The trench he meant to cover on Monday

The backhoe operator clocked out at 5:40 on a Friday and left the trench open behind a medical plaza. He meant to barricade it Monday. Saturday night, a teenager cutting across the dark lot never saw the edge. By the time the lawsuit was filed, the question was no longer whether someone would pay. It was who, and how much was left of the contractor’s business when they finished. Texas knows this story well — the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration records the state as the nation’s leader in costly disaster, but the slower catastrophe is the one a jury hands down in a courtroom. For business owners and practice owners in Frisco, Plano, McKinney, and Little Elm, the open pit is rarely a pit at all. It is a wet floor, an unleashed dog, a misread chart, a teenager in a parking lot.

We have already made the defensive case for faith and coverage elsewhere — that buying insurance is not a lack of faith, and that the broader question of whether insurance is biblical has a clear scriptural answer. But that is only half of the text. The defensive half asks how you protect what God entrusted to you. The half almost no one preaches asks what you owe the person you harm. And on that question, Scripture is not vague. It is a ledger. If these are the kinds of questions you wrestle with, follow The Agent’s Office® on Facebook — we publish faith-and-finance insights like this one every week.

The Bible’s oldest liability code

Strip insurance down to first principles and it is not a financial product at all — it is a system for answering one question: when harm happens, who makes it right? That question is older than the insurance industry by several thousand years, and God answered it in plain legal language in the book of Exodus.

Begin with the pit. “And if a man shall open a pit, or if a man shall dig a pit, and not cover it, and an ox or an ass fall therein; the owner of the pit shall make it good” (Exodus 21:33–34, KJV). Read that as what it is — a premises-liability statute. You created a hazard, you failed to cover it, your neighbor suffered loss, and the bill is yours. We have a name for that doctrine today; the Bible got there first. Call it the open-pit principle: responsibility follows the one who dug.

Then comes the ox, and with it the doctrine of negligence. An ox that gores by surprise is a tragedy. But “if the ox were wont to push with his horn in time past, and it hath been testified to his owner, and he hath not kept him in” (Exodus 21:29), the liability escalates sharply — because the owner was warned and did nothing. This is foreseeability, the very hinge of modern general liability law. It is also Proverbs 22:3 with teeth: “A prudent man foreseeth the evil, and hideth himself: but the simple pass on, and are punished.” The prudent man does not merely see the danger — he pens the ox he was told about.

Finally, the fire. “If fire break out, and catch in thorns… he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution” (Exodus 22:6). Here is proximate cause — your fire, your neighbor’s field, your bill — set in stone before any court existed to enforce it. Three statutes, one principle: love of neighbor is not only a feeling. It carries a balance sheet, and Romans 13:10 confirms the standard the whole law is reaching toward: “Love worketh no ill to his neighbour.” Liability coverage is simply the tool by which a modern steward keeps that command when the worst happens. For the deeper architecture of this thinking, see our biblical framework for managing business risk.

The Texas reality: pits, pools, and nuclear verdicts

Texas did not abandon the open-pit principle; it codified it. Under Texas premises-liability law, a property owner owes a duty to those who come onto the property, and the attractive-nuisance doctrine extends that duty to children drawn to hazards they cannot judge. An unfenced backyard pool in McKinney is, in the eyes of the law, the uncovered pit of Exodus 21 — and there are a great many pools in North Texas. The state goes further on the road, mandating minimum auto liability for every driver. The duty to make a neighbor whole is not a suggestion here; it is statute, enforced by the Texas Department of Insurance.

What has changed is the size of the restitution. The era of the modest settlement is over. According to research compiled by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce Institute for Legal Reform, a handful of states — Texas among them — produce roughly half of the nation’s “nuclear verdicts,” the jury awards exceeding $10 million. In November 2024, a Texas jury returned a $60.65 million verdict in a negligent-hiring and supervision case: a security guard with a prior conviction, inadequately vetted, and a violent incident that followed. That is the goring ox of Exodus 21, retold in a Dallas-area courtroom — an owner who was, in effect, warned, and did not keep the danger penned. An award like that does not dent a large corporation. It ends a small business, and the household behind it.

This is the quiet danger for kingdom-minded owners. You can pray faithfully over your commercial operation, run it with integrity, and still wake up one morning as the owner of the pit. Faith does not pay the injured neighbor’s hospital bill. Restitution does — and a properly built liability program is how that restitution gets paid without destroying a second family in the process.

Four myths that leave Christians exposed

• Myth: “If I truly trust God, I don’t need liability coverage.” Reality: Exodus does not assign the bill to God — it assigns it to you, the owner of the pit. Trusting God to handle a debt He explicitly placed on your shoulders is not faith; it is the “simple” man of Proverbs 22:3 passing on and being punished.
• Myth: “Liability insurance is just me protecting myself.” Reality: liability coverage primarily protects the person you harmed. It is the funding mechanism for “love worketh no ill to his neighbour.” Refusing it does not make you more selfless — it makes your neighbor absorb the loss you caused.
• Myth: “A sincere apology and a handshake will settle it.” Reality: every restitution law in Exodus is measured in payment, not sentiment. “He shall make it good.” Sincerity is necessary; it is not currency.
• Myth: “My business owner’s policy already covers everything.” Reality: standard limits are routinely breached by today’s awards, and exposures like professional mistakes, large premises claims, or vehicle use often fall outside a base policy. This is why medical professional liability, umbrella layers, and the right primary structure matter. The parapet principle of Deuteronomy 22:8 — build a railing on your roof so no blood comes upon your house — is the call to close those gaps before someone falls.

The numbers: restitution with and without coverage

The pattern is the same in every row: the harm is foreseeable, the duty is yours, and the only variable is whether the restitution is funded by a policy or by the liquidation of everything you have built. That is the choice the open-pit principle puts in front of every owner.

The Agent’s Office® advantage

Here is where being independent changes everything. A captive agent can offer you one company’s idea of a liability program. As an independent agency, The Agent’s Office® shops your exposure across more than 75 highly rated carriers and builds the layers — general liability, professional liability, commercial auto, and umbrella — that actually match the pit you could dig, not a generic template. We are fully virtual, so the work happens by phone, text, and email on your schedule, and fully local, so we understand North Texas premises law, hail-belt property risk, and the verdict climate your business actually operates in.

We come at this with a stewardship lens, not a fear pitch. We will not oversell you, and we will not leave a gap unaddressed. The goal is the one Scripture set: that when harm comes, you can make your neighbor whole and keep your own household standing. That is the same conviction behind our work on providence and provision and the lesson of the parable of the talents — that faithful management and prudent protection were never opposites.