God paints two scenarios for his people in the book of Exodus that we can apply to our lives today. Let’s imagine you are driving down the road and you see a person you consider your enemy. He is standing beside his car on the shoulder ahead, engine boiling over, steam rising to the clouds, desperately trying to flag someone down for help. What do you do? Well, you blow the horn of course, and wave gleefully as you scream past him, hitting a puddle of water to spray him down good while screaming at the top of your lungs, “Need some water?” That is someone you despise and you are delighted to see them suffering. Right? Or imagine another scenario where there is someone who despises you. Maybe he’s a neighbor, and his small yapper dog has somehow gotten stuck in your chain link fence that separates your property. What to do? You simply ignore the poor mutt and his cries and you mumble as if to your neighbor, “You hate my guts and you didn’t even lift a finger when I needed help last year. This is just desserts.” 

That’s a picture of the way the world acts toward one another, but it is not the picture of how brothers and sisters are supposed to live together. God told his people to bring back his enemy’s lost donkey and to stop and help his enemy’s beast that has collapsed under the weight he is carrying. In other words, God says, “Love your enemies.” At the very least, we should follow the wisdom in the book of Proverbs: “Do not rejoice when your enemy falls, and let not your heart be glad when he stumbles.” More than that, we are to treat our enemies as we would our friends. Another Proverb: “If your enemy is hungry, give him bread to eat, and if he is thirsty, give him water to drink.” What may happen as a result? Your enemy becomes your friend. 

If you are involved in any kind of brokenness with an unbeliever right now, it is difficult, isn’t it? You two don’t speak the same language. You don’t follow the same rules. You don’t have the same compass. But Jesus tells us plainly, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, 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. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” This is a hard word, and to do this we need a righteousness apart from the law. Good news! We have that in Christ. We have everything we need to be able to love people in the world who mistreat us.

May I state the obvious? That means we also have everything we need to love our brothers and sisters in Christ who through their sin or our sin or both of our sins have become enemies to us. Are there Christ followers you don’t speak to anymore? People who love Jesus that you don’t even want to be around anymore? I remind you that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us. And we who were his enemies are now seated at his table. Can you honestly say to Jesus, “Hey, Lord, thank you for saving me, but if you don’t mind, can I sit somewhere else? You know, Lord…that guy beside me hurt my feelings and I don’t want to even see him right now, much less break bread with him. Ok if I just move down the table about 15 seats or so?… Lord?” 

And heaven just weeps.

God taught his people after delivering them from slavery in Egypt how to treat the most vulnerable in society. That group, especially in those times and still today in many parts of the world, included widows and orphans. You may have heard the saying, “The measure of civilization is how it treats its weakest members.” You can tell as you read the book of Exodus that God is very serious about how his people are to care for widows and orphans. If you haven’t stumbled across that in the Bible yet, let me make it plain. They are not to be mistreated. And when they are, you can be sure, God hears their cries. He acts on their behalf and punishes those who make their life miserable. The way of the world is to climb to the top and to climb over people while doing that, and who is easier to climb over or plow under than a widow or an orphan? But God calls his people to live differently. He did then and he does now. In fact, this love for the least and the lowest was a mark of the church in the New Testament, even from the earliest days. People marveled at how much the covenant community of God’s people loved each other and took care of each other, including the most vulnerable among them. 

Also among the most vulnerable are the poor. God cares about the poor and made it clear to his people who had come out of Egypt that they were not to take advantage of anyone who had less than they did. Specifically, God said to his people that if they loaned money to the poor among them, they were not allowed to charge interest. Alan Cole wrote, “The reason for the prohibition is presumably that the poor man borrows in his need. The loan is seen as assistance to a neighbor, and to make money from his need would be immoral.”  God wanted to protect his people from the burden of debt.

 Often when someone borrowed money, even if it was without interest, he gave something to the lender as collateral. That still happens today. If you borrow money from the bank for home improvement, your house is collateral that you will pay back the loan. A man who owned livestock in in ancient times might give some goats or sheep to his lender until he was able to pay back what he owed. But what if the man had nothing but the clothes he was wearing? God said that if the poor man gave his cloak as collateral on the loan, you had to give it back to him before the sun went down. This man was so poor he was literally giving you the shirt off his back, which doubled as his bed clothing. God’s instructions insured that if someone had to give up an item necessary for his own survival as collateral, at the very least it was returned to him before the sun goes down. That cloak helped keep him from freezing on cold winter nights. 

Do you need another incentive to show this common decency to the poor? Here it is. God says, as he did with regard to widows and orphans, “If he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” What God does not tell us here is how to discern when a person is poor because he will not work. Paul wrote about that in the New Testament, “If anyone is not willing to work, let him not eat.” There are those who cannot, but there are many who simply will not work. And we know that in those cases, helping sometimes hurts. For example, to give money to someone who has proven that he will use it to feed a self-destructive addiction is not wise. He needs deeper help, if he is willing to receive it. 

What if you left your favorite donkey with a neighbor for safekeeping and it ended up dead or injured or missing when you returned? Don’t have a favorite? Ok, any of your donkeys. That problem was covered in the civil laws God gave to His people in the wilderness. The man who was responsible for keeping the donkey would stand with the owner and swear before God that he did not kill, injure, or lose the donkey, and that he knew nothing about the circumstances in any of those cases. He had not, he would say, “put his hand to his neighbor’s property.” The owner was then obligated to receive that testimony as truth. This is a foundational principle we hold dear in our nation, that someone is innocent until proven guilty. But what if it was discovered that the donkey truly was stolen and the man had watched it happen? That is covered as well. The neighbor did nothing to prevent the theft so he was guilty and had to make restitution. 

This section of the civil code, in part, is a study in being the right neighbor for others and choosing the right neighbors when you have a need. Asking your neighbor to watch your animals and your house for you when you are gone is taking a calculated risk that is certainly minimized when you ask the right person to do it. Right? Think of this question: Which of your friends would you call if you wanted to have fun, you know, watch a movie and eat pizza together? OK, got that person in mind? Now, which of your friends would you ask to take care of your dog or cat while you are out of town? Different person? Yeah, sometimes. The fun friend may not be the responsible friend.

In His civil laws, God also covered the matter of borrowing. Anybody who has ever loaned a tool or a DVD or a lawnmower to a friend knows how that can end up. Honestly, sometimes you never see that thing again. Or you may see it years later on a table at a neighborhood yard sale! You say, “Hey, I am not going to pay $5 for this! It’s mine!” God knows the human heart so he gave us some good rules here that boil down to this simple truth: the borrower has to take complete responsibility for the thing borrowed. Especially in the civil laws in Exodus, which seem to indicate that the number one thing borrowed was an animal. You borrowed your neighbor’s ox so you could plow your field. If something happened to the ox while you are using it, you have to make restitution. Simple! But God said if the owner of the ox was there while you are plowing, watching you do it, then you are not responsible. Huh? This may be because he saw you about to drive the oxen into a steep ditch that could break its leg and he did nothing to stop you from doing it. The same applies if you didn’t borrow the ox but you rented it. You paid the fee to hire out the ox so that fee also covered any damages that occurred while you used it.

 So much about the civil laws we have covered today and last week find their foundation in the eighth and ninth commandments: You shall not steal, and You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor. We see how practical God is. Did you steal something? Then you pay it back, and even pay double. Did you lie about what was stolen? God knows. Even if the elders of the city or even your own parents can’t tell you are lying, God sees and knows. 

I mean, seriously, do we ever really get away with stealing something?

In his book, “How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen,” David Brooks writes this: “We do not see things as they are, we see things as we are.” And he writes, “She who only looks inward will find only chaos, and she who looks outward with the eyes of critical judgment will find only flaws. But she who looks with the eyes of compassion and understanding will see complex souls, suffering and soaring, navigating life as best they can.” 

The Book of the Covenant is a section of Exodus that begins, “These are the rules that you shall set before them.” God instructed Moses how to apply the Ten Commandments, especially the last six which refer to how we love our neighbors as ourselves. Some of these rules seem strange to us and some of the penalties as well. But remember, there were three divisions of the Old Testament laws or rules. The ceremonial laws pertained to the sacrifices, the tabernacle or temple, and the priests. These included laws of purification and dietary laws. The civil laws mainly dealt with disputes among individuals and gave instructions on how to mete out justice when there are violations. That’s primarily the scope of the Book of the Covenant. The moral law includes abiding moral principles which point us to God’s character and our need to love him and our fellow man. Which set of rules still fully apply today? The moral law.

The ceremonial laws were fulfilled in Christ. He pronounced all foods clean. He is our sacrifice so we don’t need any other. The Holy Spirit indwells us so we don’t need a tabernacle or temple; we gather as the body of Christ. We don’t need a high priest: that’s Jesus. The civil laws of the Old Testament are helpful pictures for us, and we can certainly learn from them. But remember, they were primarily given for Israel which at that time was a theocracy, governed by God through his prophets and leaders. We are not a theocracy in the strictest sense, but Jesus is building his church and raises up leaders to help the covenant community walk together in the grace of God. What happens when a believer is not walking properly? The leaders of the church, and I believe in the New Testament that is a plurality of elders, are charged by God to love them enough to hold them accountable, to speak the truth in love, so that in all things they may grow up into the head, Christ Jesus. 

How would I summarize the rules in the Book of the Covenant? Love your neighbor as yourself. There are rules that deal with murder and manslaughter, personal injuries, property damage more. Most of those today are handled by the courts. But the rules that deal with negligence which leads to injury or even death apply to us today. For example, if you have a dog that likes to bite people, keep it away from people. I worked in a factory in college during the summer and will never forget one of the guys in the breakroom telling all of us about his dog. He said, “Yeah, he is just as friendly as he can be when you come see us. But as soon as you get up to leave, he will bite you!” One old guy sitting next to me looked the man dead in the eye and said, “You need to kill that dawg.” I laughed but thought, Or maybe put the dog up when company comes? Loving your neighbor means you don’t text and drive. Or drink and drive. Loving your neighbor means when you shoot a rifle on your property, you make sure there is no way you will hit a car, a house, or a neighbor! Loving your neighbor also means you keep you word, you show up on time, you look for ways to serve, you go out of your way to love others even when you feel like others are not doing that with you. 

Or, loving your neighbor is to look with eyes of compassion and understanding at those around you, people made in God’s image who are navigating life as best they can.