nor listen to me, the dagger will devour you; for the mouth of the Lord has spoken these things. “How the faithful city Sion has become a whore! She that was full of justice, wherein righteousness lodged — but now murderers! Your silver has no value; your taverners mix the wine with water. Your rulers are disobedient: they are companions of thieves, loving gifts, running after a reward, not defending orphans and not paying attention to the widows’ cause.”
Isaiah 1:12–23 New English Translation of the Septuagint
Our sacrifice today are our words and our prayers (Hos. 14:1–2; Heb. 13:11–16). They all emphasize that it is mainly with our words that we offer sacrifice to God, not with animal sacrifices. Animal sacrifices without obedience are worthless (Isa. 1:11). Prayers and words without obedience are worthless as well.
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father who is in heaven will enter. Many will say to Me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in Your name, and in Your name cast out demons, and in Your name perform many miracles?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; “Depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness” [Psa. 6:8].’ ”
Matthew 7:21–23 NASB
If we don’t walk in obedience to HaShem, we can’t say we actually know Yeshua. If we walk in disobedience, Yeshua will deny us. God tells us in the Bible how He wants us to live. If we say the right things but walk in a way that is wrong, that hypocrisy, that disconnect between our words and our actions, defames God.
Summary: Tammy