February 26, 2024 Bible Study — Giving People the Benefit of the Doubt

Today, I am reading and commenting on  Numbers 34-36.

I struggled with what to write about today’s passage until the second or third time I read this verse:

Anyone who kills a person is to be put to death as a murderer only on the testimony of witnesses. But no one is to be put to death on the testimony of only one witness.

It struck me that this represents an important principle that applies to how we look at others.  The principle here is that we should not believe something negative about someone unless those telling us saw them do it.  Even then, we should not believe it if there is only one person who saw it, even if we are that one person.  We need to remember that sometimes what we see is not what happened.  Our view may have been obscured, or something relevant to events may have happened before we started looking.  Or, maybe our own bias has caused us to interpret someone’s action incorrectly.   So, we need to give people the benefit of the doubt.

I use the daily Bible reading schedule from “The Bible.net” for my daily Bible reading.