Verse 16
No One Shall Die For Another’s Sin (Deuteronomy 24:16 ).
Fair play and consideration for others was even to reach to those responsible for justice. This idea of personal responsibility was not late. It appears in early law codes outside Israel, although as we would expect, in varying degrees. The unrighteous must be condemned and the innocent justified.
‘ The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, nor shall the children be put to death for the fathers. Every man shall be put to death for his own sin.’
The root principle of justice was to be that every man died for his own sin, and not for the sins of others (compare Numbers 27:3). The Law Code of Hammurabi sometimes applied the principle of ‘a life for a life’ in terms of the fact that if a man killed someone else’s son, his own son must be killed in recompense. This was never to be so in Israel. Each man was accountable for himself and himself alone as far as justice was concerned.
This is not contradictory to the principle that the sins of the fathers will be visited on the third and the fourth generation (Deuteronomy 5:9). There God was warning of how sin could, and regularly did, work out. He was warning of the consequences that could result. That is a very different thing from the administering of individual justice. The consequences brought about by evil in our lives are inevitable results, not God’s deliberate judgments.
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