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.
