Thou shalt not raise a false report” Exodus 23:1 KJV
You shall not bear a false report” Exodus 23:1 NASB
Thou shalt not follow a multitude to evil” Exodus 23:2 KJV
You shall not follow the masses in doing evil” Exodus 23:2 NASB
Thou shalt not wrest the judgment of thy poor” Exodus 23:6 KJV
You shall not pervert the justice due to your needy brother” Exodus 23:6 NASB
Thou shalt take no gift” Exodus 23:8 KJV
You shall not take a bribe” Exodus 23:8 NASB
God intended His people to be marked by equity and honesty in all their judgments. In the shadow of Sinai, He enunciated precepts and principles in an attempt to ensure that the nation would be marked by these qualities in all their decision-making. His intention was to set Israel apart from the heathen nations with all their injustice and inhumanity. Israel was to be a light to the nations, a window to show them the character of God. Israel was to judge in keeping with the character of God Himself.
What must have been in God’s mind as, looking fifteen centuries into the future, He knew how the nation would flout every precept He had issued and defy every barrier against injustice He had established. And all of these distortions of justice would be directed at His Son.
Think of the false accusations raised against the Lord Jesus. “A perverter of the people,” and “a blasphemer,” and that He was forbidding “to give taxes to Caesar.” These, and others which had dogged His steps during His life, were some of the false reports raised against Him. Not only did the nation raise these reports, but the leadership was foremost in promulgating all of these in their hatred of the Son of God. No charge was too grievous, and no accusation too extreme as they sought to discredit His works and His worth. 
The multitude, once so enthusiastic at His entrance into the city, was now swayed to demand a cross for Him. The chief priests apparently knew how to manipulate the crowd. The multitude ran “to evil” on that fateful April day. Nothing would satisfy them apart from the crucifixion of the Lord Jesus.
“Thou shalt not wrest judgment.” Was judgment ever so unjustly meted out to anyone as to the Lord Jesus on that day? The Hebrew writer tells us that He endured “the contradiction of sinners against Himself.” Simply put, that means that everything, without exception, that He received, He did not deserve, and everything He deserved, He did not receive. The greatest miscarriage of justice ever known in a court of law was played out in Pilate’s judgment hall. It was a day of infamy – a day when the blindfold on Lady Justice’s eyes was tightly bound.
Verse 8 points to a practice still infamous to this day in our modern system of law: bribery. At the outset of the cabal, it was Judas and thirty pieces of silver. Whatever his motive, the price was a mere pittance compared to the infamy that follows his name and the eternal night which enveloped him. But from thirty pieces of silver, we next have large sums of money given to soldiers to fabricate the unlikely story that disciples came by night, overpowered them, took away the stone, and removed the body (Matt 28:11-15). The price of sin always grows greater: thirty pieces of silver rapidly mushrooms into “large sums” when once the path of deceit and bribery is taken.
Injustice piled on top of injustice, precept after precept violated and flouted, and all was done in the name of justice and to honour God. There can be little question that at Sinai, as God issued these commands, His mind was on Calvary and what His Son would endure.
Consider
What other reminders of Calvary can you find in Exodus Chapters 21-23?