We take gift wrap seriously.  It is no mere covering to delay the inevitable.  My children take gift wrap to whole new levels of artistry and concealment.  The packaging is often as stunning as the gift.  Hours of thought and craft unfold to reflect the gifter, giftee and gift.  And beyond creative beauty, my children delight in suspense.   Gifts are wrapped in multiple layers, textures, and shapes.   Though we are somewhat predictable in our gift choices, the presentation never fails to surprise.  No amount of shaking, squeezing, assessing can reveal the contents.

For giver and receiver, the anticipation, surprise, and drama of the giving of a gift is often as much the gift as its contents.   My dad understood this.  Gifts, announcements, special occasions always came with a dramatic story.  What my dad lacked in artistic creativity, he made up in theatrical presentation.   Especially at the holidays.  

On Christmas Eve, Daddy would allow us each to open two gifts.  They were always presents from our Nana and Granny Wallace.   We knew exactly what they would be, what they should be.  They never changed. But Daddy kept us guessing, nonetheless.  Nana would invariably gift us a new pair of winter pajamas.  Christmas Eve would not have been Christmas Eve without fresh, festive pjs.   And Granny Wallace always gave us knitted house-shoes.  She was a prodigious knitter.  Each pair would be unique, personalized for each of us in some telling way.

I was always fascinated by those house shoes.  How did Granny create such intricate patterns and careful contours with just two needles and one long piece of yarn?  And how did she construct them so that they did not quickly unravel under the relentless shuffling of an eight-year-old boy.   The clever knitter knows how to cast a thing of beauty and durability, though every creation is vulnerable to the slipping of a single knot.  If the knot is not strong, a moment of stress can quickly reduce a hat, a sweater, a pair of house shoes to a nondescript pile of yarn.

Life can be like that.  We think our lives, our relationships, our culture are durable, solid things in and of themselves.   That their structure, history, and resources guarantee continued existence and growth.   But they are all vulnerable.  Their durability depends on what knot ties them off.   Whether they are tied off by the solid knot of God’s revealed Word and sealed by the grace of the gospel.  Or not.  Only that knot will hold up under moments of stress and sin.  

Sin is the disintegrative entropy that pulls us apart at every seam.  Only God’s good, gracious, and binding grace given in both the law and the gospel form the knot that will keep our lives from unraveling and becoming a disordered pile of yarn.  Contemporary discussions of ‘social justice’ are legion.  And a modern, secular, progressive culture disdains the ancient paths, simply because they are ancient.   Yet it is the Bible’s instruction on social justice that is more progressive, compassionate, and caring than any contemporary progressive has even imagined.

After giving the Ten Commandments, God teaches Moses how to teach people to unpack the moral law in the daily business of managing servants, anger, property, and relationships.  And Old Testament laws are not for individuals only, not extra for experts, but for life together.  The persistent use of plural pronouns reminds us that the law anticipates life in community.  And instructs us what it means to love the Lord our God with heart, mind, soul, and strength and love our neighbor as ourselves.   It is not left for us to decide what this means.  God gives detailed explanation and illustration in Exodus 21-24 as well as Leviticus and Deuteronomy.   Hardly antiquated, primitive thought, the Bible’s laws of social justice are the only knot that ties off the easily unraveled relationships in our lives. 

Exodus 22:16-23:9 seems to be a hodge-podge of various laws.  But there is a cord that binds them together.   They are not framed conditionally but as absolutes. They remind us to guard the dignity, worth, and rights of others as fiercely as we would guard our own.  Without this concern, the law and society unravels.   It is ‘covenantedness’ that is at the core of law-keeping.   It is ‘otherly’ love that gives proper impetus and motivation to do all God commands.   Without this, the command to love our neighbor as ourselves is always contorted by our desire to love ourselves at the expense of our neighbor.

Join us as we examine Exodus 22:16-23:9 and examine what the Bible says about our responsibility to love our neighbors as ourselves rather than using our neighbors in order to love ourselves.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

It is a sensory feast.  Brightly colored, exotic flowers.  The fragrance of flora, coffee, and traditional culinary offerings.  Row upon row, stall upon stall of every conceivable offering.  Purveyors of every conceivable craft engage their commercial dance with customers to entice and negotiate.  Local woodcraft, spices, flowers, foods, toys, coffee, and festive traditional clothing pile on sights, sounds, smells, tastes and textures to overpower yet delight.  The city market in San Jose, Costa Rica is an experience not to be missed.  With all the natural treasures of this incredibly biodiverse country, San Jose’s market is easily overlooked.   

My daughter and I tried to take it all in.  We passed a stall of traditional Costa Rican dresses. Long flowing skirts and ruffled blouses, intricately embroidered and brightly colored, caught our eye.  This would be a perfect keepsake of our adventure.  The young lady attending the booth assisted us to find the size and style Emma needed.  The prices seemed reasonable and the exchange rate favorable.  So, I prepared to pay the price listed on the tag.  The proprietor frowned.  She brought out her calculator and declared in broken English all the merits of her product.  A little slow on the uptake, it finally dawned on me that the “price was not the price.”  It was just the starting point for the dance.  

My willingness to pay an arbitrarily assigned price, though better for the seller, was not the way it was done.  I was to offer half.  She would counter with 90%, to which I would counter-offer 75%.  Then, and only then, could the sale happen.   Costa Rican culture expects to establish the price of everything through negotiation and mutual agreement.   It would not do to pay the sticker price!  Commodities simply do not have a fair market value.   Their value is intrinsically connected to the relationship between buyer and seller.  And so, every price is unique. 

This is an important insight.  The value of things is not an intrinsic quality.  Nor entirely dependent on laws of supply and demand.  The value of a thing, in significant ways, reflects the value of the one to whom it belongs and the relationships of those who share it.  The prophet Nathan makes this shockingly clear to David when the prophet confronts the King about his sin with Bathsheba, telling him a story about the rich man’s wanton theft of a poor man’s only lamb. 

Do you understand this?  That the value of another’s things reflects the degree to which you value them?   How careful are you when someone loans you something to treat it with care and return it promptly?  How concerned are you about guarding what is under your care, your habits and possessions, to ensure they harm no one?   Do you take responsibility for the impact your things have on others?   The law speaks of liability.  But these concerns are more about our love for one another.  Our possessions are, in many ways, an extension of our relationships.  And the means through which we love our neighbor as ourselves. Or not!

It is easy to gloss over property laws in the Old Testament.  Most of us don’t have a donkey or an ox?  Yet, anything more than a cursory reading quickly reveals timeless principles to instruct us in the our care for our own property and that of other’s.   Do we accept responsibility for the consequences of our actions, our negligence, or our unfaithfulness in the use of our neighbor’s possessions?  Does our love for our neighbor as ourselves extend to our fences, our dogs, our shared spaces, our care for things borrowed?  Does our neighborliness make it clear that we are the covenant people of God?  Or confirm the world’s suspicion that our faith is a hypocritical cover story?

Join us as we examine Exodus 21:28-22:17 and examine what the Bible says about our responsibility to love our neighbors by the way we use our things, what happens when we fail to exercise this love, and why it matters.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

Ah, sweet justice!  Few things are more satisfying than a rude driver caught in the web of the magistrate.   When that Dodge Challenger, sporting the fish, blows you off the road then gets pulled over, it’s hard to resist the temptation to honk and wave as you pass.   We feel it is simple poetic justice.  But perhaps, it is actually a desire for vengeance.  

Despite how they feel, vengeance and justice are not the same thing.   Vengeance demands punishment for any and every offense committed against us as individuals.   And it imputes guilt to everyone connected to that offense, whether past, present, and future.   Vengeance also demands its “pound of flesh” for every scratch or insult.  It always operates on an inflated scale of personal offense.  It is punitive.  And desires to inflict pain and loss on a much greater scale than that of the original offense.

Vengeance feels like justice, but it never quite satisfies.   It grows and grows out of all proportion to the offense.   And it consumes the avenged along with the offender.  One wit once noted that “The man who seeks revenge digs two graves.”   And in Laura Hillenbrand’s wartime biography of Louis Zamperini, Unbroken, she offers an important insight on revenge.

“The paradox of vengefulness is that it makes men dependent upon those who have harmed them, believing that their release from pain will come only when their tormentors suffer.”

By contrast, true justice declares the value of an offense against a Holy God.  And only secondarily, what our sin cost someone else.  Every sin against God deserves His wrath and curse, both in this life and in the life to come.  But the Bible prescribes just temporal consequences to address how our sin affects others as well.  And its prescriptions are fair and limited.   Far from encouraging vengeance, the Bible warns strictly against it.   Vengeance, like unforgiveness, ties our souls in knots.  But justice teaches restraint, compassion, and mercy.  And reminds us to be more concerned about offense to God than ourselves.

After God spoke the Ten Commandments directly to the people at Sinai, he called Moses to come up the mountain to receive the Book of the Covenant.  This Book, recorded in Exodus 21-24, included needful reminders, examples, and illustrations of how God’s covenant people are to apply the Ten Commandments to their daily lives.  And while some of these examples apply specifically to the circumstances of ancient life, how they are unpacked has application for us today.  

God’s first concern is purity of worship.  His second, the condition and care of slaves.   Then he moved on to capital offenses then justice for personal injury.  And while the causes and nature of personal injuries highlighted by Scripture are diverse, one principle binds them all together – a call for justice, not vengeance.   When a servant is abused, or a vulnerable woman harmed by negligence, the desire for revenge is strong.  But what is truly fair and just?  Unlike our highly nuanced personal injury law, the Biblical directive is surprisingly simple.

“But if there is serious injury, you are to take life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for wound, bruise for bruise.”

Exodus 21:23-25

Often called lex talionis or the ‘law of the tooth,’ this principle is assumed by moderns to be a primitive, barbaric sanction for revenge.   Indeed, Gandhi famously wrote, “an eye for an eye, and the whole world goes blind.”  But like many things about Christianity, Gandhi failed to understand that lex talionis reflects God’s concern to protect life, not a disregard for it.  It is designed to guard against retribution and revenge, not foster it. 

Lex Talionis is a safeguard to prevent the escalation of personal injury into a blood feud.   And far from a literal demand for vengeful mutilation, it requires a careful assessment of the value of what sin destroyed and what restitution demands. Join us as we examine God’s law concerning personal injury in Exodus 21:18-27 and consider the important difference between justice and vengeance. 

We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

As Christians, how do we respond when life is absolutely overwhelming?   We profess that our faith gives us strength for “many trials of various kinds.”  We are instructed to “count it all joy.”   We declare that we can endure “all things through Christ who strengthens us.”   We have an expectation that things will work out because, “if God is for us, who can be against us.”  Yet, when things go from bad to worse, how do those scripture truths hold up as threads in the fabric of our lives.  How do we keep from being overwhelmed? Or do we?

Or perhaps the question is not ‘how do we keep from being overwhelmed,’ but are we ‘overwhelmed by the wrong things?’   The Apostle Paul points to this paradox, writing to the ancient Church at Corinth. 

We are afflicted in every way, but not crushed; perplexed, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not forsaken; struck down, but not destroyed; always carrying in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be manifested in our bodies….  So we do not lose heart. Though our outer self is wasting away, our inner self is being renewed day by day. For this light momentary affliction is preparing for us an eternal weight of glory beyond all comparison, as we look not to the things that are seen but to the things that are unseen. For the things that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal. 

2 Corinthians 4:8-10, 16-18

Through a remarkable series of comparisons, Paul admonishes us to be overwhelmed by the grace of God, not the gravity of the present crisis.   Perhaps our problem is that we are overwhelmed by the wrong things?   A friend once noted that ‘fear is simply faith pointed in the wrong direction.’  Are you overwhelmed?  Overwhelmed by fear of what will happen next?  Or overwhelmed with faith in the One who is the same yesterday, today and forever.

Join us this week as Rev. Bill Holiman preaches from 2 Corinthians 4:5-12 and shares how we can manifest the life of Jesus even when life seems overwhelming.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube. 

It’s supposed to be completely random.  Yet while I have been chosen only once in 40 years, my wife is clearly on the short list for both federal and local courts.  Jury duty is for Americans both a civic responsibility and a privilege.  A justice system that depends upon a jury of peers is a great blessing.  And we should all be willing to serve if possible.  

Of course, even if tapped to serve, you may not be selected.   The cases on the docket may be dismissed, continued, delayed, or settled.  Or you may be called and dismissed during the process of voir dire, where jurors are vetted to eliminate those with prejudice or personal bias.  You can be weeded out for all types of reasons.  No one is automatically guaranteed to serve.  You may be excused because of personal knowledge or the defendant or because you have been a victim of crime.  Or perhaps because of your religious or political views.

And especially if the case is a death penalty case, voir dire seeks to impanel a jury that will not only fairly assess the questions of guilt or innocence, but also assess the necessity of imposing the death penalty.  In Arkansas, the death penalty can be imposed, without regard to age, on those found guilty of treason, murder, or capital homicide.  Arkansas currently has 28 prisoners on “death row” some of whom have been awaiting execution for decades.

Debates over the death penalty along with concerns about racial inequity, false conviction, cruel and unusual punishment, and lengthy stays on death row have raged for decades.  Judicial theorists argue that it is ‘certainty not severity’ that discourages recidivism.  And that, statistically, the death penalty provides no deterrent effect on violent crime. 

Furthermore, we have seen cases in which evidence or forensics, not available at the time of the trial, later emerged to exonerate a convicted murderer as he awaited execution.  Finally, our whole system of incarceration is predicated on the theory of “correction.”   Thus, prisons are part of the Department of Corrections.   And execution is clearly at odds with the goal of rehabilitation.

But what if our theories about crime and punishment are founded on faulty assumptions.  What if we have misunderstood both the human condition and the purpose and manner of punishment for crimes against people and property?  Our secular and humanistic culture despises the Biblical teaching about crime and punishment as barbaric and unreasonably cruel and unusual.   But is it? 

The Bible is brutally honest about the human condition and the effects of sin.  That is its major theme.   And the way of redemption is never some false notion of “paying a [penitential] debt to society” through decades of incarceration.  But rather through faith in Christ.  

Biblical sentencing guidelines declare the justness and justice of a Holy God, the absolute necessity and sufficiency of Christ alone to satisfy that justice, and the value of what was destroyed by crimes against people and property.    God created us to live in society.  Certainly, he knows best how law-breaking should be addressed.   Perhaps our real problem in this debate is that we have not settled the question of whether we or God should have final authority.

Do OT civil laws have any continuing relevance? Or are they, like ceremonial laws, abrogated by Christ’s finished work? Are the laws concerning crime and punishment mere relics of the theocracy? Or should they carry authority in modern civil justice?   The Westminster Confession of Faith makes an interesting statement regarding the continuing relevance of the Old Testament civil law.

To them also, as a body politic, He gave sundry judicial laws, which expired together with the state of that people, not obliging any other, now, further than the general equity thereof may require.

Westminster Confession of Faith, XIX.4.

But what does ‘general equity’ mean?  While our forms of civil government are not prescribed by scripture, there are principles of government derived from the civil laws in the Old Testament.  So, what does the Old Testament teach us crime and punishment and particularly the death penalty?   To what extent are these laws still applicable?  And how do they inform our civil magistrates to “bear the sword” faithfully and effectively?

Join us as we examine Exodus 21:12-17 and consider what the Old Testament teaches about the application of the death penalty and about civil justice today.  We meet on the square in Pottsville, right next to historic Potts’ Inn at 10:30 am for worship.  Get directions here or contact us for more info.  Or join us on Facebook Live @PottsvilleARP or YouTube.