Missions Paul

We can be thankful that in some of the verses that we could easily skip past without thought, that actually, they reveal the tender heart of God for those who may end up in debt and even those who may end up not being able to sleep because of the cold.

“If you lend money to one of my people among you who is needy, do not treat it like a business deal; charge no interest. ²⁶ If you take your neighbour’s cloak as a pledge, return it by sunset, ²⁷ because that cloak is the only covering your neighbour has. What else can they sleep in? When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.” (Exodus 22:25–27)

Did you notice it? God knows about items handed over as security for a loan.

Lending to a poor neighbour was not meant to be for gain. They were not to profit from someone else’s pain. Credit was to be an act of kindness.

Those who used their cloak for the day and as protection at night (they had only one cloak) must never have it taken from them permanently. To stress the point, we are left with this question: What else can they sleep in?

Slow down for a moment: God thinks about the cold temperatures the poor man may be enduring, and He says something beautiful that leaves us compelled to help: When they cry out to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

God has never been impressed by worship that leaves a neighbour cold.

Compassion is not a feeling we admire in God; it is a character He expects to see reproduced in His people.

At the cross, the soldiers took Jesus’ garments and gambled for them (John 19:23–24). He clothes us now with the garments of salvation (Isaiah 61:10).

The God who heard the poor man’s cry heard ours. He did not demand interest. He paid the debt. God is indeed tender.

Look around you and you don’t need to look far to see need. With the world that has shrunk because of social media, our neighbours can be living thousands of miles away and yet are very close to us; they are as reachable as the neighbour next door. Even in 2026, as the world advances, many still spend every day wondering how they can eat, where they will get water, and how they will pay their debt.

Who is easily overlooked? Who is easily exploited?

“Do not take advantage of the widow or the fatherless. ²³ If you do and they cry out to me, I will certainly hear their cry. ²⁴ My anger will be aroused, and I will kill you with the sword; your wives will become widows and your children fatherless.” (Exodus 22 v 23-24)

The widow and the fatherless were the most exposed people in Israel’s world. They were easy to overlook and easy to exploit. No one would object if these low-status people didn’t get a fair deal. Nobody except God.

Not long ago (chapter 2, to be precise), they cried to God for help as a nation. God heard their cry and came down to act.

Now He tells a newly freed people that, as the rescued, they would not be allowed to become oppressors.

Actually, the warning is severe. Those who make others widows and orphans through injustice will see their own families face the same fate. This shows how God takes the powerless seriously, more seriously than we often do.

This is who God is. The psalmist calls Him “a father to the fatherless, a defender of widows” (Psalm 68:5).

So the question is simple. If God hears the cry of the vulnerable, are we listening? “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress” (James 1:27).

The people we overlook are the very people God never overlooks.

The cry you choose not to hear is a cry He has already heard.

Most people who are downtrodden by abusive power are those who had little power to begin with; God gives them particular attention and has a special place in his heart for them.

If God’s character includes zeal for justice that leads him to tender love and close involvement with the socially weak, then what should God’s people be like? They must be people who are likewise passionately concerned for the weak and vulnerable.

Sometimes, as Christians, we care more about moral living, personal righteousness, and obeying the laws of purity than about living out the commandment to do justice, love mercy, and speak up for those who cannot speak up for themselves. 

It’s time for us to get bothered about what really bothers God.

Do you remember starting work on your first day or week? Do you remember the many times in your working life when you helped a newbie because you never forgot what it felt like?

What about supporting a new parent? You will never forget the exhaustion of a crying baby and having no sleep, so you cook a meal; you offer support.

The examples could go on. Here is another.

“Do not mistreat or oppress a foreigner, for you were foreigners in Egypt.” (Exodus 22 v 21)

After three severe verses about sorcery, bestiality, and idolatry, the tone shifts. But the subject has not changed. The God who demands exclusive worship is the same God who cares about outsiders, and how his people treat the vulnerable is part of what it means to be loyal to him.

The word for “foreigner” is someone living among Israel without family, land, or legal protection. These people had no one to speak for them, and people easily exploited and ignored them. God names two sins: mistreating them (by what you do) and oppressing them (by what you take). He sees both.

The reason: “for you were foreigners in Egypt.” Israel was not being asked to imagine what it felt like. They already knew. They had no rights or voice, worked under a hard master, and God had heard their cry. Now that they had power, they were to remember their weakness and act like the God who had rescued them.

That pattern applies to the whole Christian life. We are meant to show others the mercy that we have been shown.

Paul reminds the Ephesians that they were once “foreigners and strangers” to the covenants of promise, without hope and without God. Now, through Christ, they are “fellow citizens with God’s people and also members of his household” (Ephesians 2:19). The Saviour who brought us in knew what it was to be an outsider himself. As a child, he was carried into Egypt as a foreigner (Matthew 2:13-15).

So we dare not close the door behind us. We were the ones standing outside, and someone opened it.

We have moved from sorcery to sexual sin, and now to sacrifice. Underneath them all is one very important question: who is your God?

“Whoever sacrifices to any god other than the Lord must be destroyed” (Exodus 22 v 20)

We have had sorcery, bestiality, and today, sacrifice to other gods, and it all comes down to the same question: who is your God?

The Hebrew word behind “destroyed” is herem, meaning devoted to destruction. It applies to someone who gives another god what belongs to the Lord alone. This is the first commandment with a penalty attached: “You shall have no other gods before me” (Exodus 20:3).

Why so serious? Because Israel was not simply a religion. It was a nation in covenant with God as its King. Sacrificing to a rival deity was not a private spiritual preference. It was treason. It broke the marriage bond at Sinai and took your worship, and your loyalty, to another bed. Time and again the people drift to other altars, and time and again it ends in ruin.

The principle has not changed. Paul tells the Corinthians they cannot drink the cup of the Lord and the cup of demons (1 Corinthians 10:21). John closes his first letter with a short, urgent word: “Dear children, keep yourselves from idols” (1 John 5:21).

Anything we trust, fear, or serve more than God has become a rival to Him, whether it is money, success, approval, or comfort. And the altar of our attention is never empty.

We have all sacrificed at other altars.

But the One who was herem, devoted to destruction, was not us. “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law by becoming a curse for us” (Galatians 3:13). The penalty for covenant treason fell on the faithful Son, so that unfaithful people could be brought home.

One Lord, no rivals. And one Saviour who paid for every time we forgot it.

This is probably not the verse you expected to read first thing this morning. This verse may feel blunt and unsettling, but it reveals how God sees humanity and how far God will go to restore what sin has broken.

“Anyone who has sexual relations with an animal is to be put to death.” (Exodus 22 v 19)

Why is this ever appropriate? Why would we need such an instruction?

Israel was about to live beside Canaanite nations whose religion was bound up with fertility cults, and ancient sources suggest that sexual contact with animals was sometimes part of that world. God says his people will not live like that. They belong to him, and they will be different.

Leviticus 18:23 gives the deeper reason. It calls the act a “perversion”, a word that conveys confusion, mixing what God has kept apart. From Genesis 1, God has been making distinctions: light from darkness, land from sea, creatures after their kinds. And humanity is set apart from the rest of creation, made in God’s image, called to rule the animals and not to be joined to them. Bestiality collapses that order. It degrades the person, and it denies who they were made to be.

That is why the penalty is so severe. This was no private vice. It attacked the dignity of the one made in God’s image.

But notice what the gospel does with people. The church in Corinth was full of those who had lived in all kinds of sin. “And that is what some of you were,” Paul writes. “But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Corinthians 6:11).

The law shows us how far we have fallen from the image of God. The cross shows us how far God will go to restore it.

Some of the Bible’s hardest verses require us to slow down and understand them in their original setting. Exodus 22:18 is one of them. Beneath its difficult language lies a question that reaches far beyond ancient Israel: when life becomes frightening and the future is uncertain, where will we turn?

“Do not allow a sorceress to live.” (Exodus 22: 18)

Few verses have been misunderstood as badly as this one. The King James Version translated it as “Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live,” and later used the words to justify witch hunts. But that is not what this verse was intended to authorise.

The Hebrew word refers to someone practicing occult arts and seeking spiritual power, knowledge or protection from somewhere other than God.

Notice where the verse appears. It sits among laws concerning sexual sin, bestiality and idolatry. Israel was a covenant people, with God as their King. Turning to occult practices was therefore not simply an unusual interest. It was turning away from God and seeking another source of power and guidance.

And the question underneath this difficult verse still speaks to us:

Where do we turn when life becomes frightening and the future is uncertain?

We can be tempted by anything that promises knowledge, control or reassurance without requiring us to trust God.

Saul eventually went to the medium at Endor when he could no longer hear from God (1 Samuel 28). It is a sobering warning. When we refuse to wait for God, we become vulnerable to running elsewhere.

But we do not need spiritual shortcuts.

Christ has already defeated the powers of darkness. As Paul says, he has “disarmed the powers and authorities” (Colossians 2:15).

Nothing remains to buy from the dark. Christ has already won everything we need.

Some choices have consequences that do not disappear when the event is over. We can walk away from what we have done, but we cannot always walk away from the damage it has caused.

“If a man seduces a virgin who is not pledged to be married and sleeps with her, he must pay the bride-price, and she shall be his wife. ¹⁷ If her father absolutely refuses to give her to him, he must still pay the bride-price for virgins.” (Exodus 22 v 16-17)

This is not about rape but seduction.

A man persuades a young woman into a sexual relationship and then thinks he can simply walk away. At the time of this statement, a woman’s future security and standing in the community could be seriously affected if she was no longer a virgin and remained unmarried. God says there must be a cost. He cannot take and then disappear.

But she is not simply handed over to the man because he has slept with her. The father may refuse, and the man still has to pay.

This principle extends far beyond this situation: God holds us responsible for the damage we cause, especially when someone else is left to carry the consequences.

We live in a world where it’s tempting to enjoy the moment and leave someone else to pay the bill. We can damage trust, relationships, reputations, and lives, and then move on as though nothing happened.

God says we are responsible for what we do.

But then the gospel turns the principle upside down.

We had a debt we could never pay. Yet Christ did not leave us to carry the cost. Paul writes: “You were bought at a price.” 1 Corinthians 6:20

In Exodus 22, the person who caused the damage had to pay. At Calvary, the innocent One paid. He took the cost that belonged to us so that we could belong to him.

Think of what you are holding right now that isn’t really yours.

It might be a borrowed book. It might be something far more precious, like a friend’s confidence or a child’s trust. Most of life is spent looking after things that belong to someone else.

But things entrusted to us can be damaged, lost or neglected, and sometimes nobody else is there to see it happen.

Exodus 22 asks what happens then, when something entrusted to us goes missing and there is no witness?

“If anyone gives a neighbour silver or goods for safekeeping and they are stolen from the neighbour’s house, the thief, if caught, must pay back double. But if the thief is not found, the owner of the house must appear before the judges, and they must determine whether the owner of the house has laid hands on the other person’s property. …

“If anyone gives a donkey, an ox, a sheep or any other animal to their neighbour for safekeeping and it dies or is injured or is taken away while no one is looking, the issue between them will be settled by the taking of an oath before the Lord that the neighbour did not lay hands on the other person’s property. The owner is to accept this, and no restitution is required.”
(Exodus 22 v 7–15)

What do you think of yourself?

Self-awareness is an overlooked key to the Christian life.

People who never want to be corrected have sometimes used Paul’s words to defend themselves. But I think his words help us understand something important in Exodus 22:

“Those who have been given a trust must prove faithful. I care very little if I am judged by you or by any human court; indeed, I do not even judge myself. My conscience is clear, but that does not make me innocent. It is the Lord who judges me.”
(1 Corinthians 4 v 2–4)

Paul describes himself as a servant and a steward. He has been entrusted with something that belongs to another. He is not free simply to do whatever he wants with it.

And the measure is not popularity, recognition or success.

It is faithfulness.

That is the world of Exodus 22. Someone places something that belongs to one person into another person’s hands. Sometimes it is lost, damaged or stolen “while no one is looking.” So the law provides evidence, judges and, when there is no witness, an oath before the Lord.

Accountability to one another matters.

But behind it all stands God, who sees what nobody else sees and has the final word.

Ultimately, none of us owns anything outright. God has entrusted us with our lives, our gifts, our opportunities, our ministries and, for some of us, the responsibility of caring for His church.

So what matters most to us?

The world’s metrics, or God’s measure of faithfulness?

Are we willing to do the essential things when nobody applauds?

Are we willing to care for what God has placed in our hands even when nobody is watching?

And then notice verse 15. If the owner is with the animal, the borrower does not have to pay.

That is wonderfully reassuring.

Our Owner has not left us to manage on our own. He is with us.

So perhaps the real question is not simply, “What am I doing when no one is looking?”

It is:

“What am I doing when I remember that God is looking?”

Faithfulness is doing what is right not because someone else will see it, but because He does.

A gate left unlatched. A cigarette end not quite put out. An email never sent, a promise quietly forgotten. The list can go on to demonstrate that we never set out to do damage. But the damage happened.

Hardly anyone sets out to do damage. Most of the harm we cause happens while we are looking the other way.

“If anyone grazes their livestock in a field or vineyard and lets them stray and they graze in someone else’s field, the offender must make restitution from the best of their own field or vineyard. ⁶ “If a fire breaks out and spreads into thornbushes so that it burns shocks of grain or standing grain or the whole field, the one who started the fire must make restitution.” (Exodus 22 v 5-6)

Have you ever been guilty of neglect?

You simply took your eye off the ball, or the animal, or the fire. We want to say, “I didn’t mean for that to happen.”

The law here said this: the damage is still yours to put right. Carelessness still has victims. A neglected responsibility or a small compromise left to spread was never intended to ‘burn a whole field down’.

Putting things right is meant to cost us something. The restitution should be from ‘the best of’.

Now pause.

That is exactly what God did for us. He gave from the very best He had: His own Son. Not because He had done wrong, but because we have.

Do you remember the story of Zacchaeus? The chief tax collector in Jericho was rich because he had taken more than he was entitled to. Then Jesus invited Himself to his house. “If I have cheated anyone out of anything, I will pay back four times the amount.” Jesus replied, “Today salvation has come to this house.” Zacchaeus didn’t pay to be saved. He paid because he was. This great story is the best example of the word “restitution,” which is at the heart of Exodus 22, particularly the verses we read today.

“Anyone who steals must certainly make restitution, but if they have nothing, they must be sold to pay for their theft. ⁴ If the stolen animal is found alive in their possession—whether ox or donkey or sheep—they must pay back double.” (Exodus 22 v 3-4)

This was not only about the offender getting justice, but it was about the victim getting back what was lost.

Sin is never victimless, and repentance is never just a private feeling. A genuine change of heart may require practical and costly restitution.

The law went further. If the thief has nothing, he is sold to pay for his theft. The debt has to be paid, one way or another. Even in a bankrupt situation, the law will not pretend the wrong never happened. Someone has to bear the cost.

But if the thief is caught red-handed with the stolen animal, they must pay back double: two animals for one. The law demanded that the sinner make things right.

Now pause.

The gospel declares that it has been made right.

Every one of us has sinned. We could never pay it back, let alone double. So the One who owed nothing stepped in and paid everything. Christ did not merely cancel our debt; He bore the cost, and He gave back more than we ever lost.

He paid in full.