Reporting The Matter

"Now in case a soul sins in that he has heard public

Jehovah's Witnesses are told that they must report a sin seen or heard to the elders. If they fail to report the sin, then they are told they are blood guilty. This teaching places a heavy burden on the witness and a heavy sense of guilt.

Must Report The Matter

The result of this teaching are many accounts of broken confidentiality. On a social level, conversations can not always reveal true thoughts. On a moral level the confidentiality of medical reports, credit reports, title searching judgements and other information that is illegal to report have been reported to the congregation elders. For instance, after one employee revealed confidential records to the congregation elders, one doctor complained that his liability insurance would not cover an employee in a breach of confidential information. And the witness employee went against her agreement with her employer, thus lying to him.

Does Leviticus 5:1 apply to reporting secretly to a group of older men about the actions of a sinner ? Reporting a matter in the context of Leviticus 5:1 can be compared to the account in Ruth 4:1-12. Here reporting a matter was to call witnesses to give testimony in a particular case against an individual. The reporting or testimony was done in a public way at the city gate, with the person put under an oath to report the matter, it was not a secret told to an elder who would arrange a secret meeting with the person. (Matthew 26:62,63)(Deuteronomy 16:18, 21:9)

There is no doubt that the Israelites had the responsibility to report matters of grave wrongs, sin. But nowhere in the Mosaic Law do we find it stated in such broad terms that every Israelite was duty bound to report to the judges of Israel any serious wrong doing that he observed. Rather in most cases, it was a matter of responding to a summons or a call to testify at a public hearing, not an individual Israelite's intiating some report.

As the Watchtower, September 1, 1987, page 13 states: In their Commentary on the Old Testament, Keil and Delitzsch state that a person would be guilty of error or sin if he knew of another's crime, whether he had seen it, or had come to the certain knowledge of it in any other way, and was therefore qualified to appear in court as a witness for the conviction of the criminal neglected to do so, and did not state what he had seen or learned, when he heard the solemn adjuration (the "curse" referred to) of the judge at the public investigation of the crime, by which all persons present, who knew anything of the matter, were urged to come foward as witnesses.

This scripture of reporting a matter is a principle, not law. When one lives by the letter of the law, it kills, but the spirit gives life" (2 Cor 3:6) If this were a law, then Jesus father Joseph would have violated it. His wife, the mother of Jesus, Mary, was pregnant and Joseph "because he was righteous did not want to make her a public spectacle, intended to divorce her secretly." (Matthew 1:19) Did Joseph break the law ? No he did not! He was "righteous" and had the knowledge of Leviticus 5:1, yet knew it was a principle, not a law. He also knew that according to this scripture it would mean making a "public spectacle" of Mary in a public hearing, showing that "reporting the matter" was being called by the older men to testify of a particular matter, not a matter of going to the elders privately to inform of a persons sin.

As Christians, "discharged from the law" and no longer slaves of the "written code". We have the example of Jesus Christ who spoke against the rigidness of the apostate Jewish leaders. The entire law was fulfilled in loving God and neighbor, not bodies of rules and regulations.

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