Underground Exiles

Leviticus 20.1-5 is the final text I’ll ask you to consider:

“The Lord spoke to Moses, saying, “Say to the people of Israel, ‘Anyone of the people of Israel or of the strangers who sojourn in Israel who give any of his children ot Molech shall surely be put to death.  The people of the land shall stone him with stones.  I myself will set my face against that man and will cut him off from among his people, because he has given one of his children to Molech, to make my sanctuary unclean and to profane my holy name.  And if they people of the land do at all close their eyes to that man when he gives one of his children to Molech, and do not put him to death, then I myself will set my face against that man and against his clan and will cut them off from among their people, him and all who follow him in whoring after Molech.”

Lest there be any confusion, “giving” a child to Molech was not some form of indentured servitude.  Leviticus 18.21 makes it explicitly clear that God is talking about child sacrifice, the heathen ritual of offering live babies as burnt offerings to pagan gods.  After reading this passage does it seem like God has much patience for this barbaric practice?

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So I had another conversation this morning at church before the service started surrounding the question of free will.  There is a dear, dear lady at the Well who walked up before church started and noticed that our pastor had a copy of Erasmus and Luther’s debate on Free Will.  She picked up the book and said she’d never read anything by Erasmus and thought she might be interested in the book.

Seeking to engage the conversation, I mentioned that Pastor Todd had loaned me the book several years ago, and that I thought Luther’s writing in Bondage of the Will was by far the best piece of writing he’d every produced.

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Psalm 82.3-4 is a passage that parallels Proverbs 24.11-12 in many ways:

Vindicate the weak and fatherless; do justice to the afflicted and destitute.  Rescue the weak and needy; deliver them out of the hand of the wicked.”

Through passages like these God is calling his people to intervene whenever the vulnerable are threatened, be it an individual or an entire group.  Masses of German Christians should have com to the active defense of their Jewish countrymen, and a much larger segment of the American church should have joined the fight against slavery and segregation.  Why didn’t this happen?  Why don’t more Christians today follow these passages into the active defense of unborn children?  I would suggest that most of us, myself included, have too narrow a definition of who our neighbor is and too narrow a view of what it means to love him.  Regarding widespread oppression and injustice, we tend to confuse opposition in principle, with opposition in practice.  We content ourselves with the idea that we’re not participating in injustice, failing to consider the fact that we’re often doing nothing to stop it either

Martin Niemoller, a German pastor imprisoned for his opposition to Hitler, made the following statement in 1946:

Christianity in German bears a greater responsibility before God [for the Holocaust] than the National Socialists, the SS, and the Gestapo.”¹

How could he say this?  Because he recognized that those who have been rescued unto salvation are far more accountable to God than those who remain mired in blindness and unbelief.  If we don’t get a better grasp of what it means to love our neighbor, history is going to again look at the church with the same indictment:  “Where were all of the Christians while innocent babies were being murdered en masse?”  We would do well to turn our attention to the Good Samaritan.

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1. Quoted in Hitler’s Cross: Erwin Lutzer, Hitler’s Cross, Chicago, IL: Moody Press, 1995.  p. 191 [↩]

While Proverbs 24 gives us the general command to intervene on behalf of those who are being killed, Exodus 1 provides us with a very specific example of this command in practice.  A new king has come to power in Egypt, and fearful that Israel’s phenomenal growth will threaten Egypt’s security, he orders every newborn Hebrew boy to be put to death.  To ensure that his command is carried out, he tasks the Hebrew midwives with following through on the decree.  We learn in Exodus 1.17-21 that his plan did not succeed:

But the midwives feared God, and did not do as the king of Egypt commanded them, but saved the male children alive.  So the king of Egypt called for the midwives and said to them, “Why have you done this thing, and saved the male children alive?”  And the midwives said to Pharaoh, “Because the Hebrew women are not like the Egyptian women; for they are lively and give birth before the midwives come to them.”  Therefore God dealt well with the midwives, and the people multiplied and grew very mighty.  And so it was, because the midwives feared God, that he provided households for them.”

The implication of this passage is that those who fear God will do what they can to keep mothers from killing their babies.

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While orphans, widows and abortion-vulnerable children are all “in distress” - and generally unwanted by society at large - the circumstances surrounding their distress are very different.  It is one thing to provide food and shelter for people in need, and another thing entirely to intervene on the behalf of people who are about to be killed.  Perhaps you wonder if the Bible actually mandates our involvement in the more extreme circumstances, whre the price of involvement is much higher, and the level of opposition is more, much more, significant.  Here enteres Proverbs 24.11-12:

Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter.  If you say, “Behold we did not know this,” does not he who weighs the heart perceive it?  Does not he who keeps watch over your soul know it, and will he not repay each man according to his work?”

Like almost all biblical proverbs, the text gives zero indication what kind of specific injustice, if any, the author has in mind.  It serves as a general guidline for what God’s people are called to do in the face of violent injustice.  If innocent human beings are in danger, God-fearing people are to come to their rescue.

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