Covenant, Consent, and Community Text: Deuteronomy 22:23-24
Introduction: The Goodness of Hard Laws
We live in an age that is squeamish about justice and sentimental about sin. When modern Christians, particularly those raised on a diet of therapeutic flannelgraph niceties, encounter a passage like this one in Deuteronomy, their first instinct is to blush and stammer. They treat it like an embarrassing relative at a dinner party, hoping no one asks them to explain what he just said. They are ashamed of the very laws that God calls good, just, and holy. They want a God who is always nice, but never severe; a God of mercy, but not of judgment. But a God without justice is a marshmallow idol, and a gospel without the law is no gospel at all.
The laws of God, including and especially the hard ones, are a gift of grace. They reveal to us the character of God, the nature of sin, and the structure of a just society. To be embarrassed by God's law is to be embarrassed by God. To wish He had given different laws is to wish He were a different God. Our task is not to apologize for the Word of God, but to understand it, and in understanding it, to see the wisdom, goodness, and righteousness of our Creator.
This passage deals with a specific case of sexual immorality, but the principles it establishes are foundational. It touches on the nature of covenant, the importance of consent, the responsibility of the community, and the gravity with which God views the sanctity of marriage. And like all Old Testament case law, it was never intended to be applied woodenly or simplistically, as though you could just rip it from its context and paste it onto 21st century America. That is not how biblical law works. The Mosaic code is a case law system. We are given specific cases from which we are to extract the abiding principles, the general equity, and apply that wisdom to our own circumstances. So let us roll up our sleeves and look at what God has to say, praying that He would give us the courage to believe it and the wisdom to apply it.
The Text
"If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them, and they will die; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you."
(Deuteronomy 22:23-24 LSB)
The Sanctity of Betrothal (v. 23)
We begin with the scenario God lays out:
"If there is a girl who is a virgin engaged to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her," (Deuteronomy 22:23)
The first thing to notice is the status of the woman. She is a virgin, and she is "engaged." The Hebrew word here for engaged, or betrothed, describes a binding covenant. This is not our modern, flimsy idea of engagement where a ring can be given back with a tearful "it's not working out." In the biblical world, betrothal was the first stage of marriage. It was a legally and covenantally binding commitment. This is why Joseph, when he discovered Mary was with child, was minded to "divorce her" quietly. They were not yet living together, they had not consummated the marriage, but they were already in a covenant that required a legal writ of divorce to dissolve. They were, for all intents and purposes, husband and wife in the eyes of the law.
This is the first principle we must grasp. God takes covenantal commitments with the utmost seriousness. Marriage does not begin when you walk down the aisle, or when you first have sexual relations. It begins when you make the vow. The vow is the thing. Our culture has cheapened this by treating engagement as a trial period, a "let's see." But God establishes here that the word of covenant creates a new reality. The man is her husband, and she is his wife, even before the consummation.
The scene is set "in the city." This detail is not incidental; it is crucial for what follows. The city is a place of community, of witnesses, of help. It is a place where a cry for help could and should be heard. This law is intensely practical and rooted in the realities of geography and community life. The law of God is not an abstract set of floating principles; it is designed for real people in real places.
The Verdict and the Reasons (v. 24)
Verse 24 delivers the judgment and, critically, the reasoning behind it.
"then you shall bring them both out to the gate of that city, and you shall stone them, and they will die; the girl, because she did not cry out in the city, and the man, because he has violated his neighbor’s wife. Thus you shall purge the evil from among you." (Deuteronomy 22:24)
The penalty is severe: death by stoning for both parties. Before we recoil in modern horror, we must ask what this severity teaches us. It teaches us that covenant-breaking sexual sin is not a trivial matter. It is not a "mistake" or an "oops." It is a capital crime in God's economy. Why? Because it is a violent assault on the foundational institution of human society, the family. Adultery is a form of treason against the family, and by extension, against the whole social order. God is teaching His people that the marriage covenant is a life-and-death matter. To treat it as anything less is to unravel the fabric of society.
But notice the careful distinctions the law makes. This is not barbaric, indiscriminate justice. It is reasoned and principled. The man is condemned for a straightforward reason: "he has violated his neighbor's wife." As we established, the betrothed woman is considered a wife. He has committed adultery, a profound theft and violation of his neighbor's most precious covenant relationship.
The reason for the girl's condemnation is equally specific and instructive: "because she did not cry out in the city." The law assumes her consent because she failed to protest when help was available. The very next case in Deuteronomy (vv. 25-27) deals with a similar situation in the country, where if she cried out, no one would hear. In that case, only the man is executed, because it is assumed to be rape. The law here is establishing a crucial principle of consent and responsibility. Her silence in a place where she could have been heard is taken as evidence of her willing participation. She had a responsibility to uphold her own covenant vows by resisting and crying out for aid. Her failure to do so made her complicit in the act.
The purpose of this severe judgment is stated plainly: "Thus you shall purge the evil from among you." This is not about personal vengeance. It is about corporate sanitation. The community has a responsibility to deal with high-handed sin in its midst, lest that evil spread like gangrene. Public justice serves to warn others, to uphold the holiness of God's standards, and to cleanse the covenant community from defilement. When a society refuses to punish grievous evil, it becomes complicit in that evil. We are seeing the fruit of such refusal all around us today.
Applying the Principle Today
So, what do we do with this? Do we organize a stoning at the town square? No, and to think so is to misread the Bible as a flat, timeless legal code. The Westminster Confession rightly teaches that the judicial laws given to Israel as a "body politic" have expired, "not obliging any other, now, further than the general equity thereof may require." The specific civil and ceremonial applications were tied to the nation of Israel, which was a typological theocracy pointing to the true kingdom of Christ.
With the coming of Christ, the application of these laws is transformed. Christ did not abolish the law, but fulfilled it. He fulfilled the moral law by His perfect obedience. He fulfilled the ceremonial law by His perfect sacrifice. And He fulfilled the judicial law by bearing its ultimate penalty on the cross. The death penalty for adultery is not waved away as an overreaction; it is magnified and satisfied at Calvary. Every adulterer, every fornicator, every covenant-breaker deserves to be taken to the gate and stoned. And the good news of the gospel is that Jesus Christ was taken outside the gate, and all the wrath of God that our sexual sin deserved was crushed down upon Him.
Therefore, the general equity, the abiding principle, remains. And what is that principle? First, that marriage begins at the vow and is a sacred, binding covenant. We must teach our young people this. Second, that sexual infidelity is a heinous sin with devastating consequences, not a private lifestyle choice. Third, that the community has a vested interest and a solemn duty to protect the sanctity of marriage.
How do we "purge the evil" from among us now? The New Testament application is not civil, but ecclesiastical. Judgment begins with the household of God (1 Pet. 4:17). When a professing Christian commits adultery, the church is commanded to act. The process is not stoning, but church discipline, culminating in excommunication (Matt. 18:15-17; 1 Cor. 5:1-5). To excommunicate a person for unrepentant adultery is the New Covenant equivalent of purging the evil from the camp. It is declaring that this person, by their actions, has shown themselves to be outside the covenant of grace. It is a severe and loving act, intended to protect the church and to call the sinner to a radical repentance.
Our society has abandoned these principles, and we are reaping the whirlwind of sexual chaos, broken homes, and profound confusion. The answer is not to be embarrassed by God's law, but to return to its wisdom. We must preach the holiness of the marriage covenant, the ugliness of sexual sin, and the glorious grace of the cross where the penalty for that sin was paid in full. We must call sinners to repentance and faith in the one who was executed in our place, so that we, the guilty, might be welcomed into the community of the forgiven.