God’s Wrath Or Mercy?

Numbers 15:14-16,30-36,41 “And if any foreigners visit you or live among you and want to present a special gift as a pleasing aroma to the Lord, they must follow these same procedures. Native-born Israelites and foreigners are equal before the Lord and are subject to the same decrees. This is a permanent law for you, to be observed from generation to generation. The same instructions and regulations will apply both to you and to the foreigners living among you”… “But those who brazenly violate the Lord’s will, whether native-born Israelites or foreigners, have blasphemed the Lord, and they must be cut off from the community. Since they have treated the Lord’s word with contempt and deliberately disobeyed his command, they must be completely cut off and suffer the punishment for their guilt”. One day while the people of Israel were in the wilderness, they discovered a man gathering wood on the Sabbath day. The people who found him doing this took him before Moses, Aaron, and the rest of the community. They held him in custody because they did not know what to do with him. Then the Lord said to Moses, “The man must be put to death! The whole community must stone him outside the camp.” So the whole community took the man outside the camp and stoned him to death, just as the Lord had commanded Moses… I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt that I might be your God. I am the Lord your God!”

It is not hard to pick up how harsh God is to man as in today’s chapter and it leaves us wondering how the Israelites would have any hope if at all they were to live in peace with God?

Freedom From Slavery

Exodus 21:1-2,12,15,23-25,35 “These are the laws you are to set before them: “If you buy a Hebrew servant, he is to serve you for six years. But in the seventh year, he shall go free, without paying anything… “Anyone who strikes a man and kills him shall surely be put to death… “Anyone who attacks his father or his mother must be put to death… 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… “If a man’s bull injures the bull of another and it dies, they are to sell the live one and divide both the money and the dead animal equally.

A bizarre set of laws that certainly confound logic but I am sure they were valid for the time they were revealed when there was no law and morality had no meaning among the nation of Israel who were wandering in the desert.

It seems like God did not condemn slavery and that any wrong action could simply be excused by a payment! What relevance do these laws have for us today in our Christian walk of faith?