Shof’tim - “Judges”
I have copied a comment into a new post for everyone’s convenience:
Shof’tim
I am unsure where I need to go to start a new post, so for now I will do so here.
Having been studying Torah for one year the most unusual concept for me to embrace is community living. Don’t get me wrong…..I embrace the idea of living with less walls and more interdependence……but I foresee lots of bugs having to be worked out. Quite a task and how ever can it be accomplished has been my concern.
Today I read D’varim 17 where the witness are to be the first to stone to death one they have witnessed serving or worshipping other gods. Oh my. A far cry from the head-turning, or worse yet….the condoning of idol worship taking place today.
Questions/comments:
1) When will commands such as this be implemented?
2) D’varim 17:8 says, “IF a case come before you at your city gate……”
I am thankful that in Matt 18:15-20 Yeshua gives us guidelines on how to deal with one another’s sin. It seems this is a great route to take now in preparing for future community living. How better for us to learn now how to appropriately hold each other accountable for our actions than to jump right into the stoning process or be tempted to ignore innappropriate behavior.
August 16th, 2007 at 8:23 am
I am not going to even try to answer the question of when will we be stoning people; I just don’t see us getting to that type of a situation. But who knows. The main point I take from here is hating idolotry. Over and over and over and over and over God has been hammering on this when the Israelites entered the land. There must have been so many other fake gods around at that time! But we do the same thing today with our more modern idols. Granted we’re trying to get away from that.
Anyway, and what happened to Israel? They got kicked out of the Land, for what.?.. idolotry. If there’s one area to think about during Deuteronomy, I think it would be what are the idols in my life, and how do I tear them down before I enter the Land.
August 18th, 2007 at 11:16 am
The commandment to stone the idolater seems so harsh and even capricious to many in our current, western, “multicultural (accept everything-judge nothing) society.
But in the eyes of HaShem, putting up with “a little idolatry” is akin to putting up with “a little Anthrax”! If Israel, HaShem’s vehicle for reconciling the world to Himself gets tainted with idolatry, then ultimately, the vehicle’s mission will be thwarted. The stakes, therefore, are extremely high in regard to idolatry!
Tim Hegg speaks much more eloquently on this:
http://www.torahresource.com/Parashpdfs/139CommentsTR.pdf
Shabbat Shalom!