ספר במדבר

...Our sages, quoted in a Tossaphot Baba Batra 119, claim ‎that the individual gathering firewood on the Sabbath and ‎subsequently executed for having violated the Sabbath (Numbers ‎‎15,32-36) had committed his sin with a noble motive, i.e. to ‎demonstrate the Torah’s warning of the penalty dealt out to the ‎deliberate transgressor is not an empty threat. He did not want ‎his peers to think that seeing that they would not enter the Holy ‎Land anyways that the Torah laws no longer applied to them.‎The whole episode of the Israelite gathering firewood is ‎puzzling even without this especial motivation that he ‎supposedly had for this. We have a general rule that when a ‎major violation of the Sabbath is performed without the ‎intention being that this act is the one intended, i.e. that it had ‎been used for when building the Tabernacle (‎מלאכה שאינו צריכה‎ ‎לגופה‎), the act is not punishable by death. Seeing that this is so ‎the execution of this individual appears highly questionable, as ‎what he did was not the classic desecration of the Sabbath. We ‎must therefore conclude that his execution was a signal to the ‎other Israelites not to consider Torah laws as no longer binding ‎for the adults who would not enter the Holy Land.‎