Lesson 48 - Purity of Created Distinctions & Sexual Identity

Deuteronomy Lesson 48

Purity of Created Distinctions and Sexual Purity

Deuteronomy 22:5–30

Fellowship Chapel
22 March 2011
Charles Clough
© Charles A. Clough 2011
www.BibleFrameworkApplied.org

Last time we spent half the time before we got to Deuteronomy 22 because I wanted to review what’s going on in the legal circles, the articles that are being written in the peer review law journals, which judge are reading and which, therefore, will become probably manifest in judicial decisions in the various courts of the land. And I hope that that showed you how serious the cultural drift is against biblical Christianity. And it’s going to get much worse than getting better unless God sends a revival of some sort. And the behooves us as Christians to be able to master the arguments that we need to master in order to think through what it means to honor the Word of God, and not be swept along in the tsunami, so to speak, of human viewpoint and the basic pagan views that are coming once again into our society.

In our situation culturally in the West, in America, Europe, probably in some of the Latin America countries, but basically in the West—Christians in Asia and throughout the Muslim world, they’ve got their own serious problems, their problem is that they are being attacked by explicitly absolutist religious positions—we’re being attacked by people who are deceptive, who are pushing an absolute agenda but calling it tolerance. And so we have to be careful that we think through how we’re going to respond to these arguments. They come up all the time and we need the skill to see through what the ordinary person out there just blindly accepts, the editors, both with the TV and the newspapers let this stuff go through because they don’t really have a filter themselves in many cases.

So the argument that we tried to show last time was why the family versus the State in the issue of education is a crucial thing. The authority for education is given in the Bible, in Deuteronomy 6, very clearly, very explicitly, upon the parents. It’s mom and dad that bear the responsibility to see that the children are educated, not the State. The State has stepped into it, sometimes because the parents have abdicated. Sometimes it’s because families are so dysfunctional, as you can see in the inner cities, that if the State didn’t step in you’d have a total disaster. So we’ve got this uneasy, and it’s an uneasy area of friction between parent’s rights to their children and the State thinks it has the obligation to step in and become a surrogate parent.

So in Deuteronomy 22 we start this area, as you can see in your outline. It goes from chapter 22 to 23 and this is a hard section to find a unifying theme to. We know it’s a section because of the way it starts and the way it ends. The problem is, how do you describe something that summarizes this? And in the outline that you see there, what I’ve tried to see as the unifying theme is that God is expounding boundaries that He has placed into the creation, boundaries that He also placed in the kingdom of Israel during the days of the theocracy. He wants His people to honor these distinctives. Some of this, like we’re going to see tonight, some of it, it seems peculiar to the days of the Kingdom, but other of these boundaries are not just peculiar to the days of the Kingdom but they are basic social things. And as I’ve said before, when you get into the Word of God, when you really see the power of the Word of God, what that should do to you is when you read articles about things that infringe on the Word, you ought to think to yourself, what is this telling me? Out there as we look at the universe around, what is this telling us about what God is saying in the Word? I want to show you how that works tonight.

So let’s turn to Deuteronomy 22, and we said last week that the first four verses deal, obviously, with ownership; it’s talking about losing something that belongs to you and the obligation that other people have to return that lost object, back to the owner. Now if you think about it, what are some parables in the New Testament that deal with ownership? The parable of the lost coin; the parable of the lost sheep; and in those parables what does Jesus always do? It comes back. And He’s using those to teach God’s ownership. In the social dimension of ownership God designs the pattern of ownership down here at the human level so that it reflects His ownership of us.

So these social things that we’re reading about in the Bible are not just random things that, you know, oh gee, just seem good for the Jews to do it that way. That’s not the point; the point is it’s related to deeper spiritual truths. So in those first four verses it also expounds the idea about “thou shalt not steal,” and you could literally obey that and not turn things that are lost back to their owner. That takes an extra motivation and that’s the spirit of the Law. In other words, behind each of the Ten Commandments there’s a whole spiritual reasoning that’s going on here. Those are just given in negative form because it’s a legal form and laws are always prohibitive.

So verses 1-4, then, we deal with the issue of ownership. That establishes a boundary and if you think about it, what’s the first case in the Bible of ownership? Let’s just think about that; let’s go back all the way in history, we get into who owned the garden? God owned the garden, and therefore when Adam and Eve disobeyed, what did God do to them? Kicked them off His property, because they violated ownership. He gave them the terms of inhabiting His property, His sacred space, and they violated those terms so part of ownership is the right to exclude. And children, when you have more than one, they’re always arguing about this inside the family, the boundaries of ownership and it’s hard, sometimes, in working with young kids to get that across, but it’s a necessary lesson socially, to respect ownership.

And after you get through those four verses and talking about ownership, guess what the implication is economically. If you’re sitting in an economics class and you’re listening to what you would listen to in most community college or college campuses and they start giving you this socialist line, socialism and Marxism deny personal property and ownership. So right here in the first four verses of Deuteronomy 22 you have an economic exclusion of Marxism. What you have in these four verses is an affirmation of capitalism. And when people read the Bible, it’s not just a devotional here. This is not just devotional literature; there are some implications here economically and politically. So these four verses establish, among other verses throughout the Bible, the capitalist society; that capitalism means somebody owns the property; somebody takes the risk of taking care of the property and the responsibility to make it fruitful.

So now we go to the first part in Deuteronomy 22:5 we come to the next section, and the only title I’ve been able to give this is created distinctions. So from verses 5-12 there’s a series here of things and it’s hard to tie them together. So I’m going to treat that as all dealing with distinctives. Now let’s look, if you will, at 22:5. “A woman shall not wear anything that pertains to a man, nor shall a man put on a woman’s garment, for all who do so are an abomination to the LORD your God.” Now, this is apparently meant to be very, very serious, because of the language in the last clause.

Oh, and by the way, I see where on the outline there are two blanks; let me before I get to verse 5. On your outline: Ownership (title), the basis of a capitalist society, that’s the first blank, capitalist society. The Marx (in Marxism), the “fall”, was supposedly when imagined primitive “hunger-gatherer” society became agrarian. It’s their idea of social progression in ancient history that somehow we were all hunter-gatherers, and then suddenly somebody decided it was easier to farm than it was to hunt, so you have the rise of flocks and the rise of agrarian culture and then by definition if you have a flock you have a field, and therefore a field is owned, so you have property. And so Karl Marx argued that once that happened that was the unfolding of human society, it was property ownership that led to war, led to competition, led to conflict. So the Marxist view is that ownership leads to conflict. The biblical view is that ownership leads to production. So those are the two diverse points.

Now in verse 5 we have this last clause, “all who do so are an abomination to the LORD your God.” So this has caused commentators to say well, what is the background of this? Well, surely one background is it’s acknowledging the distinction between male and female. And we’ll see later that the Bible makes a big deal about the difference between men and women, and it’s not just talking about physical differences. The differences between man and woman in the Bible go far deeper than physical. It goes into the psychology, it goes into the design, it goes into how men and women are to function in society. This is the basis of marriage; this is the basis of family. In Genesis you have the background for this sort of thing.

So on the notes, where it says, it shows that purity is the issue in this series, and it has something to do with the difference between men and women. And I point out in the notes that sexual distinction is taken to be very serious because it is the created order to produce and nurture life. There’s a division of labor between what men are best at and what women are best at. There’s just a difference in skill levels; men can’t do certain things women can, and women can’t do other things that men do. Now there are exceptions, of course. But the general pattern is that God has designed us differently and so He has designed this difference, not as a casual physical psychological thing, but he’s defined the sex differences to mirror what He then later picks up in history to say I am married, I, Yahweh, am married to Israel. Now that doesn’t make any sense if you don’t have some idea of what marriage is all about. And when God does that He’s not just saying oh, gee, I need a metaphor, I need an illustration, let Me go grab something at random down here. That’s not the way it is. God created this so that it would be a pattern of that.

So the difference that we’re looking at—and this is again, see here biblically we’re parting company again, we are not looking at it anatomically, we’re not looking at it sociologically, we are looking at it theologically—is the fact that God’s relationship in the case between Yahweh and Israel is patterned after the same relationship between men and women. That means that that shows something about that relationship. The relationship in the New Testament between Christ and the church is premarital; the church is to be the bride, it’s not yet married to Christ. So that is a picture of engagement, that’s the picture of the fiancée stage, and so these are not casual metaphors, these are built into the structure of what we’re talking about.

Now some have said because of the abomination clause in verse 5, and this may well be, that one of the things that this text is getting at is that in pagan worship it was largely homosexual. And so the dress involved in some of the pagan ceremonies was what we call transvestites. So in verse 5 God comes to Israel and He says let the pagans do that, that’s their lifestyle, but that’s not your lifestyle because you are Mine and I have designed you this way, and I want you to act this way and I want you to dress this way. So that gives it, again, a distinction.

So now we move on and now we come to something that looks utterly unrelated. Look at verses 6-7. “If a bird’s nest happens to be before you along the way, in any tree or on the ground, with young ones or eggs, with the mother sitting on the young or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young, [7] you shall surely let the mother go and take the young for yourself, that it may be well with you and that you may prolong your days.” Now again, look at the last clause, it’s the last clause in all of these series that gives you the purpose. In other words, he goes on and he talks about this and that, and then he says, “in order that,” and here’s the result of the purpose. And so now he says, “that it may go well with you and prolong your days.”

Now we have to say what on earth is a bird’s nest have to do with prolonging the days. So again we have to go back a little bit and think about when’s the last time we heard this purpose clause, “that it may go well with you and that you may prolong your days.” Aren’t they the words of the fifth commandment? What does it say, the fifth commandment? “Honor your father and your mother that” it may go well with you in your days. Well, he’s talking about the institution of the family here, and so obviously that’s something serious, that sets up the whole structure of the society. Well now, do you mean to tell me a bird’s nest and how I deal with a mother bird and her babies has to do with prolonging? Is it that serious?

So we have to go deeper. We have to ask, wait a minute, if you took verses 6 and 7 and thought about it, what is the subject material of verses 6-7 if you generalize it? The subject material is nature, so this is one little tiny aspect of how man is related to nature. So in your notes I’ve got two blanks there where it deals with man’s relationship with nature and in particular it deals with man’s relationship with undomesticated nature. See, the bird’s nest isn’t an ox, it isn’t a donkey, it isn’t part of the herd; we’re not talking about the business of farming here. This is more casual than that, this is out in an area where nobody owns the bird nest, the bird here isn’t owned by anybody; if the bird was the property of somebody it would fall into the distinctives of verses 1-4. So this is an un-owned animal; this is out in the wild, we would say.

So now we want to come out and say all right, what it the biblical view of nature. See, this is what I mean that you can’t read a verse here and there in the Bible and disconnect it. All these verses are woven together into a pattern, and of course, what we’re dealing with now. If we’re dealing with a relationship between man and nature, what subject on the modern culture are we immediately in collision with or engaging? Environmentalism. So now here, in what turns out at first glance to be some sort of little thing about a bird’s nest, it turns out this is to understand what’s going on in verses 6 and 7; we’re in the middle of an environmental discussion here. And this gets into the diagram I have on the first slide. When you go back in Genesis and you look at how God originally set out the garden, what you have is a garden that He tells man to protect it and cultivate it. Outside of the garden was not a garden; outside was a wilderness, and the verb used in Genesis 1 for this is to subdue it. Now we Christians are caricatured by the environmentalist as saying, “Oh you Christians, you read Genesis 1 and you rape nature”. That’s not what we’re talking about; these people need to get more seriously academically and read seriously the text and stop being so snitty. The text here is saying something very important to man. It’s saying that God has created this wilderness with the resources out there, and those resources are to be taken care of and brought to fruitfulness and the illustration of how to do that is the garden.

In other words, God has first subdued it; He’s planted the garden. That is a model of what it means; it doesn’t mean raping the land, it doesn’t mean destroying it, it means to be wise about it. It’s not easy to have a garden that functions, if you’ve tried one; you have to know what you’re doing with the soil, you have to know what you’re doing with the seeds, you have to know what you’re doing with the plants, you have to know what you’re doing with the water, it takes a whole agrarian wisdom to do this. And if it’s done correctly it can be beautiful.

For example, my son visited Japan recently and one of the intriguing things about Japan is that the Japanese are very orderly and it’s a very densely populated island, so these people haven’t got much room per square foot per person here, they have to be very careful how they handle this. And he was on the bullet train and so it’s a little smeary, the photography here, but this is how the Japanese farm and this is how the Japanese take care of the land. You can see there’s not a square foot in any of this that they haven’t managed. And of course the hill here, they’ve left it because they can’t farm on the side of that, but here where there are people, there are boundaries, but there’s a beauty to it; it’s not just thrown out there. They believe in having an artistry in doing it. So there’s an artistry to this; there’s a beauty to it.

Now that, to me, is a picture of what God meant when He said to subdue the earth: to bring it to fruition and make something beautiful out of it. But today, in the reverse way we’re thinking, in environmental thinking, nature is superior to man. Man is always presented as the hooligan that destroys nature. So your modern ecologists are always anti-man, it’s man that’s trashed the environment; man has done this. Yes, man has done a lot of that but the answer is not given to man, the answer is moral reform of man. And so therefore, as Cal Beisner said on Fox News, when he was interviewed, he’s worked a lot with the environmental issues, and Cal pointed out to the audience of Fox News, he says think about this; all of us sitting in the studio here could be arrested for breaking an eagle’s egg, but none of us would be touched by the law if we perform an abortion. Tell me, then, which is more important—nature or man! So there’s a reverse here, biblically we cannot agree with an environmentalist, we have to say man is more important and nature under man because God is over man.

So now we get back here with what’s going on with the bird and the eggs. If you’ll look at your handout, God commissions man as the lord of nature; “wild” nature, now here’s where God is protecting nature, the bird nest is an example of uncultivated, un-dominated, un-subdued wild environment. Wild nature is un-owned, nobody owns the bird nest, and therefore it’s liable to be over-consumed, because nobody owns it, nobody cares for it and so therefore it can be over-consumed because I can to kill an animal, and kill an animal, and kill another one, and another one, and we can decimate them because nobody owns them. So this is the dilemma, there are no boundaries of protection, and that is an economic problem, which in economics is known technically by this term, the “problem of the commons”. Now if you go to Boston you go to see a whole place, there’s a park called Boston Commons, now Commons dates back to the origin of our country when they thought they could have a common property to all the people in the town. What do you supposed they discovered about keeping the Common maintained? That’s the problem of the Common, if nobody owns it nobody is going to maintain it, and that economically is what is the problem of the Commons?

And that economically is what is being defended here. You don’t take the mother bird and her chicks and expect nature to be fertile. If you want to take her chicks, fine, but leave the mother because she can reproduce again. So what turns out to be some sort of silly appearing verses, 6-7, actually deals with ecology, it deals with environmentalism, it deals with how you subdue nature, and how to protect it from being over consumed. The solution here is for man to assume ownership and therefore responsibility in managing it, of bringing it to fruitfulness. Now that’s opposite today because today we want to preserve it in a permanent state of wildness. I’m sorry, but that’s not in the Scriptures.

So God places a boundary on uncultivated, un-owned nature. God is protecting, in verses 6-7, aspects of nature to keep man from ruining it so it can’t be fruitful. So this is some good biblical ecology going on here.

Now we come to verse 8, we come to another apparently disconnected thing. “When you build a new house, then you shall make a parapet for your roof, that you may not bring the guilt of bloodshed on your household if anyone falls from it.” What kind of roofs do you think they had in the Ancient Near East? They had flat roofs; most of the ancient cities were flat-roofed. What do you suppose they did on the roof? Now keep in mind that the streets in most ancient cities were filthy, animals pooped on them, you had human sewerage, at least in the Middle Ages, dumped out in the streets, you don’t have a party and a social gathering in the street. And homes had limited space, homes in the ancient world from archeology are pretty small. I mean, we would consider very cramped living quarters. So guess where they had their social life? On the roof.

So they’re on the roof, and what this says, again look at the last clause because that’s the purpose of honoring this distinction, just like the purpose of verse 6-7 was “that it may be well with you,” that is, nature be preserved fruitful, but now in verse, “that you may not bring the guild of bloodshed on your house,” now that word “bloodshed” means murder, homicide, it’s a very serious word, it’s not talking about somebody just having an accident here. The very fact that it’s called “bloodshed”, what do you think that implies about the responsibility of the owner of the roof? That he could be charged with homicide if he didn’t do the parapet. Right?

So now we are introduced with something else that’s interesting, in the light of our culture today. The safety of the people on the roof was guaranteed, or at least protected by the threat of being hauled into court for homicide. So we have, then, criminal law. Now today we have administrative law, which is different. We have safety regulations, we have OSHA doing this and OSHA doing that, one of the things when I was working with the government out at Aberdeen, I couldn’t believe it. You know, those of you who works in firms now, you know you have to have material data sheets or whatever they are, and you have to have those around for every little chemical that you have in your plant. Well, I was thumbing through the data sheets one day and I saw one for water. And I thought what the heck is this, a data sheet for water as a hazardous material? And so I called up the safety office and said what’s this, I mean, this is a federal sheet, this is OSHA now; this isn’t Maryland, what have got an MSDS for water for? Well, somebody could gag on it and you know, you can drown in water. Well, I only have a drinking fountain; I don’t think they can drown in my drinking fountain, why do I have to have an MSDS for water for my drinking fountain. But I had to because that’s the regulation.

Now let’s think about the difference between administrative law and criminal law, versus the event. What is administrative law trying to prevent? The event, right, the administrative law is trying to throw barriers up to make it say, usually politicians try to get a law passed because oh, it doesn’t matter how many millions of dollars it costs to carry out this administrative law, as long as we save one life. You hear that all the time and it’s used to justify draconian administrative laws.

Now just look at this text a minute, how do you see verse 8 designed; what is the thrust of verse 8? Obviously it’s for safety, but how does God deal with the safety issue; does he deal with it administratively or does He deal with it after the fact, criminologically? Now if that’s carried out and somebody down the street has a party and somebody falls off and kills themselves and they’re prosecuted for homicide or murder, do you suppose that gets around the neighborhood a little bit? That’s a deterrence. So God says it’s using the criminal. And look at the difference between administrative law and criminal law. Let’s think about it again, these are not casual features in the Old Testament, they profoundly relate to how we are designed. Under criminal law it strengthens personal responsibility by a threat of criminal conviction and punishment on specific individuals. Administrative law doesn’t look at anybody in particular, it has a “one size fits all” for everybody, regardless of whether you have a swimming pool or a drinking fountain; it’s water, got to control it, unsafe compound. And it just doesn’t make the common sense test. But that’s the dilemma that administrative law always has. You try to create a legislation that one size fits all and it doesn’t fit all, so you create this monstrously expensive process of everybody trying to meet a law that is inappropriate in this area and probably overkill in another area, so everybody is paying all this money to try to conform to an administrative law when all it takes is personal responsibility, which can be handled by a criminal proceeding.

So again, I’m just pointing out these things that when you read these texts, think through how they are designed. This is God speaking here, this is not somebody in Washington DC, thank God, this is God Himself who created the universe.

Okay, now we come to verse 9, and verse 9, 10 and 11. Now look at the subject material of verse 9, the subject material of verse 10 and the subject material of verse 11, how would you summarize those three things. One deals with flocks, the first one deals with seeds, one deals with flocks, now that’s interesting, what economic activity is involved with seeds in Israel? Farming. And which economic activity deals with flocks and the animals. Farming. So now here are your two major industries being addressed here. Then you have the third one, it says “you shall wear a garment of different sorts, wool and linen,” that we have to deal with. That’s textiles; how people dress.

So the first one, talking about different seeds, God says He’s created certain kinds and basically what this is is that during the days of the theocracy He kind of rejected the idea of hybridization, and certainly rejected the idea of genetically modified seeds here. One of the great papers of one of our young people is a paper, which dealt with GMO, genetically modified seeds. He did a whole research paper on that, and a really nice paper, nice work. And so the point here is that in the theocracy God just wanted them to respect the way He designed the seeds. Just leave them alone, I designed them, you use them.

Then the second thing is the ox and the donkey. As you read verse 10, does that ring a bell in the New Testament? Don’t be unequally yoked. Now that’s Paul picking this up. Now let’s go back, originally why do you suppose God put verse 10 there? He’s dealing with farm animals and He says I don’t want you yoking a donkey and an ox together. Now what would you be yoking any animal together for? Work. Now what happens if you try to take an ox and a donkey? Who’s the stronger one to pull? So what you’re doing, it’s an inappropriate use of both animals. The idea there is that you’re not respecting the design of the animals. God didn’t design those two animals to work together. Now that’s picked up in the New Testament for us as Christians, don’t be unequally yoked in work and labor with a non-Christian in a relationship, it deals with marriage, it deals with family, for the same reason. See, once you understand the donkey and the ox, that they don’t work together because they’re not designed to work together, that’s the same thing as it is applied by the Apostle Paul as believers and unbelievers aren’t designed, by way of their design, they don’t work together in a close relationship. That’s why “unequally yoked” is there.

And then finally we have to deal with the wool and the linen. This is somewhat problematical and I’m not sure I’ve got onto this right, but the best suggestion I’ve seen is that linen was a textile that was used for the priesthood, and that it was reserved. The priest’s garments were always of the textile linen. So by prohibiting linen and wool mixed together, what basically this is enforcing in their mentality that in your clothing style is don’t mix part of the Levite’s uniform with your clothes. Linen is for the priests, and if you want to use wool, that’s fine, but don’t mix them together. And this might have something to do with the specialized priesthood and the fact that you don’t compromise that, it’s honoring that kind of design.

Now we come to the last part and we’re going to have, in verses 13-30 six violations of God’s design of the man and the woman. And the first one goes on with verses 13-21. Oh yes, I haven’t done the tassels; the tassels apparently, according to Numbers and other passages, it was to remind people of God’s commandments, and all I can think of is that it was sort of like you wear a uniform in the military and if you have ever been in the military you know there are patches, you can look at a guy’s patch and you can look at his ribbons and you can almost tell his biography of what he’s done. One of the times I was out working with some snipers at Aberdeen Proving Ground and I saw one of the patches one of these sniper guys and it says, Reach out and touch someone, and I thought that was an innovative design to put on the sleeve of a sniper. But whatever, some of them are humorous this way, but it just designates what these guys do. And the tassels are more like a uniform.

Now we go into that section and the first one we want to do some background work, most of you know this so I won’t belabor the point, but Genesis 1, man and woman together are God’s image. It’s not just the man, it’s the man and the woman that are made in “our image.” Now we have a clash with a new homosexual idea, the agenda. In the box I say, “with the new homosexual agenda being forced upon us by those who have bought into the line that homosexuality is genetic rather than a choice.” That’s the debate today. When somebody challenges you as a Christian because, well, you just don’t like me, no, that’s not the point. The debate goes far deeper than that; the debate is, is your sexual identity there because you were born that way, or is your sexual identity the result of your choices. Now that is a fundamental difference, and that is not what is being aired today. We are all dealing with the potshots up here, you know, the homosexuals are attacking the Christians with their jamming technique and then some of us attacking them because they’re immoral and so on, their sin is worse than everybody else’s.

But that’s up here, the trivial level, down at base level there’s a real question here, just like the abortion issue. We have all these laws up here but the issue is, is the fetus life, is it a person or isn’t a person. And that’s the choice here. So the Bible argues that homosexuality is a result of choice, and if it is a result of choice, then it follows that we can morally disapprove of it. We’re not hating the people; all of us are sinners, but we have to deal with our sin. Now I have a sin nature, I’m responsible before God for my sin nature. I’m responsible to deal with that, I’m responsible to make the right choices and so are they. So if it’s a chosen issue then I’m not demeaning them, I’m simply saying why have you got special privileges for your sin pattern and I don’t get them for mine. That’s another way of looking at this.

Okay, so that’s the clash and this gets back to a slide that we’ve shown you before and that is you’ve to get down at the basic levels. The political is up here, you’ve got to get down into the ethics and get into the structures that we are dealing with.

Now the male and the female, of course, is the basis of marriage, basis of family, it’s the basis of the structure of society. So now when we come to verse 13 you’re going to see some very serious judgments going on here for promiscuity. The first one is premarital promiscuity, and let’s look at it. We can go through this pretty rapidly because it’s straightforward text; the problem here isn’t the text, the problem here is to put it in perspective and see what we can learn from this, what God is saying.

“If any man take a wife, and goes in to her, and detests her, [14] and charges her with shameful conduct, and brings a bad name on her, and says, ‘I took this woman, and when I came to her I found she was not a virgin,’ [15] then the father and the mother of the young woman shall take and bring out the evidence of the young woman’s virginity, to the elders of the city at the gate. [16] And the young woman’s father shall say to the elders, ‘I gave my daughter to this man as wife, and he detests her. [17] Now he has charged her with shameful conduct, saying, ‘I found your daughter was not a virgin,’ and yet these are the evidences of my daughter’s virginity.’ And they shall spread the cloth before the elders of the city. [18] Then the elders of that city shall take that man and punish him; [19] and they shall fine him one hundred shekels of silver and give them to the father of the young woman, because he has brought a bad name on a virgin of Israel. And she shall be his wife; he cannot divorce her all his days. [20] But if the thing is true, the evidences of virginity are not found for the young woman, [21] then they shall bring out the young woman to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death with stones, because she has done a disgraceful thing in Israel, to play the harlot in her father’s house. So you shall put away the evil from among you.”

Now again, as with the previous passages, look at the last verse, the last clause. That sets it up, “so that you can put evil from among you all,” plural, among the society. So this is considered to be a threat to the community. So we have to go back and say okay, what is going on here? Well obviously what’s going on is first of all, rules of evidence, this isn’t a random process that’s going on, there are some details in the text, however. Notice, as you look at verse 18, you’ll see where this man was false, he has violated the ninth commandment by falsely testifying about his wife, and the character assassination in this society was considered very serious. And you might want to wonder about why is the poor girl, in this case, “shall be his wife, he cannot divorce her all his days,” what that does if you look at the marital rules, that doesn’t mean necessarily that she had to live with him; what it means is that he is economically responsible for her for the rest of his life. Not only that, but if she’s pregnant and she has a boy, that boy, if it’s firstborn takes the inheritance of the entire family. You’ve got to read to this in terms of the economic dimension; it’s not just the social dimension here that we’ve seen before. There are all kinds of rules embedded in this thing. You can’t take a piece of the Mosaic Law out and treat it as an individual thing; you have to embed it in the process.

So this guy, whether he likes it or not, now what he has done is he not only can’t get rid of this woman, but now she becomes an economic burden to him for the rest of his life. And he has to provide support to her, and not only that, he probably will lose the family inheritance to her son. So this is quite a serious thing, it’s not just a hundred shekels.

Now the other thing is, if the girl is to blame here, verses 20-21 and so forth, notice where the execution occurs; it’s not in the gate, it’s at the door of the father’s house, so that the emphasis in the text appears to be that she has disgraced her dad. Because her father, because he, the father is the head of the family, this is recognition of the fact that she has undercut him. So again the emphasis is on the family again.

So now I want to address, in a series of three slides the argument today that is so prevalent that we can shack up and not get married. So let’s bring the logic out here, because, again, we have to think as Christians, Satan is a genius at screwing us up in our thinking. So let’s go and see what we can do here. This slide is taken from J. Budziszewski’s book, What We Can’t Not Know. He’s the professor, Christian professor at University of Texas, tenured professor or he couldn’t do this and keep his job, but Budziszewski has written some fantastic books, one of them is for college students, How to Stay Christian while in College. But in this book, what he’s doing is he’s dealing with the new morality and he’s arguing about their three options to look at here. Now let’s look at these three options and see what the prof is talking about.

“There is a vast array of possible moralities; we need to find the true one.” That’s an option; it’s being discussed today. What’s your value system? And we just need to find the true one; there are a bunch of moralities out there, what is the best one? He says that’s incorrect, biblically, the question is wrong.

The second one, there is a vast array of possible moralities, none of them is true so we’re left with subjective choice. That one is subjectivism, and biblically, we can’t accept that either. So what Dr. Budziszewski has pointed out here is there’s only one morality given by God designed into us and reinforced by verbal revelation. Well, that leads, then, if somebody argues that we live together because we love one another but we don’t see a need to get married. So let’s squeeze that argument, let’s take it down one more step. To get there we have to deal with the fact there’s only one morality. And what he says is this: “There is only one possible source of value judgments, one possible well from which moral duties can be drawn, one tree from which they can be plucked. The so-called new moralities,” and watch this one, because I want to squeeze this last sentence out and you’ll see the fallacy in the argument, we love one another, we don’t need to get married, “do not pick from different trees. They pluck from the same tree, but they pluck selectively.”

What does he mean by that? Hey prof., explain yourself. Okay, he’s going to go back to C. S. Lewis. C. S. Lewis had a deal with the morality in World War II with the communists. The communists were arguing that they’re moral. The communists would insist, and they still do in Latin America, that all we’re trying to do is solve hunger, we’re trying to solve suffering, we’re trying to solve these things. What? Are you Christians saying that it’s wrong to be concerned about the suffering, it’s wrong to be concerned about the hungry? What’s the matter with you Christians? This is the argument of the Marxist.

C. S. Lewis “observes that the natural law agrees with the communists about the importance of feeding the hungry and clothing the naked.” We agree with that. “Unless the communist himself were drawing from the well of natural law, he could never have learned of such a duty.” Got that? In other words, where does the communist who is a materialist come up with the idea that you should feed the hungry and clothe the naked? Does that follow logically from an atheistic materialist viewpoint? So what do you see? The communist has plucked from the tree of Christian morality. But he doesn’t want to pluck all of the tree, so he plucks selectively.  “Unless the communist himself were drawing from the well of natural law, he could never have learned of such a duty. But side-by-side with it in the same well,” the way God designed it, “the same well and limiting it, are other duties, like fair play. The communist denies the limit, and uses one duty to debunk the others as bourgeois superstitions.”

He then goes on to the strategy, the same strategy that’s used by the young people today who say, oh, we love one another; we don’t have to get married. Watch, watch the fallacy, here it comes. “The strategy is to select one moral precept, exaggerate its scope and importance, and use it as a club to beat down the others. The foundational principles of right and wrong can be neither created nor destroyed by man; therefore, the only way to defeat the natural law is to make it cannibalize itself.” See, everybody has a conscience, you can’t totally kill off the conscience, so you’ve got to somehow justify it and so this is what happens. “There are no new moralities, but only new perversions of the old one.”

So, let’s explore now the argument. I’ve given it to you in your outline so let’s follow through. Let’s explore the argument that because we’re dealing with premarital sex here, and it’s forbidden, very forcibly and said to be a threat to the community, because that’s the last clause, it says you will “purge evil from among you.” So clearly there’s a social dimension to all this that’s threatening the civilized order. So I’ve listed in six points. The first one:

Cohabitation is an impostor of marriage.

1. “Real marital love as God designed it,” remember, “as God designed it”, so when you deal with l-o-v-e we are not loading that noun with any content that happens to be available. When you see l-o-v-e it is a noun that refers to something, and biblically it refers to love as God designed it. It “is a commitment to a permanent relationship that corresponds to His historic relationship to the nation Israel and to His future relationship with the Church.” So this is not a mere sociological arrangement, it is not just that, it’s a sociological arrangement but it has all kinds of implications.

2. In the Bible, “Such a relationship,” that is, God’s relationship with Israel, Christ’s relationship with the church, “is defined and measured by a contract,” such a relationship is defined and measured by a contract that is open to public witness and verification.” That’s why we have weddings. A wedding service always has a point in it where the bride and the groom commit and everybody that attends the wedding is looking. It’s not just a party, people think, you know, a wedding is just sort of a glorified party it’s more than just a party, yeah, it can be a party but the reason you have people there to watch a marriage is because they are the witnesses to the establishment of a contract. It is a public contract; it has to be registered with the State. That’s why it’s a relationship, yes, it is a loving relationship, yes, but in order in this world to have a loving relationship that is permanent, that’s going to endure the hard times, there has to be a structure to it or the whole thing collapses. So this is why you have a contract.

Now point 3. “New morality says, “a contract is not needed because love itself is sufficient”. And it goes on then to argue that formal marriage is just a legalism. So watch how the argument is developing now. The love in point 3 is redefined. This love no longer needs a contract but if you think about it, why, then, when God says He loves Israel or Christ says He loves the church, why does He bother with the contract? He’s God; He doesn’t need a contract. Isn’t there something in this when God says I bind Myself to a contract? Doesn’t that say something about relationships that our society doesn’t. God isn’t casual; God is very concrete.

Point 4. “Therefore the marriage relationship is perverted into a contract-less arrangement under the “love” label.”

5. “Marriage is then lower on the moral scale then cohabitation. That’s the thrust of the argument.”

6. “Steps 4 & 5 constitute a rejection of God’s design and a moral judgment against Him,” He doesn’t know what He’s doing.

So that’s the case for marriage. That’s the case of why pre-marriage promiscuity is bad. There are also other instances, I’m going to run about five minutes over if you don’t mind because I want to finish those other cases, we can go through those very fast but there’s one thing I want to add that’s not in your notes. It came to my attention in an article that was in the American Family Magazine, American Family Association. And this is the stuff you guys need to take hold of when you see articles like this. Save them, tear them out of the magazine, keep them in a three-ring binder somewhere and start developing a collection that validates the Scripture.

Now here’s an interesting article, it’s called Bonded in the Brain. “New science confirms a biblical view of sex,” and it goes on to point out about bonding and it cites a new research book put out by two Ob Gyn doctors, who know what they’re talking about anatomically, called Hooked: New Science on how Casual Sex is Affecting our Children. And they point out a lot of stuff goes on in the brain. It’s not just the sex organs here that are involved, there are hormones, there are certain chemicals that we have and that these people have looked at, and our whole nervous system, of course we have neurons, but unlike a computer where the wires are connected, the way God has designed our neurons is they’re separated and the current is taken through chemistry. It’s not just electrical, it’s chemical, and the reason for that chemical thing in there is so we can adapt. You know, guys go out football and you do exercises, you do practice. Someone is on the piano; she does practice with her hands, her eyes looking at the music and the hand coordination. You develop that. Now you know that practice does something to the brain because the brain adapts to this, it’s very familiar with it and soon you do it without even thinking.

Now why does God build that into us? Because of what He wants to do with us, what He wants us to do to subdue the earth. And the point that these people are making is that in the area of sexual relations there are three chemicals that are in the brain, dopamine, oxytocin and vasopressin. Dopamine is a chemical that makes you feel good; it is morally neutral; the dopamine chemical doesn’t care whether what you’re doing is killing somebody and it gives you a thrill or whether you’re loving, caring for someone and it gives you a thrill. But the dopamine rush is the idea that you feel great, the dopamine is making you feel great because of what’s going on up here in the brain. So if you have a case where you have promiscuous sex God has designed a dopamine reward; it feels good. The problem is now that this is combined with two other chemicals in the woman, oxytocin. I hope I’m pronouncing that right, and what that is, that’s a chemical that is related to the woman when she’s giving birth and when she’s breast feeding; and it’s part of her female response. And it makes her want to be held and touched and loved. And so you combine dopamine with this response.

So what happens when that happens to the gal? She bonds with the guy and what happens then, they find, is that girls can be with a guy and they can be abused, they can be attacked, and they still somehow are bonded with this freak. You know, you say well why do they go back, because of the dopamine response, because of the way the chemicals work; they’ve bonded. And it’s made the bond that way because that’s what God wants to happen in marriage. So when you have promiscuous premarital relationships you’re getting this bonding mechanism to trigger the way it’s supposed to, except this person may not be the one, so the relationship breaks up, now we have to bond with somebody else, and what happens, every time you have broken relationship, bonding, broken relationship, bonding, broken relationship, bonding, guess what happens to the ability to bond? It diminishes because it’s stopped, it goes up to a point and it stops, it goes up to a point and it stops. And the same thing with guys, vasopressin does that with a guy, makes him feel good, I’m in charge kind of thing, and that gives him an incentive. But then the relationship gets involved, all these hormones start going, the chemicals do their thing because the chemistry is designed to activate in order to produce a marriage, in order to produce a long-term relationship. So all these things are triggered.

This is why, in the Song of Songs, one of the texts, it’s very interesting, there’s a passage in there, I don’t have the reference now, don’t awaken me sexually if we don’t mean business. And it’s a very serious verse and the reason that’s in there is because of all this. Now obviously Moses didn’t know this and Solomon didn’t, but see, these are the things you want to look for. The Bible doesn’t make claims casually. These claims go far deeper. Now here we’re talking about 3,000 years later, now we’re talking about chemical tracks in the brain. Oh gee, Moses, maybe you really knew what you were talking about.

So again, quickly look in your outline, these are the different cases. Our time is running out but if you look at these different cases they are all handling the marriage relationship. Point 2, Discovered adultery, that was the one in John 8 where they brought the woman to Jesus and they said stone her, they were quoting this passage. Only one problem, it takes two to commit adultery, so where’s the guy? And of course, the point was, it was during the Feast of Tabernacles and we know from Jewish literature that all kinds of parties and orgies were going on, Jesus knew that, and so He said, you know, where are the guys.

[3] The promiscuous fiancée, in verses 23-24; the raped fiancée in 25-27, you’ll see the difference in how they distinguish between rape and involvement. The raped single girl is protected in verses 28-29. And then incest is prohibited in verse 30 where in that case it was a boy, if you look down in verse 30 one thing you want to remember when you read verse 30, where it says, “A man shall not take his father’s wife, nor uncover his father’s bed,” obviously the father is out of the picture. In order to be married, he can’t be married to her under Jewish law, so obviously it must be talking about either the father is deceased or there’s a divorce. And so the divorce permits marriage, so therefore the father “shall not take his father’s wife, nor uncover his father’s bed.” Remember what happened, you had a polygamous society here, so you had these occasions and what is protected there, apparently, verse 30 is to protect the father’s legacy and also prevents taking advantage of the former wife’s economic dependency. You have to read economics. The one thing I’ve learned as we’ve gone through this Deuteronomy series, I’ve tried to research the economic implications and what I’ve discovered is a wealth of information. To treat this text independently of the dollars and cents and the economic flows misses a lot of the emphasis.

So to summarize tonight, what we’re looking at in verse 22 is God is protecting the male/female design because of the greater purpose of marriage and family, and to produce a culture that will last and will glorify God. So next week we’re going to deal with more of the distinctions in chapter 23.

I’ll be here for a few minutes if you want some Q and A.

[question asked something about a slave] But if the divorce restrictions are the same then you have an implicit contract; you don’t get away from the contract. The mode of the marriage ceremony, the question you’re bringing up is what a common law marriage, for example is probably the case, we would look upon that as common law marriage, but the point is in that society with these restrictions and this understanding you have an implicit contract. Just because you don’t have a piece of paper, this idea of the State, really, when you think about it, when a pastor does a wedding service, if you listen to what he says at the wedding, he says, “By the authority vested in me by the State,” as well as the church, that’s because historically we have combined civil ceremony with the church ceremony. Now we may have to break that; in the Middle Ages that was not the case. In the Middle Ages you had ecclesiastical weddings and disregard the State, the State never tracked them. And this may have to be the same with us, as long as the State is going to redefine marriage, then that raises the question as to whether ecclesiastical marriage should be reinstated. But the point is that there’s inherently a contractual agreement in the Biblical, regardless of the papers.

[more said by same guy] it’s implicit because of the way they thought about it. The slave, in the case of the slave, remember, the slaves basically had to be Yahweh worshippers or they weren’t acceptable as slaves. This is why we have… we’re going to come up to kicking the slave out, the runaway slave. The slavers had to live under a Yahwehistic faith, that was the faith of the household. The pagan slave would be unacceptable. This is why when you have the war bride passage and the man says… he wants to marry this beautiful woman he sees and for thirty days he waits and then it gives him the option of divorcing her because he finds something unacceptable in her, most commentators argue right there that was a Yahwehistic filter. She was a pagan woman that wouldn’t agree to the Yahwehism, and you can’t have a woman in that kind of a house that doesn’t agree with a Yahwehistic faith when all the money is going to the festivals, it’s going to this and to that, it’s going to cut right across her heart and she’s not going to… you know, you can’t have a team that way, you’re unequally yoked. So even though they might personally not be born again the way we would argue, they had to agree that that was the law of the land.

Today an analogy, if you want to think about it, is immigrants to this country. If you come to this country you agree that you accept American society. You’re not here… this is the danger we’ve got now, we’ve got people coming to this country that think they want to change the country. Forget it, go back where you came from, you messed up your country, don’t mess up mine. So you can’t have diverse views that are so diverse and hold together to a community. What does the word “community” mean; something’s got to be in common here. And that’s what our country is fracturing right now, we have got a culture war of three or four groups competing here, but when it gets to marriage we see it.

I mean, you see it in the pagan infiltration in the way young people think. And older people think the same way, the young people are just following the old people, that the people that are running our country today, the 40 and 50 year olds are the hippies of the 60s, and if you want to read a book that documents this, read Judge Bork’s book, Slouching Towards Gomorrah, and Judge Bork in that book documents the fact that he taught at Yale during that when all this was going on and he says look, they haven’t changed their thinking, they take baths now, but they haven’t changed their thinking. So this whole thing tonight, yes, there are criminal procedures here and presumably, what we now know from archeology and the records, very few of these laws were ever enforced. It’s very rarely… Hammurabi’s Code had some similar type laws and you can’t find one thing in all the digs in Mesopotamia that these things were ever carried out. The laws were looked upon as ideal, but that’s probably, in one sense you could argue because the threat of the criminal proceeding was so scary that maybe people obeyed it, they didn’t have to file it.

So, take away from this people is that when you read these kinds of things in the Old Testament, always think about the fact that gee, I wonder why God did that that way, He was thinking about something, there has to be a reason behind this. So that’s why, when I find articles like this, it’s talking about anatomy and physiology and we shouldn’t be surprised; the guy who designed our bodies is the guy who told us to act this way… gee, it fits!

[something said] Well, as you say, there’s three or four positions based on the Matthew passage and other passages, and I’m not hot right now on those texts so I would hesitate to give you a definitive answer, but what I can say is that whatever your basis of a divorce is, divorce is the right of remarriage, you can’t separate that; you can separate the couple and call that separation, and that’s a separation but you haven’t fractured the marriage relationship if it’s just a separation. Where the confusion is in our day is what is divorce, see, because that’s… not just the basis of divorce but what is divorce, and it appears from Scripture that divorce basically means the marriage is over, and if the marriage is over then there’s a right to remarriage, given, you know, how the person decides in their life and how God leads, but the divorce and marriage have to be seen as part of an institutional thing. What is tremendously confusing right now is the only people that are serious about marriage, I say this facetiously, are the gays. I mean, it’s sad, but the only people that are, you know, beating the door down politically to get married are the gays. Now what have we come to here? Nobody else wants to get married.