First Baptist Church Wiggins, FBC Wiggins
Today we will learn to value life as God values life.
Numbers 35:30-34 ESV
So many of our societal failures go back to our lack of value for human life.
- Abortion
- Racism
- Poverty
- Corruption
- Drugs
- Sex/Porn industry
- Senior abuse
- Child abuse
- End of life issues
- Orphan crisis
We most remember how much God values human life, how he demands justice for all human life, and how God judges a society based on how it takes care of Human life.
I. God values all human life. v.30a
This is God’s law.
This is the revelation of His heart.
This is the mirror that His people were to look into to see if they were where they needed to be spiritually.
1) It reveals that God values all Human life.
- It says if anyone kills a “person.”
2) It reveals that God is commitment to life’s protection.
- A murderer’s death was not only required for punishment purposes… it was required for the safety of other innocent lives.
- Earlier in the chapter God spelled out the different “degrees” of murder.
- Not every killing was punishable by death.
This law reveals that the heart of man is “swift to shed blood,”
II. God values justice for all human life. V30b-32
- God’s instruction is that the testimony in a capital case must be from at least two witnesses- this is to insure that the conviction or acquittal is just.
- No ransom shall be accepted for the life of a murderer.
- no bribe shall be paid for early release of an exiled prisoner.
These show that God is concerned not just with human life, but also with justice.
If we are children of God, possessing and being conformed to His divine nature. Then we should value justice for all.
- So, The right and godly thing to do is to punish murderers justly and swiftly.
Romans 13:3-5 ESV
Our judgment of murders is not bearing upon God’s final judgment of them. We judge them in order to uphold God’s justice and the safety of human life.
Our just judgment is essential but not final. Upon their death, they will then be judged by God according to their faith and repentance or the lack of it.
III. God values the purity of the land and the people in which He Dwells. 33-34
Just as God had claimed a people for himself… he had also claimed the land for himself.
- Just as he was concerned with the holiness of the people… he was concerned with the holiness of the land too.
The behavior of his people had an effect on the purity of the land.
- Whenever the inhabitants of the land became corrupt, God sent the Israelites to drive them out. That is also why whenever the people became corrupt and turned their backs on God, he would send them into exile.
We as believers care about the great land that God has blessed us with.
- We are not Israelites, although we who have believed have been grafted into their blessing… and our land is not the promised land at all.
We have grossly failed to keep her unstained by human blood over the last 241 years.
- The slaughter of the Native Americans, slavery, the civil war, abortion, murder… have left our land stained.
- We HAVE to get to a pace where we value the safe keeping of human life… human blood… or we are going to slide off into the abyss.
Though the land in which we live is NOT the promised land of old… we are not, contrary to what a lot of people think, the new Israel… still we should care about the land in which we live… the land in which we live with God dwelling in us.