Deuteronomy 25:1-4--Additional Miscellaneous Laws

Deuteronomy 25:1-4
English Standard Version

25 “If there is a dispute between men and they come into court and the judges decide between them, acquitting the innocent and condemning the guilty, 2 then if the guilty man deserves to be beaten, the judge shall cause him to lie down and be beaten in his presence with a number of stripes in proportion to his offense. 3 Forty stripes may be given him, but not more, lest, if one should go on to beat him with more stripes than these, your brother be degraded in your sight.

​4 “You shall not muzzle an ox when it is treading out the grain.

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I usually don't expect headings to go across chapter breaks so I goofed yesterday and left off these verses from yesterday's passage. I'll cover them now.

The first has to do with punishments by beating (receiving up to 40 lashes) as prescribed by a judge in a way that was proportional to the crime that was committed.  The beating or whipping was to take place there at the time of the verdict in the courtroom in front of the judge, but only if the accused was found guilty and only done by the court--there were to be no mobs of vigilantes going around beating and whipping people on their own because they thought someone to be guilty who had had no trial.

While most of us see beating or whipping as cruel and unusual punishment, it was one of only a few options available to punish people:  You could fine the person, you could beat the person, you could exile the person, or you could kill the person by stoning or sometimes hanging.  There were crimes that were beyond the need for simple financial restitution, but did not rise to the level of someone losing their citizenship or losing their life, so most of those crimes involved some number of lashes.  God puts limits on this though as the beating was to be corrective and not primarily to degrade the offender, nor would the LORD want to risk them dying from the beating as these whippings or beatings were supposed to be punishment for crimes not deserving of a death penalty.  It was important to have righteous judges that would give a punishment that fit the crime.

There is one other verse in this list of various laws and it will be quoted later in the New Testament by Paul and explained to say that this is again making sure that fair compensation is not withheld from the worker and that the worker should get to enjoy some of the fruits of his labor.  Paul applies this in a "spiritual" aspect for his ministry to say that he has every right to ask people to give him money and for him to benefit in that way from the labor he was doing, yet there were false teachers that were only out to use the name of Christ to make money for themselves and Paul didn't want people to think that's what he was all about, so, at least with the Corinthians, he chose not to ask them for money and let other churches support that work and ministry and he aslo worked at a tent maker to earn his own way.  We still have the principle here though that everyone, even those that are pastors, elders, deacons, missionaries, and so on, all have as much right to benefit from their work that they do as the ox here does to eat of the grain in the field he is harvesting.  We do not put a muzzle on the ox so that he has to work but is unable to eat the grain, and we do not turn workmen, even workmen for the gospel, into slaves who are forced to work for no wages--if they choose to do that like Paul did, that is between them and God, but we should be willing to value the work they do and support them in every way we can--money is not the only form of support.

Next time we'll talk about a special situation in marriage that the Sadducees used to try to test Jesus in the New Testament.  Since the purpose of marriage is to be fruitful and multiply, what happens when a man dies suddenly without giving any children?  There are several legal questions to be answered here, but suffice it to say that the LORD had a plan even for this.