June 16, 2023

Deuteronomy 19: 21 Show no pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot. (NIV)

Justice requires punishment of the guilty and protection of the innocent.*

If you learned about “citizen’s arrest” from watching the Andy Griffith Show, you may have a misinformed view of taking the law into your own hands. Many people down through the ages have taken the phrase “an eye for an eye” as justification for private vengeance.* And those people were wrong. 

In the book of Deuteronomy, we find the “stipulations, decrees and laws” (4: 45) that Moses presented to the Israelites when they came out of Egypt. Just like the laws of any nation, the Law of Moses addressed a wide range of issues – from the trivial to matters of life and death. Beginning with verse 15 of chapter 19, we find the court procedure for conviction of a man accused of a crime: 

1. “A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses.” (19: 15) One witness was not enough to convict someone of a crime. 

2. The defendant and the plaintiff “must stand in the presence of the Lord before the priests and judges who are in office at the time.” (19: 16, 17) 

3. The judge must conduct a thorough investigation. (19: 18) 

4. As a lesson to the rest of the people, the punishment must fit the crime. (19: 19-21) 

“An eye for an eye” was never intended for the resolution of offenses between private citizens. Though vengeance is not man’s business (“It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” Deuteronomy 32: 35), human justice is the job of the appropriate officeholders. Our job, as Christians living in the world, is to facilitate reconciliation. We are not here to see that people get what they deserve but to introduce them to someone who can provide them with what they don’t deserve – a verdict that declares them, “Not guilty!”

The most wonderful truth revealed in all of the word of God is that mercy stands higher than the law as the guiding principle of God's relationship with men.*