Your Stuff, Is Yours. Your Neighbor's, Your Neighbor's (Exodus 22:1-15) Series

One of the main topics discussed among my coworkers over the past year or two, has been inflation. All of us are constantly feeling the effects of it. Everything costs more. We find that we save a little less every month than we used to. We find ourselves reexamining what we buy, and thinking about if we really need it. And we find ourselves reexamining how much we need to work, and where we should work. We find ourselves needing to spend less, or make more.

Unless we are getting government handouts, we know that to make it in this modern world, and provide for ourselves and our families, we usually have to work long, and work hard.

Hopefully, we trust God to provide for us, and we ask him for our daily bread. But at the same time, we know that trust, and prayer, aren't a substitute for hard work. We know that when God gives us our daily bread, that we have a role to play in that. And really, there's a sense in which asking God for our daily bread, means asking God for opportunities to work, and the strength to work (Deuteronomy 8:18).

Now, when we work, there's often something rewarding about it. It's satisfying, when you finish your harvest, and you have bins full of grain. Or take tree trimming: After you trim someone's tree, and climb down to look at your work, you have this moment of happiness over how good it looks. When you cut someone's hair, I imagine it feels much the same-- and it's nice, seeing people's gratitude for how good you made them look.

But at the same time, work has a tendency to turn into toil, and when you look at your house, or your apartment, and the stuff you own, you know that all of that stuff represents hours of hard work.

I think that's part of why the stuff we own has value to us. When I look at our piano, when no one is playing it, I normally picture my family sitting at its bench, maybe swaying a little (with one person in particular), creating beautiful music out of it. But I could also look at that piano differently, and see it as many, many hours of overtime.

Our property-- our possessions-- were paid for with blood, sweat, and tears. Mostly sweat, but a little blood. And on a bad day, maybe a few tears.

And so the end result, is that we attach real value to what we own.

Now, you can bring in the NT at this point, and try to short circuit all of this. But let's just acknowledge that everything we own, was paid for with a lot of hard work.

Now, what happens once we have our stuff?

We try to protect it. In town at least, we lock our doors. We have security systems, for when we leave our house.

Maybe our houses are protected by Smith and Wesson.

Our passage today covers different situations involving possessions. Mentally, we will find ourselves hopping around a little. But those situations all have to do with stuff. Specifically, with different ways that our stuff is taken from us by someone else, in one way or another. And the Mosaic law here gives God's people guidance, in what happens next. How do you respond, when someone loses your stuff, or damages it, or steals it? How should the society of God's people be ordered/set up, to handle these situations? And what do all these laws teach us about possessions, as a whole? How does God feel about "stuff"?

Let's start by reading Exodus 22:1:

(1) If a man steals an (A) ox or (B) small livestock, and he slaughters it, or he sells it, five cattle he shall make whole/compensate in place of the (A) ox,

while four sheep/goats [shall be] in place of the (B) small livestock. ["A" and "B" just to make it easier to follow the verse].

This verse should sound quite a bit different to us, than anything else we've read so far. Up to this point in Exodus, the key idea that we've seen, over and over, is that the laws are designed to make people "whole." If someone's ox kills your ox, he replaces your ox with one ox. If you get in a fight with someone, and you end up being badly hurt, the other person makes you whole financially, by compensating you for your lost time at work.

The idea is that when you are wronged in some way, the person who wrongs you makes it right. That person brings you back financially to the place, financially, where you were before. You end up on the same financial footing, in the same financial place, that you were before.