Sins: Unpremeditated & Premeditated

The subject of these verses is first, unintentional or unpremeditated sins by individuals or the congregation. This we have in verses 22 through 29. Then second, sins of premeditation, presumptuous sins, or in the text, literally, sins with a high hand, verse 30-36, and third, the requirement of manifesting one’s faith, verses 37-41.

In the first grouping, unpremeditated sins, in verse 24, it is said that these are done by ignorance without the knowledge of the congregation. Very literally, they are sins committed by wandering off, by a separation, whether physical or mental. A person can isolate himself from God and God’s law word and reality. He can then blunder into sins, great or small. If this unpremeditated sin involved the whole community, a young bull had to be offered for a burnt offering, together with grain and drink offerings, and a sin offering. There was forgiveness for the people because the sin was not premeditated and because atonement was made.

On becoming aware of their lawlessness, the people repented. If they did not do so, the sin remained as guilt. All sin requires atonement, whatever the way it was committed, but this does not necessarily mean forgiveness by God. Mere ritual atonement does not suffice of itself. We are told in Psalm 51:17, “The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart, O God, thou wilt not despise.” The difference between unpremeditated and premeditated sins are very real. One aspect of the difference can be seen in the distinction between man’s slaughter and murder. The one is accidental, the other is deliberate. This law had to apply equally to Israelites and aliens abiding in the land. No excuse could be made for aliens on the ground of a lower moral or cultural state. Contrary to the modern view of nationality in Antiquity, religion was basic to membership in a society. David, for example, was partly of Moabite blood. Men of power around David included Hittites, Ammonites, Zobahites, and even Philistines from Gad. It was not race, but faith, that made nationality.

The law makes clear that God’s holiness cannot be, in any way compromised. Moreover, forgiveness does not result because the necessary sacrifice has been made, but only because of God’s free and sovereign grace. God does not permit the sanctuary to become the atoning power; it is merely an instrument used by God and man. The rite does not cause atonement. God’s grace alone does that, but He requires us to show our sorrow and repentance very plainly.

Roland, or Ronald, B. Allen has cited these verses as illustrative of the relationship between law and grace. He rejects the idea that God’s law is distinguished from man’s law, the tradition of the elders is impossible to keep. God knows our frame, and He knows what we can and what He cannot do. When we fail, He provides the means of restoration. As Allen said, “Therefore, we conclude that in the Torah, God speaks in grace. In the most exacting law there is mercy, and in all the Torah, the intention is to know Him and to relate to Him.”

In the second section, the concern is with sins of premeditation, presumptuous sins. We have a statement of what this sin is in verses 30-31 and in verses 32-36, we have an example of such a sin. Men who commit such sins do so in arrogance and pride. They show contempt for God and His word. What God says is for them nonsense, and they may even deliberately and flagrantly violate God’s law to declare its meaningless. Instead of worshipping God, they defy Him. Some such men have, over the generations, defied God to strike them dead for their law-breaking.

We have, in Matthew 12:32, our Lord’s reference to the unforgiveable sin. The specifics of the sin are not given. It is not merely an act, but it is also the spirit of radical contempt for God, and an inversion of all moral order. Such men break a law because it is God’s law. To show that for them, evil is good and good is evil. God cannot legislate for them, they hold. It is, in effect, not only denying God, but declaring also that man is his own god and can do as he pleases. There is an important aspect to this law. Many, in fact most of God’s laws, can only be enforced by God. Virtually all the offenses against God are punished by Him in His providential time or in eternity. Very few offenses directly against God are punishable by man, but in this instance, God requires punishment by man, because the fundamental order of all society is at stake. God is the only valid ultimate source of all law, and anyone who strikes at God’s legitimacy as a source of law and order, is trying to demolish society and all law.

There were therefore sins for which there was no atonement, only judgment. Such offenses are called sinning with a high hand. We are given then, in verses 32-36, an example of such a sin. Now, this is a very familiar example. I’ve had unbelievers throw this at me again and again. Do you believe in stoning somebody who picks up a stick on the sabbath? Well, in Exodus 45:2-3, death is required for such an offense because in the wilderness, God provided manna for Israel. He provided miraculously for their protection, and gave them food which would stay uncorrupted over the sabbath. This was a law for the wilderness. It required Israel to remember on each sabbath the meaning of God’s providential and miraculous care. They were miraculously provided with food on the sabbath, and it was provided the day before and was good for the day after.

The man referred to in these verses had no need for a fire on the sabbath. He had manna prepared from previous day to feed himself and his family. The fact that he had not built a fire indicates plainly is premeditation. The law in Exodus 35:2-3 had reference to the lighting of fire. He was therefore, playing a legal game, showing contempt for God’s law while legally not breaking the letter of the law.

James Moffett renders verses 33 and 34 a bit more clearly: “Those who caught him gathering the fuel brought him before Moses and Aaron, and all the community, who put him under arrest, as there was no clear law about how he was to be punished.”

Now, the arrested man would today, be a good candidate for the United States Supreme Court, because he knew the law of Exodus 35:2-3, and technically, he did not break it. He did not start a fire. He merely gathered sticks. He publicly gathered sticks to show his contempt for God’s law, and how you could break it in intention without breaking it in fact. God ordered the execution of this man. This is the only known penalty in all the Bible for Sabbath-breaking. Here, its meaning is an obvious one. Immediately after the pronouncement against presumptuous and premeditated sins, this man chose to show his contempt for God and His law in an open and public way, and God’s penalty was death. Is it any wonder that our society is in trouble? As one professor of law said, “He did not know of a law passed in the past few generations, or any passed before that, that has not been turned upside down in recent years by lawyers so that it is no longer recognizable by anyone who ever wrote the law, nor if the dead could come back to life and see what their law means, would they understand it?” Now, the professor of law who said this was not a conservative. He was just commenting on how the law is used to push it to the boundaries, and the beyond, to turn it upside down, and what this man did was precisely that, to say, “I didn’t technically break the law,” although in spirit, he was showing his contempt for God and showing how far he could push the law.

Not only individuals, but nations can be guilty of the sin of arrogance and presumption. This is done whenever a nation deliberately legislates into practice what God forbids in His law. Two examples of this are the legalization of abortion and homosexuality. The nations of our time have openly expressed their contempt for the Almighty. As the enlightened ones, they feel that contempt for God is a mark of intellectual respectability.

Well over a century ago, Joseph Parker said of this passage that this incident has been the occasion of a good deal of jeering at the Bible, and I’ve heard more than a little of it. Men have cited it as an example of the Bible’s extreme and intolerable severity. It is automatically assumed that the man was innocent, and God harsh and evil. No attempt to see what the man did, and how he was playing games with the law.

This attitude of men towards this text comes out of a rejection of God’s sovereignty and His prerogative as a lawgiver. Such critics have their own law, and it leaves no room for God. Our problem is a false view of the universe. As Parker said, “We do not see the reality of the case. We think of huge sins. There are none. We think of little sins. There are none. We live in a region of fancy. We picture possibilities of sin. We play at the great game of jurisprudence, setting this against that, weighing, measuring, balancing, and telling off things in definite qualities and relations. It is the spot that is the ruin. It is the one little thing that spoils the universe. God cannot drive on His mighty chariot until something has been done with those who have committed so-called little sins and perpetrated small and almost nameless trespasses. The whole conception of today is wrong.” In other words, we refuse to see sin for what it represents in us. We rate it in terms of what it is out there, and we say, “But that was a little sin, and that was a big one, and I didn’t commit that,” forgetting that what is in us when we commit any of those is what counts.

We evaluate reality in man-centered terms, and we assume that our reason rather than God’s will is the final judge. Quoting Parker again, “We must not delude ourselves with the notion that there are sins which are of no consequence.” It was after all, a small offense that revealed to Buchanan the evil heart of a boy who later became James 1 of England, as Otto Scott has pointed out in James 1.

To return once more to Parker, his comment concerning the sabbath and all of life is important, and I quote, “Consecrated men, consecrated property, consecrated space, consecrated time declared that God still claimed the world as His own, and that in all the provinces of human life, He insisted on being recognized as Lord of all.”

In the third section of this text, God requires that all the men of Israel wear fringes on the border of their garments. These are also called tassels, tied by a blue cord. Such tassels were common in Ancient Egypt and Babylon, in fact, everywhere in Antiquity, and in the Western world until fairly recently. Outside of the Western world, people still identify their religious affiliation by something in their garb, in their clothing. The student rebellion of the 1960’s instinctively made itself identifiable by distinctive clothing and long hair. They were proclaiming what they were. They were identifying themselves to everyone, and every time there has been strong convictions on the part of a people, there has been self-identification publicly, letting people know where they stand. Now, there is anonymity. God’s purpose in requiring this of Israel is clearly stated. “And it shall be unto you for a fringe, that ye may look upon it, and remember all the commandments of the LORD, and do them; and that ye seek not after your own heart and your own eyes, after which ye use to go a whoring: that ye may remember, and do all my commandments, and be holy unto your God. I am the LORD your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, to be your God: I am the LORD your God.”

Pagan identifying garbs have tended to provide identification by other men, but God’s requirement was for self-identification. Men were to be reminded constantly of their responsibility to be God’s men, to exercise dominion and obedience to God. This practice has continued in Christendom in various ways. In Eastern Orthodoxy, icons in the home have, among other purposes, been a reminder to the family of the family’s obligations under God. Clerical garb was once universally worn by all churchmen. The wearing of a cross has been a common expression of this, or an open Bible on a small lectern in the home. Many other means have been used over the generations to remind oneself of God’s claim on us.

At the same time, these tassels came to be used by the scribes and the Pharisees as a means of boasting, as our Lord says in Matthew 23:1-12. They increase the size of their tassels as a way of claiming greater holiness, and our Lord ridiculed the practice, but by wearing the tassels, the believers were always identifiable to others as well as to themselves.

Shortly after World War 2, an Irish clergyman received from his sister in the United States, in fact from California, a beautiful woolen sports shirt. Since he loved football, and he attended the matched in the city, he decided to wear it one cold day instead of his clericals. On his return from the football match by train, he found the little Irish town in an uproar of gossip. He had supposedly sneaked off that morning without his clerical garb and collar, no doubt to visit a house of ill repute in the city. Only the presence of others at the match, from that village, helped him to salvage his reputation, but he never dared to wear the sports shirt again. Well, in typical fashion, the rabbis, in time, stressed the form at the expense of the meaning. Each string in the tassel had eight threads, then the number of knots and the numerical value of the words was made to total six hundred and thirteen, the number of laws in their reckoning in the books of Moses. The numerical value of the Hebrew letters and tassels is six hundred. The threads and knots added up to thirteen, giving six hundred and thirteen as they reckoned the law.

But God’s purpose in all this is very simple. The people are to remember that He is the Lord, the sovereign. They must remember to do all His commandments, and to be holy, separated, and dedicated to God. The Lord’s plain commandment is that “ye seek not after your own eyes,” and their departure from His and His law is called whoring. Sin is compared to adultery. We are to be God’s exclusive possession, and disobedience is called adultery and whoredom all through the Bible. Let us pray.

Our Father, we thank thee that thou hast identified us as thine own. Teach us to treat ourselves as thy possessions. Deliver us from playing games with thy law, and with all our heart, mind, and being, to serve and obey thee. In Christ’s name. Amen. Are there any questions now about our lesson? Yes?

[Audience] {?} forms. It’s the letter, and not the spirit of the law that {?}

[Rushdoony] Yes. And today, the form and the spirit are wrong, because after awhile the form gives way. It doesn’t exist. It becomes a hollow shell, and so today, the spirit is gone and the forms are collapsing. Yes?

[Audience] It’s impossible to know, as far as civil law, what the law is anymore. The state legislature in just California, it passes over three thousand of what they call laws a year, every year, and no body knows when they’re breaking a law anymore. You have to go talk to an attorney before you find out whether you’re breaking a law, and the attorneys don’t know. They say, “Well, that’s up to the judge to decide what the law is.”

[Rushdoony] Yes. Well, there was a decision, or a resolution of a committee of congress about a century and a half ago which said plainly that any law passed which contradicts the word of God is no law at all. That’s still on the books, and I think it’s true. Such a law is no law at all in the sight of God. Yes?

[Audience] This going to the self-declaration thing, just in my lifetime, the past thirty years, the t-shirt syndrome and the bumper sticker thing has just blossomed. It didn’t exist when I was a kid growing up.

[Rushdoony] Yes. When I was a child, the lowest form of employment in the cities, which you did if you were very poor, was to be a sandwich board man. Do you remember sandwich board men? You walked around the streets advertising something because you had a hinged board that hung on both sides of you with an advertisement on you. Now, that kind of thing is done on t-shirts. In fact, it’s pretty hard to find a pair of sneakers in the stores today that doesn’t carry an advertisement on it. Any other questions or comments? Well, if not, let us conclude with prayer.

Our Father, we thank thee that thy word is truth, and thy word speaks to our condition. We pray that thy judgment may cleanse our nation, may cleanse the world and make of us again a godly nation, and a beacon light of grace to the peoples. And now go in peace. God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost bless you and keep you, guide and protect you this day and always. Amen. 33:58.0]

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