The Grammar of Creation: On Lying with Animals Text: Exodus 22:19
Introduction: When The Map is Lost
We are living in an age that prides itself on having thrown off all constraints. We are a culture unchained, a people untethered, a generation that has burned the map and now insists that getting lost is a form of liberation. But when you burn the map that God has provided in His Word, you do not find freedom. You find yourself in a dark wood, surrounded by monsters of your own making. One of the clearest indications that a society has torched its divine charter is the confusion that erupts in the realm of sexuality. When men reject God, they do not become rational and enlightened; they become fools, and their foolish hearts are darkened. And as Paul tells us in Romans 1, this darkening of the heart leads directly to a debasing of the body.
The sexual revolution did not begin in the 1960s. It began in the Garden, when the serpent whispered to our first parents that they could be as gods, determining good and evil for themselves. The essence of all sin is the refusal to accept our creatureliness. It is the desire to blur the lines, to erase the distinctions, to undo the separations that God established in creation. God separated light from darkness, land from sea, and man from beast. And at the pinnacle of His creation, He established the most fundamental human distinction: male and female He created them. All of our modern sexual confusion is a direct assault on this created grammar.
The law we are considering today is one that makes moderns blush and stammer. It feels alien, severe, and to many, incomprehensible. Why would God even need to address such a thing? The answer is that God, unlike us, is a realist. He knows the depths to which a rebellious human heart can plunge. And in giving this law, He is not merely prohibiting a bizarre and grotesque act. He is defending the created order. He is protecting the meaning of humanity, the meaning of sexuality, and the very distinction between man and beast. This law is a high, electrified fence, warning us away from a chasm of degradation and chaos. To dismiss it as primitive is to misunderstand the nature of the cliff it is guarding.
The Text
"Whoever lies with an animal shall surely be put to death."
(Exodus 22:19 LSB)
The Created Order Defended
This verse is stark, simple, and severe. It is part of what is called the Book of the Covenant, a collection of case laws that apply the principles of the Ten Commandments to the life of Israel. These are not abstract philosophical statements; they are practical, earthy, and designed to build a holy nation, a people set apart for God. And a holy nation must have holy boundaries.
"Whoever lies with an animal..." (Exodus 22:19a)
Let us be clear about what is being condemned. The act of lying with an animal, or bestiality, is a profound violation of nature. It is what the apostle Paul would later call "unnatural affection." It is a confusion of kinds. God created mankind in His own image, distinct from and sovereign over the animal kingdom. Adam's first task was to name the animals, an act of exercising this God-given dominion. In that process, it was established that among all the creatures, "there was not found a helper fit for him" (Gen. 2:20). This was by divine design. Man is not an animal. We are a different kind of thing altogether.
The sexual union is not merely a biological act for the release of tension. It is a profound spiritual and physical act of communion, designed by God to image the union of Christ and His Church. It is a one-flesh union between a man and a woman, a husband and a wife. It is covenantal. It is personal. It is uniquely human. To engage in a sexual act with an animal is to degrade this high and holy gift. It is to take an act intended to reflect the glory of God and drag it down into the mud. It is to treat a being made in the image of God as though he were a brute beast, and to treat a brute beast as though it were a personal, covenantal partner. This is a lie of the highest order, enacted with the body.
This is the outworking of idolatry. When you cease to worship the Creator, you begin to worship the creation (Rom. 1:25). And when you worship the creation, you begin to act like the thing you worship. You become what you behold. A man who worships a beast will, in the end, act like one. This law stands as a bulwark against that degradation. It insists on the Creator/creature distinction in the most visceral way imaginable. It says that the image of God in man is so sacred that to confuse it with the animal realm is a capital offense.
The Divine Sanction
The penalty attached to this sin is as stark as the act itself.
"...shall surely be put to death." (Exodus 22:19b)
Now, this is where our modern sensibilities recoil. We have been catechized by a sentimental, therapeutic culture to believe that tolerance is the highest virtue and that judgment is the greatest sin. But God's justice is not sentimental; it is righteous. The severity of a penalty reveals the gravity of the crime in the eyes of the lawgiver. The fact that God prescribes the death penalty for this act tells us something about how He views it. It is an abomination. It is a fundamental tear in the fabric of the created order.
In the Old Testament legal system, the death penalty was the maximum, not always the mandatory, penalty for many crimes. But for a certain class of sins, sins that struck at the very heart of covenant faithfulness and the created order, it was required. These were sins that polluted the land itself (Lev. 18:25). Sins like murder, idolatry, and the kind of sexual abominations listed in Leviticus 18 and 20, which includes bestiality, were seen as a toxic poison that would defile the nation and result in God's judgment upon them as a whole. The execution of the offender was a necessary act of social and spiritual hygiene. It was purging the evil from their midst.
We must understand that God is not being cruel here. He is being kind. He is protecting His people from the kind of moral collapse that leads to societal ruin. A society that begins to tolerate the blurring of the man/beast distinction will not stop there. It is a sign of a deep-seated spiritual sickness, a rebellion that will manifest in every other area of life. God loves His people too much to allow such a cancer to metastasize. The penalty is severe because the danger is severe.
The Law and the Gospel
So what are we to do with such a law today? As Christians under the New Covenant, we are not a civil theocracy like ancient Israel. The judicial laws of Moses do not apply to us in the same way they applied to them. As the Westminster Confession says, the judicial laws have "expired together with the State of that people," obliging us now only so far as the "general equity thereof may require."
The general equity, the underlying principle, is this: God hates the confusion of kinds, and sexual perversion is a profound evil that pollutes not just individuals but entire cultures. The principle that God's created order is sacred and must be honored remains eternally true. A society that makes peace with this kind of perversion is a society that is storing up wrath for itself. We may not be required to implement the specific civil penalty, but we are required to recognize the sin for what it is: a heinous abomination in the sight of a holy God.
But there is a deeper connection to the gospel. Why was the penalty for this sin, and others like it, death? Because the wages of sin is death (Rom. 6:23). All sin, from a proud thought to the most grotesque physical act, is a capital offense before the throne of a perfectly holy God. The Old Testament civil penalties were a constant, visible reminder of this ultimate reality. They were a tutor, driving us to see our desperate need for a substitute.
The glory of the gospel is not that God has lowered His standards or graded sin on a curve. The glory of the gospel is that the death penalty we all deserved has been carried out. It was carried out on a Roman cross just outside of Jerusalem. Jesus Christ, the spotless Lamb of God, became a curse for us. He who knew no sin was made to be sin, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God (2 Cor. 5:21). Every filthy, unnatural, abominable act, every rebellious thought, every wicked deed of His people was imputed to Him. He bore the full weight of the curse. He was put to death in our place.
Therefore, we do not look at a law like this and feel smugly superior to the one who might break it. We look at this law, we see the righteous penalty, and we recognize that "such were some of you." But we have been washed, we have been sanctified, we have been justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God (1 Cor. 6:11). The law shows us the depth of our depravity and the horror of our sin. But it does so in order that we might flee to the cross, where we see the height of God's holiness and the even greater depth of His grace. The law diagnoses the disease and prescribes the penalty, but the gospel provides the cure, purchased by the precious blood of Christ.