Walking the path

(3-minute read)

I heard some friends saying, “Hate the sin but love the person,” when talking about someone who had done something wrong. I thought it sounded spiritual and then used the expression one day when someone was caught stealing. I immediately felt the displeasure of the Lord. I recoiled, “What? It’s a good expression. It’s anti-sin and pro-love. What’s wrong with that?”

It turns out that the problem wasn’t what came out of my mouth but what was in my heart. I’ve had my share of people who have stolen from me. I don’t trust people who steal; I avoid them. A more honest expression would have been, “I don’t like the sin, don’t trust the person, and I’m trying to manufacture the love.”

As it is today under modern law, in first-century Israel, individuals never had the right to take the law into their own hands, even when they knew what punishment the court would hand out. Someone could appear in court as a witness and say, for instance, I saw this man stab that man with the knife. He would not, however, be allowed to call it murder; only the court could decide if it was murder or self-defense. The individuals were not allowed to judge. How the system was set up and how people acted was quite different.

The courts, Lesser Sanhedrins for the cities, were composed of 23 rabbis sitting as judges. If someone was unhappy about their ruling, they could appeal to the Great Sanhedrin in Jerusalem, consisting of 71 rabbis sitting as judges. Either court required a minimum of five judges present to make a ruling.

About five years ago, I decided that I would try to live as if under that system. I would live as if moral law was only for me and hold no one else accountable to those same moral laws. If someone did something against civil law, I would call the police and let the court handle any judgment. I would try to live as if my only moral responsibility to others would be to help them have a relationship with the Lord. Living this way was more challenging than I thought, and I wasn’t very good at it.

 Jesus was in the temple courts one day when the teachers of the law and the Pharisees brought a woman to him who had been caught in adultery. The punishment for adultery for both the man and the woman was death by stoning. The court would have found her guilty of adultery and then assigned community representatives to carry out the punishment. In the story, it appears that they were ready to stone her and wanted Jesus to speak to the issue as they tried to trap him into defying the court. As you know from the story, Jesus said, “Let any one of you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” They all walked away and left the woman with Jesus.

When I think of this story, I try to decide who in the story am I most like. I want to be most like Jesus, obviously. Unfortunately, all too often, as I try to live a non-judgmental life, I look down and find a stone in my hand. Something within me wants to hand out justice, and it’s not the Lord.

If I were standing next to the Lord and could clearly see him and hear his voice, there wouldn’t be a problem. I would follow his lead and try to be like him. When we’re new in the things of the Lord, the Lord emphasizes our obedience. As we grow up in the things of the Lord, the Lord puts us in circumstances where not only can we not see him, but we don’t even feel him in our situation. He wants us to grow up and give more than obedience; he wants us to change. He wants us to be like him and make decisions like him even when we don’t see or feel his presence.