Putting Things Together

            Do not hate a fellow Israelite in your heart. Rebuke your neighbor frankly so you will not share in their guilt. Do not seek revenge or bear a grudge against anyone among your people, but love your neighbor as yourself. I am the Lord. (Leviticus 19:17-18)

 

            “Son of man, I have made you a watchman for the people of Israel; so hear the word I speak and give them warning from me.  When I say to a wicked person, ‘You will surely die,’ and you do not warn them or speak out to dissuade them from their evil ways in order to save their life, that wicked person will die for their sin, and I will hold you accountable for their blood. But if you do warn the wicked person and they do not turn from their wickedness or from their evil ways, they will die for their sin; but you will have saved yourself. (Ezekiel 3:17-19)

 

             One of the problems with dividing a text into lines or verses is that we tend to read them as separate thoughts, not tied together the way unnumbered sentences are. Some people even list the verses rather than putting them together in paragraphs. Today’s passage is a good follow-up to yesterday’s consideration of extrapolation. If we begin with and focus on verse 17, verse 18 is an example of what verse 17 means. But if you begin with verse 18 and don’t associate it with verse 17, as long as you don’t actively and physically seek revenge or act in a way that shows you bear a grudge, you can continue to play the martyr and think yourself as innocent of any infraction of the Law.

            Keeping them together, however, teaches us that we aren’t to hate our fellow Israelites (which may be extrapolated to include Christians) who are our neighbors even if they don’t live next door. We are not to seek revenge or bear a grudge against them. In other words, we shouldn’t wish or seek to harm them. That’s the negative side of the equation. The positive side is that we are to rebuke our neighbor frankly so we don’t share in their guilt and we’re to love them as ourselves. Loving them includes rebuking them.

            So often, we don’t say anything about someone (whether a fellow Christian or not) doing something sinful or harmful. We claim we’re not judging. Jesus taught us not to judge, didn’t He? But while the Bible teaches us not to judge one another, it also teaches us that if we don’t speak against sin in someone’s life, we’re being hateful because we are judging that they aren’t worth saving.

            God speaks to this in the passage in Ezekiel 3 quoted above and repeats the idea in Ezekiel 33. This isn’t as strange an idea as it might first seem. If a doctor or an emergency responder stands by while their skills could save a life, they can face charges or at least lose their job due to a breach of ethics. Saying nothing when someone is doing something wrong is aiding and abetting – acting as an accessory, and when “something wrong” is a criminal matter, it can result in conviction and punishment. Why should God consider it any less so?