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.
