Sermon: The Cursed Redeemer

Christ and Deuteronomy 21:22-23
#1787
Richard T. Ritenbaugh
Given 12-Oct-24; 76 minutes 2024-10-12

Capital punishment is never a cheerful subject to explore, especially when one realizes the phrase itself, capital punishment, actually refers to beheading somebody, a criminal, a traitor, an enemy of some sort. The practice is also called death penalty or historically, it was called judicial homicide.

But, at any rate, it is the state sanctioned killing of a person as punishment for any number of reasons. And people have come up with a lot of reasons to kill offenders. But it is usually in more civilized nations given as a sentence for a high crime. Something that is considered a capital offense, a major felony. It could be murder or assassination, mass murder, aggravated rape where the victim dies, treason, sedition, war crimes, terrorism, espionage, piracy, even including hijacking, that is, piracy in the air.

In other nations, though not in the US or most Western nations, religious crimes can also be added to that list, apostasy, blasphemy, and other religious no-nos that occur when you have a state religion. In some non-Western nations execution is the penalty for sexual deviance, fornication, adultery, incest, sodomy, bestiality, that sort of thing. Some nations actually include drug trafficking in their list of capital crimes and some even drug using will get the death penalty for you. Human trafficking, which has been a focus recently, is now a capital crime in China. Militaries, of course we know, often carry out capital punishment for such things as cowardice, desertion, insubordination, and mutiny.

I have just given you a very long list of crimes that can actually become capital crimes if you are in the wrong court or maybe in the right court. And so, if you get caught doing one of these things—I should not say you, I would not expect any of you to do it. If a person gets caught doing any of these things and he is charged and brought before a judge or a jury and they say you did it or he did it, then they have choices, that is, the judicial system of these various nations, most of the nations have laws saying what their capital punishments are, but they vary and they have varied throughout time.

Until recently, executions of this kind were agonizing tortures and they did it specifically not because they hated the person, although they may have, but they did it as a means of deterrence, to dissuade the populace, anybody who watched the criminal die from committing similar crimes or rebelling against the state. And so anciently, they used all kinds of different practices: hanging, stoning (that one is popular in the Bible), drowning, poisoning, decapitation, impalement, suffocation, throwing people bodily off cliffs, slow bleeding by many cuts, burning, boiling, and crucifixion. And I have only given you a short list because man's imagination is very fertile and they can think of a lot of different ways to make other people hurt and die. So all of these were employed at one point or another.

In modern times it has gotten down to a list of about a half dozen that are used around the world. That is, firing squad, electrocution, poison gas, lethal injection, and a few others that various nations might use. There are still some who do beheading and that sort of thing, but we will just pass on.

Now, we may squirm in our seats when we think about capital punishment and all the ways that people die under a capital sentence, but God's Word clearly mandates the use of capital punishment in the pages of Scripture. It is for various sins and crimes. You might be surprised about what things actually get the death penalty in the Bible. But the idea of a death penalty actually occurs as early as Genesis 9:6 where God tells Moses, "Whoever sheds man's blood, by man his blood shall be shed; for in the image of God He made man." So the idea here is that because God made man in His image, the human life is sacred, it is sacrosanct. But when one takes the life of a person who is made in God's image, a punishment in kind is deserved. And so we have the life for life, eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth principle and it comes clearly from this sort of command.

Now, God did not give this power just to anyone. He put that power in the hands of governments in their administration of justice for their particular area of jurisdiction. If you want, you can go look that up. Paul explains it in Romans 13:4. That says that God put those authorities there to do His wrath, people who sin or commit crimes worthy of it. That is put into the hands of the government. You could also see verifying scriptures in I Peter 2:12-14 where Peter says essentially the same thing.

On the other hand, He frequently forbids personal retaliation or vengeance. So He does not allow individual people to take it in mind that they are going to kill somebody for a certain crime. It is always given to a government to do it, it is given to the state to do it. So there is a clear distinction there between what a state could do or a government can do and what an individual can do. If an individual feels like a certain person is worthy of death, he has to take it to the state, make an accusation, and then the state takes it from there and the wheels of justice begin rolling.

Biblically, the crimes that can receive the death penalty, I think I counted 14, are kind of interesting. Some of them you might not expect. Maybe you read it in reading through the Bible, but it did not make an impression that that would be a death penalty case. But I will give all 14 of them to you just so you know what they are: Intentional homicide or willful homicide, false witness in capital cases, idolatry, blasphemy, witchcraft and other kinds of sorcery, false claims to prophecy. That is an interesting one that should have held back the prophets and the sons of the prophets if they, you know, thought they had a revelation from God and they let it be known and it proved false.

Profaning the Sabbath, of course. Adultery, fornication, incest, homosexuality, bestiality, kidnapping, cursing or striking one's parents, incorrigibility (which we went over on Trumpets), and here is one, refusal to obey the court, the judges of the court. I mean, now we just get a little slap on the wrist that is 30 days in jail. But in ancient Israel, you could get, I was going to say your head cut off, but you could get stoned or whatever, or killed by the sword or what have you, if you just did not obey the judges. I mean, it is contempt of court. It really takes a big leap there, does it not? If you want to see that one it is in Deuteronomy 17:12.

Now, when God gives the law for certain things in these cases, He usually mandates the method of execution that the governments under Him should use. So here are the methods that He advocates: stoning, burning, sword, spear, arrow, and decapitation. These are all ones that are mentioned in the Bible as sanctioned for specific crimes.

It is kind of interesting that certain crimes you do not get stoned but you get beheaded, or you get thrust through with the sword, or whatever it happens to be. It is kind of an interesting thing. One of them, I will not say it, but one of them that struck me was burning for this particular crime as opposed to any other kind of punishment. But we will just go on from there. I do not want to get bogged down.

Of course, Jesus Christ was crucified, which was not a sanctioned method of execution in Israel. However, it was foreshadowed in the wilderness wanderings that Christ would be lifted up as the serpent in the wilderness was lifted up. You can find that in Numbers 21:9. This was probably before the method of execution was even used anywhere. A lot of times when you look up crucifixion, it tells you that the Persians or some other group first started it. That may be true. It just depends on which time the Persians began using it. But it was Moses' time when He was giving these laws and their going through the wilderness was probably about 800 years before the Persian Empire. So this idea that Christ would have to be lifted up like the serpent in the wilderness was already extant for close to a millennium before it actually became a frequent practice. I was going to say a popular practice, but before any nation started using it regularly.

Before I leave this, there is one other thing I wanted to mention about the serpent in the wilderness episode (that is Numbers 21:1-9). Of course, God told Moses to make this bronze serpent and if the people would look at it, then they would be healed from the bite of the serpents. And, of course, he would have to hold it up high for all of the people to see. Well, Jesus uses this imagery when He talks to Nicodemus there in John 3:14 about that He would have to be lifted up like that serpent in the wilderness.

So Jesus Himself uses that figure from way back in the time of the wilderness to say that that prefigured Him and what He had to go through. And as we know, He had to go through a lot! He had to suffer excruciating pain and torment. There was the issue of shame, thirst, His inability to breathe, because in crucifixion your body sags and you are so depleted of energy and blood that you have a hard time pulling up. And even if you have the energy to pull yourself up, it is excruciatingly painful around the hands and the feet because of having to use them as your support and you have got a nail in your flesh at those points. And it is not pretty; not an easy thing to do.

And of course, there was the extreme loss of blood which He suffered. He was beaten several times, flayed open, blood was pouring from Him. And it was this last thing, His loss of blood that actually killed Him. He gave His all, all His life was poured out as a payment for our sins.

And we should not forget one other factor. And that is, at a certain point, His suffering was increased exponentially when all the sins of the world were placed upon Him. If nothing else, it was extreme spiritual, mental, and emotional agony for what He had become with all of those sins put on Him, all the burden and offense that was in those sins. And it would have been especially acute for Him who had never sinned. He had never had to in Himself deal was sin. He dealt with it in other people, but now it had come close and now it had come not only with one person's sins, but billions of persons sins.

It is hard to imagine. How did He do it? How did He maintain His ability to speak with the thieves next to Him? How did He maintain His presence of mind to ask for His executioner's forgiveness? How did He do that? How did He maintain the state of mind to make sure all the pieces of the prophecies that had been given hundreds of years before were fulfilled? How did He do that with all the sin and all the pain, the agony? It is just beyond us. But He put himself through that for us, for our redemption.

Now today, on this Atonement day, we are going to consider an aspect of Israelite law concerning capital punishment. That is why I gave that introduction. But this aspect of capital punishment finds its ultimate fulfillment in Christ's death and burial. Specifically, what we are going to be talking about is Deuteronomy 21:22-23. (It is an easy one to remember, 21, 22, 23.) And we are going to compare that short passage with Paul's quoting of it in Galatians 3:13. And what Paul does is he links that law in Deuteronomy 21 with Christ's death by crucifixion. And by becoming a curse for us, he says Jesus Christ provided atonement for us and ultimately for the whole world.

So we are going to start in Deuteronomy 21, verses 22 and 23 and read it and then kind of take it apart. We will parse it a bit.

Deuteronomy 21:22-23 "If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day, so that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance; for he who is hanged is accursed of God."

Notice that this law appears directly after the one that we went over on Trumpets. That is, the law about the rebellious son. What do you do with somebody who will not listen to his parents. And there is nothing here in the text that says that these two miscellaneous laws are linked, but they seem to be because they are back to back. And they seem to me, at least in the way my mind works, that they are linked with the Day of Trumpets and the Day of Atonement. The one, the rebellious son, works very well with the Day of Trumpets, whereas the second one about hanging on a tree works very well with the Day of Atonement. And here they are back to back laws in the 21st chapter of Deuteronomy.

These two verses, verses 22 and 23, have a four-part organization. And I think it is important that we kind of get a feeling about this or we see this so that we can understand the parts of the law as well as possible. So it has an "if" hypothesis, that is the whole of verse 22. "If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is put to death and you hang him on the tree." That is one, that is the first part. And then after that, you get a "then" conclusion. Verse 23 contains the "then" conclusion, but not all of verse 23. The part we want is the first half, the "then" conclusion is, "his body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day." That is the "then" conclusion.

So you have an "if." If he has committed sin and you hang him on a tree, "then" (verse 23) his body shall not remain overnight on the tree and you shall bury him that day. That is the if-then. The third section here, third part of the organization, is the reason. That is the third phrasing or the third clause, I guess you would say, in verse 23. That is, "So that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance." That is the third part. I called it 23C. And then there is 23D, which is an explanation. It gives us the why of things: "For he who is hanged is accursed of God."

So you have these four sections and we are going to go through them 1, 2, 3, 4.

Let us go back to verse 22 which sets the scenario. "If a man has committed a sin worthy of death, and he is put to death, and you hang him on a tree. . ." That is basically the whole scenario set up for us so we know exactly what the situation is that we need to apply this law in.

A man has done something wrong, something terribly wrong that is a crime or a sin worthy of capital punishment. He contravened a law and was found worthy of death. So we can assume that he was arrested, charged, judged according to law, with corroborating evidence and witnesses, and then sentenced to death by legitimate judicial authority. So this is all aboveboard. Everything has happened according to the way God set it out in the governments that He set up. So there is nothing wrong with the way he was arrested, charged, prosecuted, sentenced; it was all aboveboard. And the man is brought out, everything having been done right, and he is executed by the prescribed method.

All of this is not mentioned because, I mean, if he did that this law would probably be another four or five verses long. Just for brevity's sake he has left all of that out, basically saying, Okay, he has gone through the process and you have killed him because, really, the arrests and all of that is not important. The important part is the last part, that you hang him on a tree after he is executed.

So the sentence is carried out whatever the method was and the criminal or the sinner, he dies. Then as a deterrent or a warning to the people, the court determines that because his crime was so heinous that the body of the criminal should be publicly displayed by hanging it on a tree or a pole or in some way affixing it in an elevated way for people to see.

Now what you need to understand here is that the hanging on the tree was not the method of execution. That was done in one or another way. By the time you get to the gospels in Jesus' time and the Romans and their cruelty, they actually made the hanging on a pole or a tree, or what have you, to be both the method of execution and the deterrent by public display. But in ancient Israel, since they did not crucify or impale, then there was some other method of execution and then there was a public display by hanging. I know this is gruesome but I figured you do not have anything on your stomach so, you know, it should be fine.

So that is where we are. The dead man, having paid for his crimes, is put up in a high position to be seen by the public.

Let us go to verse 23, the first half of the verse, A and B. "His body shall not remain overnight on the tree, but you shall surely bury him that day."

God's instruction is very simple, easy to understand. Such gruesome displays of criminals' dead bodies are to be a one day affair. It is not supposed to go beyond the end of that day. The criminal must be buried on the day of his death. So the body may not remain on the tree or on the pole or otherwise affixed in a high place overnight. Before it gets dark that body must come down.

Now, from the accounts in the gospels of Jesus' crucifixion, the Jews understood this quite logically to mean that the body should be taken down by sunset. Let us just go see that in John 19, verse 31. From what I was told that was a very good year, 1931. It was. My mother was born that year.

John 19:31 Therefore, because it was the Preparation Day [this was the day before the First Day of Unleavened Bread, the Passover day, which was also a preparation day], that the bodies should not remain on the cross on the Sabbath (for that Sabbath was a high day) [that was the First Day of Unleavened Bread], the Jews asked Pilate that their legs [meaning all those who had been crucified that day,] might be broken, and that they might be taken away [for burial].

So they were trying to keep this law, even under Roman jurisdiction, that when a condemned person was killed, was executed, that they take the bodies down the sunset of that same day. Now, this did not always happen. Sometimes the Romans overruled them. And you see here that the Jews had to go ask if they could take them down. We find also that when we go through the story of Joseph of Arimathea and his service to Christ by taking Him down off the cross and burying him in his own newly-cut tomb, that he had to go to Pilate as well and ask for Jesus' body. And as a matter of fact, that is a main part of the subject of my Bible study that I am doing as I go around to the various church visits.

Let us move on here back to Deuteronomy 21:23. This time we are going to look at 23C. This is the reason why you have to bury the person at sunset or before sunset of that day, "So that you do not defile the land which the Lord your God is giving you as an inheritance." So it is a matter of holiness that the body of the condemned person be taken down. What he says here is that if the body remained unburied, that is, visible, hanging on a tree overnight, it would defile, pollute, or desecrate the land, the land which was God's that He had given to them as an inheritance. You have to remember, this is within the bounds of the Holy Land and God was making sure that they kept His land in the most pristine or pure way as as possible. And so he told them here that if they left this rotting corpse overnight, that it would be a source of defilement.

Now, remember, the Israelites were not even allowed to touch a dead body. If they did, they were unclean until the evening and they had to wash themselves. So this was part of the way you handled the dead bodies of people. I mean, think about it. The human body in a land that is warm, like Judea and Samaria, the land of Israel, would begin to decay fairly quickly. And not only that, the person is likely bloody because he has had some part of his body punctured or cut off, or in some way exposed. And that would also attract the animals, insects, and other disease-carrying vermin. And there is the possibility of disease for the people.

In a more spiritual sense, the curse of the criminal, his dead body left overlong would accrue to the community or even to the whole nation. Now, why is this? Well, there is, I guess you could say, a couple of different reasons. If touching a dead body is defiling, the exposure of one who has been cursed for more than a short amount of time would be doubly defiling. It would be that (this is the wrong word) by parading this cursed man's executed body for all to see, exposing it, it also sullied God's gift of the Holy Land by drawing attention to the evildoer. God wanted to get sin, curses, evildoing, all reminders of that tucked away, buried, out of sight. He does not want His people to be reminded about those sinful things all the time. He wants them to walk in uprightness. And so he says, get that out of the way, put it in the ground.

Now, this reason may stem from the idea that Israel itself, as God's nation, was to be holy and separate and different from other nations. Other nations often exposed the bodies of criminals and they did not stop it one day. They, I am sure you have seen this on like Conan the barbarian or whatever, where they show bodies in cages and the person has been left to die and they just leave the body there until it is just a skeleton. Those sorts of things actually occurred. As a matter of fact, we are going to look at one in the pages of Scripture not long from now, but Israel was supposed to be a clean, pure, compassionate, dignified people who treated even dead bodies with respect, even the dead bodies of condemned criminals.

What God advocates in here in this law is what we would call a humanitarian ethic. Remember, we just read back in Genesis 9 that a person—man, woman, child, does not matter—is made in God's image. And so we should have respect for their lives and for their bodies and that we should not leave dead bodies hanging around even if we want to deter other crime and sin. God says, put that body in the ground. It is over, the man did his evil deed, you had the deterrent, now it is done, it is finished, it is over. The punishment has been made. The penalty has been paid, get him in the ground. Move on.

Let us go to Amos 2 and the first three verses.

Amos 2:1-3 For thus says the Lord: "For three transgressions of Moab, and for four, I will not turn away its punishment, because he burned the bones of the king of Edom to lime. But I will send a fire upon Moab, and it shall devour the palaces of Kerioth; Moab shall die with tumult, with shouting and trumpet sound. And I will cut off the judge from its midst, and slay all of its princes with him," says the Lord.

God, here, condemns the Moabite king, that is "he," which I emphasized, the Moabite king who burned the bones of the king of Edom. God condemned this king for disrespecting or desecrating a dead body. By this time, the Edomite king was probably just a skeleton. It says bones here. And so this Moabite king dug up these bones and publicly displayed them and burned them to lime. And God says, "You're going to get it. You've done something horrible." He calls it here a transgression. It one subject to divine punishment. He says, I will not turn away its punishment for this reason. He said, because you burned the bones of the king of Edom, I am going to send a fire and it is going to devour all your palaces. God does not like the disrespect of a dead body. It is pretty clear in these examples.

So in Deuteronomy 21:23 the dead body left to rot on a tree or a pole brings judgment on the community, just as the burning of the bones of the king of Edom brought judgment upon Moab. It was something that God said was a transgression that needed punishing. He did not want His people to follow the same idea that they could desecrate the bodies of even their condemned criminals. He did not like it. It was not good, it was not holy, it was not respectful, and knowing human nature and the way that people are, if He allowed these public hangings of dead bodies to occur whenever somebody died like this, the practice would spread throughout the whole nation and defile the whole land, which He says back here in Deuteronomy 21, that the land would be defiled, not just the land around the community, but the whole land. It would defile the people, ultimately. And the people would be brought under God's judgment and you do not want that. You do not want to ever be brought under His wrath.

Let us get back to this and do Deuteronomy 21:23D. The last part, the last clause here, "For he who is hanged is accursed of God." Finally, we get to the overall explanation and God's reasoning about the law, about this particular law. A hanged man is cursed by God.

Now, we do not want to misunderstand what He says here. It does not mean that the hanging itself brings God's curse on the criminal, but that the public display of the criminal's body confirms the criminal's sin. The criminal was under God's judgment because of what he had done to deserve capital punishment. It was his wickedness that brought the curse. Whenever you sin, you bring a curse because the penalty of breaking the law is death. Death is a curse. And so it was the man's sin, his crime, which brought on God's curse, that is, death, death for sin.

What we are seeing here in an exaggerated form is the way sin works with everyone. Every time we sin, we take on the death penalty. The wages of sin is death. And so He says here that when we sin, we are under condemnation, we are under the curse that that sin brings, that the law brings because of the penalty. And that hanging the dead body exhibits that the person died under God's judgment for his sins.

So hanging on a tree shows everyone that this man died a sinner, a very bad sinner at that. He did not do just the normal everyday kind of sins. He did the worst kinds of sins that took the worst punishments. He did not die in just the usual way, let us say, from old age or some sort of sickness or an accident or what have you, but under condemnation for a capital crime. And God says, yes, you can hang him for a day. But after that, put his body in the ground. We do not want this hanging around. We do not want this condemnation to get too much public air time. We do not want it to defile.

I mean, deterrence is great. It should work. But we also do not want to glorify this process because it is not what God wants. God allows these things because we are human, because we sin, because governments have to function and try to keep the peace. They have to judge, they have to make judgments on evildoers. But that is not the way of life God wants. Yes, it is fine that evildoers are punished and it is fine that we make sure that it is a deterrent. But do not take it too far. You are a holy people, respect the body, respect the law, and move on. Learn your lesson. Do not linger over it. The idea here is that the lingering on it puts our minds in the wrong places.

Let us move on. All that we have just seen in these two verses addresses the application and the explanation of the original law. Now, the Old Testament contains some examples (only about a handful) of this being put into practice. Let us go to Joshua chapter 8.

Joshua 8:29 And the king of Ai he [this is Joshua] hanged on a tree until evening. And as soon as the sun was down, Joshua commanded that they should take his corpse down from the tree, cast it at the entrance of the gate of the city, and raise over it a great heap of stones that remains to this day.

Joshua did not do a whole lot wrong in his life. He was a good man. He tried to keep God's law as closely as possible. He did get tricked by the Gibeonites but that is another story. But in this instance, Joshua did everything right. He hangs the king of Ai on a tree and being Joshua, he leaves him there only until the evening where he has him cut down and buried under a heap of stones. If you want, you could also jot down Joshua 10:26 where a similar event happens to five Canaanite kings. We find that Joshua did the same thing. He only left it their bodies up until the evening.

However, we have II Samuel 21.

II Samuel 21:1-2 There was a famine in the days of David for three years, year after year; and David inquired of the Lord. And the Lord answered, "It is because of Saul and his bloodthirsty house, because he killed the Gibeonites." So the king called the Gibeonites and spoke to them. Now the Gibeonites were not of the children of Israel, . . .

And it is all that story about Joshua and the Gibeonites. Let us go down to part of the way through 2,

II Samuel 21:2-9 . . . Saul had sought to kill them in his zeal for the children of Israel and Judah. [He was trying to make make good on Joshua's mistake. He was trying to turn it around.] Therefore David said to the Gibeonites, "What shall I do for you? And with what shall I make atonement, that you may bless the inheritance of the Lord?" And the Gibeonites said to him, "We will have no silver or gold from Saul or from his house, nor shall you kill any man in Israel for us." And he said, "Whatever you say that I will do for you." So they answered the king, "As for the man who consumed us and plotted against us, that we should be destroyed from remaining in any of the territories of Israel, let seven men of his descendants be delivered to us, and we will hang them before the Lord in Gibeah of Saul, whom the Lord chose." And the king said, "I will give them." But the king spared Mephibosheth the son of Jonathan, the son of Saul, because of the Lord's oath that was between them, between David and Jonathan the son of Saul. So the king took Armoni and Mephibosheth, the two sons of Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, whom she bore to Saul, and the five sons of Michal the daughter of Saul, whom she brought up for Adriel the son of Barzillai the Meholathite; and he delivered them into the hands of the Gibeonites, and they hanged them on the hill before the Lord. So they fell all seven together, and were put to death in the days of harvest, in the first days of the beginning of barley harvest.

Now, we have Rizpah, the daughter of that unnamed woman who put on sackcloth and spread it for herself on the rock and she shooed the birds of the air away so they would not peck at the bodies. She would not let the beasts of the fields come at them at night.

II Samuel 21:11-14 And David was told what Rizpah the daughter of Aiah, the concubine of Saul, had done. Then David went and took the bones of Saul, and the bones of Jonathan his son, from the men of Jabesh Gilead who had stolen them from the street of Beth Shan, where the Philistines had hung them up, after the Philistines had struck down Saul in Gilboa. So he brought up the bones of Saul and the bones of Jonathan his son from there; and they gathered the bones of those who had been hanged. They buried the bones of Saul and Jonathan his son in the country of Benjamin in Zelah, in the tomb of Kish his father. So they performed all that the king commanded. And after that God heeded the prayer for the land.

So this was a case where David was over the administration of the laws of the judicial system here, and he did not enforce the law of Deuteronomy 21:22-23. He should have, on the evening that they killed those seven men of Saul's line, gone up there, taken the bodies down, and buried them immediately. But he did not, he let them hang. It was like he forgot about it and somebody had to come tell him weeks or months later, "Look, Rizpah's out there trying to keep the birds away from her sons and her relatives bodies because she doesn't want them defiled. Yet they've been hanging all this time."

And you know what? It says, "They were hanged before the Lord." You know what this means? They were hanged on a hill in Gibeah facing Jerusalem. So David could see it. Gibeah is nine miles almost directly north of Jerusalem, and from Jerusalem's height, you could see it.

So the Gibeonites were basically taunting the government of Israel at the time about this breach that had been between them because of Saul trying to commit genocide on the Gibeonites. And so David had to repent. He had to make sure those bodies were buried right away, because God was continuing the famine just as strong as it had been because he had not kept this law. He had allowed the disrespect of Saul's body, Saul's kinsman's bodies, descendants bodies, to stay up there for a long time. And there is even an indication in here that Saul's and Jonathan's bones may have still been up on the walls of Jabesh Gilead. There is still a possibility that they might still have been on display.

I do not know if that is the case. Maybe they stole them and brought them back and buried them. That may be more like it. But even so, these seven bodies were exposed for a long time and God was not pleased. He left the curse on Israel of the famine until those bodies were buried. So God did not take this law lightly. He allowed David to suffer a great deal over those three years for this problem or at least this was part of the problem.

Anyway, as you may know from my sermon that I gave back in 2007, "David and the Gibeonites," David does not come out of this story looking very good. He was a righteous man and he learned his lessons after God corrected him, but he seemed to have a persistent habit of not following the details of God's instructions. He would do what he needed to do, but it was not like the way God told him to do it, like carrying the ark in II Samuel 6. They put it on an ox cart and it ended up in the death of a man. He had to learn that it had to be carried by certain sons of Levi. And so once that was done, then things were okay. God was not upset at him anymore. But we have to be careful about these things.

There is also examples of Gentiles hanging condemned criminals. As a matter of fact, the Egyptian Pharaoh in Joseph's story back in Genesis 40:19 said that he would hang the bodies of the condemned. And also the Persians did it. There is an example in Esther 9:6-14. So the Bible actually has several illustrations of what God is talking about, either from a right viewpoint, a wrong viewpoint in Israel, or the wrong way as the Gentiles did it, like in Egypt and Persia. So for an obscure law, this gets actually a lot of ink in the Old Testament.

And in terms of what happened with Jesus Christ, it gets a great deal of ink in the New Testament because it is important. We do not see the law's spiritual application until the gospel accounts of Jesus Christ, His crucifixion, and burial. And then Paul's quotation in Galatians 3:13 where it is explained.

Now, I want to go to that verse. Galatians 3 and we will start in verse 10. We will go ahead and read it and then I want to explain it like I normally do. But I want you to see the context because the verse we really want is verse 13. But I want you to see where this is in Paul's argument.

Galatians 3:10 For as many as are of the works of the law are under the curse; for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them."

Notice how this is phrased. "Cursed is everyone who does not continue in all things which are written in the book of the law, to do them."

Galatians 3:11-14 But that no one is justified by the law in the sight of God is evident, for [he quotes Habakkuk] "The just shall live by faith." Yet the law is not of faith, but the man who does them shall live by them. Christ has redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us (for it is written, "Cursed is everyone who hangs on a tree"), that the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles in Christ Jesus, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.

This is the paragraph in which this law is quoted. The paragraph's context is a person's inability to keep the works of the law or even to keep the whole law, if you want to put it that way. If an individual breaks one law within the law, even a minor law, the whole is broken, the whole law is contravened. I mean, this goes back, basically, all the way to the Garden of Eden. God said, "Do not take of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. For in the day that you take of it, you will die." His law was the command not to take of the tree. If they took of the tree, they contravened God's law, they broke the law, they transgressed the law, they trespassed, and they would die.

That was the principle that was there from the very beginning. God's law being broken brings the death penalty. Simple as that. And Paul reminds us in Romans 6:23 "the wages of sin is death." It is really easy to understand. What do you get paid for being sinful? Death. It is not the kind of wage you want. You would rather have some greenbacks or a little gold or silver, would you not? But no, if you sin, you get death. That is the law of the universe. It is how God's law works.

So, since no one keeps the law of God perfectly, no one can be justified by keeping the law because we are not doing it right. We cannot. We cannot keep the whole law. There is only One who did and He was God in the flesh. There is just no way for a human being to square accounts through works. There is nothing we can do to say, "Oh, now God owes me." No, it does not work that way. We can never get to that point. Every person will always be in the red, at a loss, in debt, guilty, and unable to pay what he owes.

I take that back. He is able to pay, but he is only going to be able to pay through dying. And then there is no opportunity for life afterward because if you pay for your own sins with your own death, well, there is no future. So there had to be another way.

So Paul argues then that the only way to be justified is by faith. That is the way it worked with Abraham. That is part of the argument. And he quotes, then, from Habakkuk, "The just shall live by faith." We are the just; we live by faith, not by works. We have to do works because God has prepared them for us as part of our training. But they are not going to justify us. They could teach us a lot of good things, but they are not going to justify us and get us into the Kingdom. There is no way. It has to be by faith.

It is only by faith in the Son of God and the works that He has done in our behalf, that our sins can be forgiven, that we can be redeemed. That is the only way. There is no other. There are not many ways to Christ. There is not many ways to salvation. There is only one way and that way is through the death of His Son and our faith in what He did for us.

So only by grace, only by a gift of divine mercy can our past sinful deeds be covered, which this day is all about. Can they be taken away, which this day is all about. Can they be blotted out, and not remembered anymore. Because, remember, there were two goats. There was a goat of a sin offering, whose blood cleansed the altar, and there was a goat that was sent away, bearing all the sins that were put upon it into the wilderness. Both of those things were done by Jesus Christ. He paid the sin offering with His own blood and He went away into death, carrying our sins with Him.

Yep—He did that for us. Though blameless and innocent, Christ was condemned as a rebellious son of Israel and sentenced to capital punishment by the Roman means of crucifixion. Yet, He voluntarily took up His cross and walked to His execution. He voluntarily took our sins upon Himself, doing for us what we could not do for ourselves. He redeemed us from the law's curse, that death penalty that has been imposed automatically on those who break the law. He bought us, if you will, out of slavery to sin and death, all our lifetimes subject to bondage. But He paid the penalty. He paid that unpayable debt that condemned us. And He did that by taking our condemnation on Himself. Our curse.

Each one of us has a curse because of our sins. And He not only took our personal one, our personal curse, but He took the death sentence of every sinner over all time. Billions and billions of personal curses were all laid on Him at once. It was all piled on Him and there was so much sin that He had to bear that the Bible says, that Paul says here that He became a curse. It was like a dump truck or 1,000 dump trucks were all backed up to that cross and all of that sin which was in the back of those dump trucks was piled into that space and piled on again, and over those three hours or so of His death, it just kept being piled on until you could no more see Christ. All you could see was a curse. All that sin, all that condemnation because of sin. And He became a curse.

He bore so much sin, so much of sin's curse that He personified it. He became it, He became abhorrent by the sheer amount of sin placed on Him. Think about it. You think, "Oh my sin's not too bad but I know I've done this and this and this and this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this. Oh yeah, this, this, this, this, this. Oh yeah, this other thing too and 95 others of those and 6 million of these."

And you start thinking about it and start multiplying that out exponentially to all the people who are alive today and all those people who are historically alive before us and all of those who will come after we go, after we die. And you think, "Boy, that's not just a boatload of sin, that's a whole world of sin." And it was all dumped on Jesus Christ while He was there on the cross, on the stake. Is it any wonder that He cried out during His crucifixion, "My God, My God! Why have You forsaken Me?" Why would He say that unless it were true? Jesus never uttered a falsehood in His life. "Why are You gone, Father?"

The Father had been with Him constantly throughout His life. Jesus was aware of it. They talked frequently. Jesus would know if God had left Him. And that is why He cried out. "Why?! Where'd You go? I need you!" But He was not there. Why would the Father forsake Him? Because He was a curse. Because the overwhelming evil of humanity's sins had made His Son so despicable, an abomination, that God had to turn away. He cannot abide sin. And it was not easy for Him either to see what His Son had to go through. But because He is God, He had to turn His face.

God tells us throughout the Old Testament and New that He cannot abide sin. He kicked Adam and Eve out of the Garden once they sinned. He would not live with them anymore in the Garden. They had to go their own way. In Psalm 5:4-6 David writes, "For You are not a God who takes pleasure in wickedness, nor shall evil dwell with You. The boastful shall not stand in Your sight; You hate all workers of iniquity." Look at chapter 11, verse 5, "The Lord tests the righteous, but the wicked and the one who loves violence, His soul hates." How about Isaiah 59:2? We all probably know this one pretty well.

Isaiah 59:2 But your iniquities have separated you from your God; and your sins have hidden His face from you, so that He will not hear.

And how about Habakkuk 1, verse 13? That is right before Zephaniah, after Nahum.

Habakkuk 1:13 You are of purer eyes than to behold evil, and cannot look on wickedness. Why do You look on those who deal treacherously, and hold Your tongue when the wicked devours one more righteous than he?

That is part of Habakkuk's complaint that these terrible Chaldeans, the Babylonians were coming to attack Judah and he is saying, "If You can't look on, if Your eyes are pure, You will not look on evil, why are You sending these terrible Babylonians to attack us?" But the point remains. God does not abide sin. He can put up with it for a while and help us along when we sin so that we can turn from sin. But when the wickedness gets piled up, like I described it being piled up on Jesus Christ, He has to turn away. He cannot answer. He will not answer because of the wickedness that is there. What would have happened if the Father had answered the cries of His Son? Billions of people would not have a chance for salvation! Their sins would not have been paid for, they would have died and that would have been the end.

So Jesus had to bear all human sin and the resultant death of His own body alone. He had to bear it all. He knew that was coming. He probably thought He understood the magnitude of it. And that is why the night before He had cried out to God (read it in Luke 22) to take this cup from Him. But He submitted to it and said, "Not My will but Yours be done." He knew it would be excruciating in every facet of the word. And for mind, body, emotion, spirit, it would be painful, but He went through it knowing that there was no other way to solve the problem of human sin.

So with all that iniquity, all our iniquity weighing Him down and suffocating Him with evil, He voluntarily paid its penalty by letting the law take its course. It killed Him. The law was fulfilled that says "the wages of sin is death." That law was satisfied. All sin had been covered by the proper payment—death.

Only the lifeblood of the sinless Creator God was valuable enough to pay for all human sin for all time and He gave it freely out of love for us so that we could be in His Kingdom. He did it out of His desire to give us eternal life and to live with us for eternity.

But you know what? The law in Deuteronomy 21:22-23 was not satisfied. It was not satisfied until Joseph of Arimathea and Nicodemus took the body of the cursed Man off the tree and just before sunset placed it in a new tomb within walking distance nearby. The process of condemnation was finished. The full scope of the law was satisfied. The curse was put to rest. Instead of the death and disrespect of the body causing defilement for the whole land, it would instead ultimately bring blessing and holiness. Jesus' burial led to His resurrection opening the way for billions to attain salvation and eternal life because the law was satisfied.

Let us go to II Corinthians 5 to finish.

II Corinthians 5:20-21 Therefore, we are ambassadors for Christ, as though God were pleading through us: we implore you on Christ's behalf, be reconciled to God. For He made Him [Christ] who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.

Now, Paul and the other apostles are the "we" here that he starts with in verse 20. He is saying we in the ministry, the ones whom God has sent to plead with you on His behalf. They appeal to us. The ministry appeals to you, be reconciled to God by His righteous life and works. Jesus Christ has made the atonement that allows us to have a relationship with God, to be united with Him forever. Take advantage of it! He did not do that work for us to just slough it off as not important. Use your remaining time to become righteous like Christ.

That is what He is talking about here. Be reconciled to God, use your time to become righteous like the righteous Christ, so that we can reflect His perfect character. With God's help we can put on and develop the righteousness of Christ Himself. And in doing so, we will be like Him and we will be prepared for eternal life in His Kingdom.

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