Light on the Hill

James Kaddis: Have you been hurt? Has somebody done something that's worthy of your anger? Has somebody done something that's so deeply painful that now you want vengeance? Are you looking for it? If you are, the answer to all of this is to simply say, "God, I have been hurt in this situation. It's been tragically difficult and I'm asking you as my God to make the situation whole."

Guest (Female): When someone does you wrong, do you look forward to seeing them pay for it? Our inclination is usually to seek out vengeance, but as we'll learn today on Light on the Hill, that's territory reserved only for God. Pastor James Kaddis opens Exodus Chapter 21, where we encounter the "eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth" passage. Most people don't understand what it means. It is not encouraging vengeance. Here's Pastor James with what it is communicating to us.

James Kaddis: When we talk about the "eye for the eye" and the "tooth for the tooth" passage, this is something that is so incredibly misunderstood. When people read this, what they think Jesus is saying or what the Lord is saying here is that if somebody pokes out your eye, you are required to poke their eye out as well. Or according to the law, if somebody pulls out your tooth, you are required to pull their tooth out.

The reason why they believe this is because they're conditioned to believe this traditionally based on the teaching that Jesus brings concerning anger when he quotes this passage. When he quotes, "You've heard it said an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, but I have told you that if this happens, turn the other cheek," it's so completely misunderstood. It is not saying if someone pokes your eye out, you're supposed to poke their eye out.

What it's saying is if somebody pokes your eye out, then the obligation that you have is not to extend yourself beyond that which they did to you. In other words, the idea here is being made whole. The idea here is reconciliation. It's not if somebody knocks a tooth out of you that your job is to go and to knock their tooth out. It's not a statement or a requirement for vengeful activity. It is a guideline being given to a judge about how to make something whole.

Think about it like this: If a person goes and removes another person's limb, it's not a guideline to tell the judge that now that person's limb is required to be removed as a function of punitive action. It's a restorative command. The idea here is if that person loses a limb at the hand of that other man who took their limb, the objective is to be restorative in how you respond with respect to the adjudication that's offered. In other words, the idea here is to make whole the person who has been deprived.

So it does two things. Number one, it keeps the person who has become the victim of the action from going to an extreme that would cause them, as a result of their experience, to then become judged as well and end up in jail. If a person gets his arm lopped off, then technically, if he cuts the other person's arm off, he's not going to get any judgment or anything like that. But the goal isn't to do that for the person.

The goal is to give the judges direction on how they're to solve the problem when the problem arises. The goal here is to understand that the obligation is set forth to make whole the person who has experienced the suffering. If a man takes the tooth of another man, then the man who took the other man's tooth is supposed to do whatever it takes to make them whole after they've done that. By the way, that man getting his tooth taken out doesn't make the situation whole. All it does is create two people without a tooth.

The idea here is if the person reacts, they can't react beyond this point. But the more critical message being given here is that when such a crime has taken place, it's the responsibility of the person who executed the crime to make the victim whole as a result of the action that they had committed. It actually is a series of sentencing guidelines. I spoke to an attorney years ago who had such an interesting perspective to see the attitudes of both attorneys.

Both were incredibly gifted litigators, very smart, and very good at what they did. I spoke to them concerning what was the same case. One litigator basically said, "We're going after the other side with everything we got and we're going to try to take everything out of their pockets. We're going to go for the maximum." Then there's another litigator who I talked to who's an incredible litigator and super smart.

He basically says, "Look, we are going to seek out whatever we can seek out legally to do, but you just need to understand the reason why we're taking this action is to make that person whole who was victimized by what they did. We're not here to completely ruin a person's life because of the fact that they did something that may or may not have been a mistake. We are here to make the person who actually was victimized whole. That's what we're trying to do."

When we ask for damages, what we're asking for is whatever's necessary to help them with what may be affected in their future job responses and what may be affected in the current condition that they're in. I think about that and I'm like, you are just talking about something that is straight out of Exodus and you don't even realize it. It's such a biblical principle. Have you been hurt? Has somebody done something that's worthy of your anger?

Has somebody done something that's so deeply painful that now you want vengeance? Are you looking for it? If you are, the answer to all of this is to simply say, "God, I have been hurt in this situation. It's been tragically difficult and I'm asking you as my God to make the situation whole." If you spend time seeking God to make the situation in which you've been victimized whole, you drop the victim mentality.

You say, "God, I'm going to rest in you to use this to make me better as God promises he will. I'm not going to focus on what the person did to me, rather I'm going to focus on what you're going to do in using this situation in my life." You now open the door for a couple of things. You open the door for God to execute his perfect judgment on the person who did the injustice to you. Number two, you open up the door for God to do something extraordinary in your life.

You chose to mitigate and attenuate the emotion of anger that was driving you to bitterness and you said, "God, I'm going to give it to you." You gave God an opportunity to do something extraordinary in the situation. It's a big deal, isn't it? When your attitude changes about what happens to you. And by the way, much easier said than done when all of this happens, but that's exactly what's going on. He's going to get more specific into this.

He's going to describe to us what this actually looks like. Again, you'll see the theme. I wanted to bring it out to you before I started reading this section. The theme is not have vengeance. The theme is let God be vengeful in what God is going to do. But the theme is demand reconciliation, demand being made whole, demand restitution. That's the model that's being given here. Demanding restitution is a significantly different picture than vengeance.

Look what it says in verse 26 and he's going to give us practical pictures of what that looks like. He says, "If a man smite the eye of his servant or the eye of his maid that it perish, he shall let him go free for his eye's sake." Did you get that? It doesn't say that if a man destroy the eye of a servant, then that man is supposed to get his eye destroyed. This is just after you hear "an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth."

What he's now saying is make the servant whole by allowing the servant to no longer be obligated to whatever debt obligation that was created in order for him to become a servant. He's no longer a servant. By the way, this is really interesting. When he says set him free, then he would be obligated to set him free according to how they are supposed to be set free in Deuteronomy. Deuteronomy required them to be set free by being given a whole bunch of property and enough sustenance to carry themselves through a new life.

So it wasn't just like, "Hey, I plucked your eye out, get out of here." The person who plucked that servant's eye out had to think twice about whether or not they were going to do so. Plucking that servant's eye out immediately brought them to a place of accountability where they had to recognize that there was going to be a price to pay. Imagine if you knew that the very moment you got angry and your actions in which anger motivated you would create an instant consequence. Most of you wouldn't do it.

Most of us would recognize that we don't want to pay that price, so we're not going to do it. I've had multiple moments where I'm on the freeway and somebody does something really stupid. In my heart of hearts, all I want to do is just completely derby them, if you know what I mean. I just want to ram them. I just want to knock them off the side of the road, take my car, and hit them. I'll take it a step further. I want to PIT maneuver them.

Honestly, I want to PIT them. That's just what I want to do. The problem is I can't. Why? Not because I don't want to. I want to! But I can't because I understand what immediate consequence will come as a result. I don't know who's in that car, who's going to be affected, what secondary vehicles are going to be affected by it. I don't know if what he did was not an act of intention, rather it was an act of carelessness because maybe he's being distracted by a kid in the car who's injured.

We don't know what's going on. So the idea here is that there's this natural tendency in me to want to destroy that person, but at the same time I don't know the whole story. So he'll go free. Look what it says in verse 27. Notice the contrast here. When you read verse 26, it says that if you smite the eye of the servant, he shall let him go free for his eye's sake. And if he smite out his manservant's tooth, he shall let him go free for his tooth's sake.

Would you say that if you lost a tooth it would be more consequential or less consequential than losing an eye? Less, obviously. You lose a tooth, big deal. Losing a tooth is nothing compared to losing an eye. Yet God places a value on both of those. Why? Because it's not about what the person loses, it's what about the function of anger does. God is regulating that emotion to basically teach people that there is a consequence to your anger. There's a consequence to your insanity.

How many times have we passed by the Tesla dealer seeing all these protesters by the dealership? I drove by there recently and a few of them had crowbars in their hand. I'm thinking, "What are you going to do with the crowbar? What kind of a stupid mindset do you have?" I still think it's hilarious the people who get really mad and try to break a Tesla window or try to dent it in. All those things have cameras around them. You're going to go to jail.

Why would you do that? They just don't think. But I just think in my mind, your sin and your anger has made you functionally stupid. Your IQ has been reduced to the average person's shoe size. You have no ability to be able to reason because your anger and your sin has made you stupid. You don't recognize the consequence that that's going to create. The rest of what we're going to read is going to go by very quickly, but I want you to understand the pattern.

The pattern is restitution. The pattern is making whole the action of irresponsibility that the person gives themselves to. That's the picture behind an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. It's make the person whole who has lost something. This is going to culminate to a very important message in just a minute. Let's move on to verse 28. It says, "If an ox gore a man or a woman that they die, then the ox shall surely be stoned and his flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner of the ox shall be quit."

So this is interesting. If a man has an ox and the ox gores somebody, then the ox itself had to be killed and the food could not be eaten. In other words, there's no benefit there for anybody, which causes the owner to be accountable for his actions. It causes the owner to think twice about whether or not you've taken reasonable precautions to make sure that there's no situation where that ox could hurt somebody.

If the owner acts irresponsibly, then there's going to be a consequence. By the way, if you lost an ox and you weren't able to feed anybody from the death of that ox, it was a huge loss financially. It would be enough to really hurt somebody, especially if they were the average person. Mind you, the person living around this time would go out of their way to take very good care to make sure that that ox would not harm anybody or damage anybody or their property.

If the ox gore a man or a woman, but if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past and it hath been testified to his owner and he hath not kept him in, but he hath killed a man or a woman, the ox shall be stoned and his owner shall also be put to death. Now things just the ante just upped. In other words, if that same ox goes and hurts somebody, but he had already hurt somebody before and it had been reported to the owner, then the ox is supposed to be immediately killed and so is the owner.

Because the owner did not take the due time to actually keep the ox in to make sure the ox wasn't going to kill anybody. Now there was one technicality here that we see: "If there be laid on him a sum of money, then he shall give for the ransom of his life whatsoever is laid upon him. Whether he hath gored a son or have gored a daughter, according to his judgment shall it be done unto him." Notice this.

What that would mean is that there would be no court hearing to determine whether or not there was liability on the part of the man who caused the wrongful death. What it basically meant is if the ox killed somebody and the ox had a reputation of harming people, then that man would immediately be killed with his animal. But if the man did not want to be killed, then they would have to go to one of these judges and the judge would have to create a lump sum of money that would have to be paid to the family.

If he wasn't able to pay that lump sum, then he would be killed. So the idea here is that there was no wrongful termination lawsuit, it was you immediately die for allowing this ox to kill one of my family members. If you want to live, well then you've got to go to the judge and the judge is going to place a stupid high number on you that you're going to have to pay to spare your life. In other words, you are going to pay out on this wrongful death lawsuit.

Even though what you did had no premeditation like a standard killing would, you're still going to be required to actually pay for it. You'll pay with your life or you'll pay with pretty much what may be your life savings. You have no place to argue. It's either pay this out or you're dead. By the way, that's going to motivate people to be very careful about what they do with their animals. It's going to teach people to be responsible.

Imagine if gangsters in the hood today were told that if your pit bull attacks and kills a baby, you're dead. You're instantly going to be executed by the police if you have known your pit bull to be vicious before. Think about the way that that would work. I think there'd be a lot less gangsters on the street running around with their pit bulls teaching them how to be vicious. It's the same kind of mentality here. It's learning to be responsible with what you've been given.

Verse 32: "If the ox shall push a manservant or a maidservant, he shall give it unto their master 30 shekels of silver and the ox shall be stoned." If a man owns servants and one of them is killed by an ox, the man is to pay 30 shekels of silver to the owner to compensate him for what would have been in essence the cost that he would have gained from the work or the life of the servant.

That's what makes the situation with Jesus and Judas to be especially egregious because if you know the Old Testament law, then you would know that Judas sold Jesus for what was termed as the value of a servant. That's kind of an interesting thing when you think about it, especially because the Bible refers to Jesus as one who has allowed his earlobe to be pierced, meaning that Christ did what he did in order to free us from that place of slavery.

Very interesting parallel that you see here. Verse 33: "If a man shall open a pit, or a man shall dig a pit and not cover it and an ox or an ass fall therein, the owner of the pit shall make it good and give money unto the owner of them and the dead beast shall be his." If you open up a cistern to get some water and that beast falls in and dies, you not only own the dead animal, but you're going to pay that man for the animal that you actually killed.

Verse 35: "And if one man's ox hurt another's that he die, then they shall sell the live ox and divide the money of it and the dead also shall they divide." That dead ox will have some value in it that will be used to provide meat for people to eat or other products. They're supposed to divide the value of that and then sell a live ox which would of course bring them a lot more money, at the expense of the person who caused it all to happen.

Again, it's all about making people whole. Verse 36: "Or if it be known that the ox hath used to push in time past and his owner hath not kept him in, he shall surely pay ox for ox and the dead shall be his own." You don't take the ox to auction and split it in half, you pay for that ox and you pay for the dead animal. The idea here is to make people whole for the destruction that anger has.

Here's the lesson that we learn from this and this is really powerful. None of us own ox. The message here is two things. Number one, vengeance belongs to God, so don't own it. Don't allow anger to overwhelm you and destroy you. It will blind you and it will make you do incredibly crazy things.