Category: Deuteronomy Devotionals

I’m thinking about my next message I’ll be giving at my church, where Jesus talks about “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” versus forgiveness.

I think one thing that many people don’t realize is that “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” was never, not even in Moses’ day, to be interpreted as justification for personal revenge.

No one person had the right to take an eye for an eye or a tooth for tooth, nor a life for a life.

You can see this, when Moses said,

“One witness cannot establish any iniquity or sin against a person, whatever that person has done.

A fact must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.” (Deuteronomy 19:15)

Verse 16 makes clear that this was to be done in front of the priests and judges who would decide these kinds of cases.

The other thing to remember is this “eye for eye, tooth for tooth” was very rarely, if ever, literally interpreted by the priests and judges.

Rather, the idea was to limit the severity of the judgment, that is, to match the punishment with the crime.

The judges were not to kill a person, for example, for knocking out another person’s tooth.

So when Jesus talks about forgiveness in Matthew 5, he is not contradicting God’s law. Nor is he saying that we are to let injustice run rampant in society.

Rather, he’s saying, “Don’t apply to yourself a law that was meant for judges in order to execute your own personal revenge. Let the law take care of them. And even if the law fails you, leave it in God’s hands.

“But as for you, you are to forgive that person and pray for them.”

But there is one more point.

In applying this law, Moses said,

You must purge the evil from you.

Then everyone else will hear and be afraid, and they will never again do anything evil like this among you. (19-20)

How often do we call evil, “evil” nowadays?

How often do we call adultery “evil”?

Or any kind of sex outside of marriage “evil”?

How often do we call lies, “evil”?

Or filthy or coarse language “evil”?

Too often, we take sins lightly. We call them “faults.”

Sometimes, because of our culture, we don’t consider them as bad at all. As a result, we do not think it necessary to purge them out of our lives. Or out of our churches.

But God never takes sin lightly. And neither should we.

In fact, Paul uses those words, “purge the evil from among you,” when talking about disciplining a man in the church who was unrepentantly committing sexual sin. (1 Corinthians 5:13)

Again, the church was not like the judges of the Old Testament who were authorized by God to execute someone. But they were to expel the person from the church.

We are to do the same with unrepentant people who claim to be Christians in our churches.

And of course, by the power of the Spirit living in us (for we can’t do it in our own strength), we are to purge sin from our own lives.

But we won’t seriously consider doing that unless we see sin as God does.

How about you? How do you see sin?

Do you see it as God does?

Do you see it as evil?