Posted on by Abe Austin

The Gospel and the Death Penalty- Why Death?

Death Penalty Categories)

I have spent the last two posts addressing different categories of people who would be opposed to God’s use of the death penalty in the Old Testament. Today, I am going to take up the other side. Why would God use the death penalty? Are there justifiable reasons for its application to the situations described in the Bible? Let’s start by considering what those situations are.

God’s application of the death penalty falls under five general categories:

  1. Sexual perversion: adultery, homosexuality, bestiality, incest, etc.
  2. Violence: murder, kidnapping, etc.
  3. Idolatry: performing witchcraft or wizardry, worshipping false gods, leading others astray, etc.
  4. Disobedience to God: blaspheming God, working on the Sabbath, disobeying the priest, etc.
  5. Disobedience to parents: cursing parents, striking parents, stubbornly rebellious child, etc.

If I were to abstract this further, I think the category of sexual perversion could be called actions against nature, the violence category could be called retributive justice, and all of the other categories could be summed up as open rebellion. I believe that abstracting these categories is useful for understanding the principle of offense at the heart of them, the core thing in each that God is so opposed to. Let us look at each of these three abstracted categories in turn.

Three Underlying Principles)

The first category is sins against nature. God has created the world with a natural order. Each species reproduces with its own kind. Family units progress from one generation to the next. Everything fulfills God’s original command to be fruitful and multiply. Our nature is one of life and propagation. Therefore, sins that go against the natural order are actions oriented towards death and termination. The end of reproduction, the end of a family line, the breaking up of the natural order…each of these is a small death, and if adopted by a significant portion of the species would spell the end of it very quickly. Thus, those who engage in sins against nature, particularly through sexually deviant acts, are already agents of death, and it is fitting for a death penalty to be assigned to them. It is God recognizing the ends that these acts are oriented towards and enacting that end immediately.

The second category is retributive justice. These are sins that deprive another of life, and therefore it is only fitting that the penalty for it is also death. This obviously includes murder, but kidnapping and selling into slavery are also forms of taking another’s life, just in a more symbolic way. Even leading others astray from the faith is a sort of killing: the killing of the soul. That sin fits in this category just as well as the next. To require the life of those that commit these killing acts is nothing more than basic justice. It is an eye for an eye. You were willing to deprive others of life, so your life is required as well.

The final category is that of open rebellion. As with the first category, God gave us another natural order of hierarchy and power. Children are subject to parents. Citizens are subject to leaders. Humanity is subject to God. Instructions and care flow down one direction of the order, fealty and obedience flow the other way. When one comes out in rebellion, they deny their proper place in that order. They hold themselves as the highest authority and sever their link from the chain. Not only have they cut themselves off, but they make themselves an enemy to the established order. They wrest for control, which makes them a direct antithesis to the order. No order can continue if its subjects can defy it unabated. When rebellion begins, it must mean the death of the order or of the rebel. God has prescribed the death of the rebel.

The Final Abstraction)

Looking at all of these categories as one, another final abstraction emerges. God created this world for the cultivation of His children, to place them within an order and nature that encourage growth, development, and ultimately for them to achieve their greatest potential. That is the whole purpose of us being here. Each of these categories of sin directly frustrates that plan. They are inherently opposed to the continuation and cultivation of God’s children. When a system has been created for a purpose, then any subject no longer interested in participating in that system does not belong within it. If one does not wish to participate in the purpose of life, then being removed from life is understandable. Yes, that analysis is clinical and cold, but I think it is also logically sound. We are here for a reason, and if we no longer fulfill that reason, why we expect to remain here?

Of course, that raises some questions. Where is the line between simply being imperfect and not being aligned to our purpose for being here? Could the arguments that I have made today be used to justify terrible atrocities? It is also worth asking, if this is the system and the order that God has designed, then why was it removed after the coming of Christ? Why do we not follow this same logic today? We will dig into these sorts of questions in my next post.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Gospel and the Death Penalty- Hypocritical Condemnation

Permitted Violence)

In my last post I discussed how our culture has a strong condemnation for violence, making God’s death penalties in the Old Testament feel unsettling. However, there is also a hypocrisy in our culture, for while we still condemn violence by our words and policies, there is a sympathy among some for violence, so long as the target is correct.

This is most evident in political violence. Most recently, the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the public reaction to it showed just how brazen parts of our society can be in celebrating the death of their ideological rivals. This seems to be a rising trend, as well. A CloudResearch poll surveyed 1,583 Americans, asking whether Kirk’s killing was justified. While 12% of all respondents and 20% of all Democrat respondents said yes, those numbers jumped to 22% and 32% when respondents were under 30.

The death of Charlie Kirk is particularly interesting, because many of the justifications that people give for his killing have to do with the things that he said. The seemingly most egregious applications of the death penalty in the Bible are also for people who say blasphemous things. Thus, there are those who cannot see any justification for words incurring the death penalty in one context, yet in another emphatically defend it.

Hypocrisy and Culture)

Of course, I don’t mean to suggest that everyone who condemns the death penalties in the Bible also endorses the murder of their political rivals, but it is undeniable that there is an overlap. For such people, they might call God’s acts of violence unacceptable, yet they are not actually opposed to violence itself, only to violence against those who ideologically agree with them. They reject God’s penalties not by principle, but because He is not authorized by their ideology to assign those punishments. They have the very tribalistic paradigm that they pretend to be above.

My last post was directed towards those who do genuinely oppose violence in all of its forms, and this post has addressed those who are only selective in their approval of it. Having acknowledged and responded to both areas of criticism, I now wish to turn my focus to considering why God would have death penalties and why they went away. We will begin with those examinations tomorrow.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Gospel and the Death Penalty- Assumed Axioms of Morality

Fundamental Moral Beliefs)

Almost all of God’s commandments to His children have been criticized and deemphasized in our modern Western culture. People constantly make excuses for lying, cheating, and stealing. Yet the one sin that is still largely considered a sin is that of killing. Even today, people tend to be largely against the idea of one person killing another. In fact, we have built many hedges around this sin, becoming suspicious of all sorts of violence, be it getting into a fight or spanking a child. In almost every context, it is simply considered unacceptable to cause physical harm to another person.

Is it any wonder, then, that we see the exceptions that God makes for killing, where He directly orders His people to put others to death for egregious sins, and we feel that He is violating moral law? We have created a “higher” god than God, one who demands a higher principle of non-violence than He does, and therefore God Himself is seen as a transgressor. He violates that “more supreme” ethic and is therefore immoral.

We may not think about it in such terms, but at the end of the day this is the moral hierarchy that leads atheists to mock the God of the Bible and Christians to gloss over uncomfortable chapters. Both hold an internal moral ideal by which even God Himself is judged. And that ideal is so fundamental that they do not have to think or reason about it. It is embedded in their hearts, causing an immediate and visceral revulsion to anything that stands against it. Many of us take such instincts as being axioms of truth. The fact that our revulsion is so strong and involuntary must mean that our own ideals are fundamental, beyond scrutiny, just eternal facts.

Taking a Step Back)

However, just because something feels fundamental doesn’t mean that it is. People can absolutely be cultivated to have immediate, visceral reactions that would not be there under another context. There are numerous examples of this, so let us mention a few. People that are raised around a particular race often feel unsettled when first seeing a person with another skin color, but had they been raised in a more diverse place no involuntary reaction would occur. People raised eating one country’s food may have an involuntary gag reflex when eating the food items of another country, though natives of that foreign land eat it without any trouble. A person raised to keep their room tidy will be deeply uncomfortable in the room of a pack rat, yet the pack rat feels absolutely relaxed in that setting. In each of these examples, we realize that these strong and involuntary negative reactions are not an indication of universal moral truth, but a result of conditioning.

This isn’t to say that all of our instincts are purely environmental. I believe that some of them truly do point to universal truth. But it is important to understand that the existence of the negative instinct is not proof in-and-of-itself that the reviled thing is immoral. We might just be out of tune.

When we are brought up in a strong culture, there are elements of it that are just too close for us to recognize. We have to take a step back and adjust our perspective to realize which things we just assumed to be true, but which might not have been. I would not expect anyone from my culture to read all of the death penalties that God assigned in the Old Testament and not feel that initial wave of revulsion. At this point those feelings are inevitable. But I do think it is worth considering whether those feelings are the result of eternal moral truth, or merely the conditioning of a particularly violence-avoidant culture.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Gospel and the Death Penalty- An Uncomfortable Problem

An Inconvenient Chapter)

Recently in my scripture study I covered Leviticus 20, which requires the death penalty for certain transgressions. Some of the applications of this penalty are fairly uncontroversial, such as consigning to death any man who performs human sacrifice with his own children. Others are extremely controversial in our modern day, such as prescribing death for cursing one’s parents, blaspheming the name of the Lord, engaging in homosexual relations, or committing adultery.

I know many Christians who choose not to contend with this area of the gospel at all. They essentially say, “Well, that was just the Old Testament, the real gospel began with Jesus.” This, of course, overlooks the fact that the lawgiver of the Old Testament is Jehovah, who is the same person as Jesus Christ. Thus, if one approves of Christ’s ethics because of the New Testament, but disapproves of his ethics because of the Old Testament, then they are contradicting themselves.

Those that do not hold to sola scriptura (the belief that the Bible has remained the pure, unaltered word of God throughout all history), tend to throw out difficult chapters of the Bible, such as Leviticus 20, claiming that this must be a chapter fabricated by men, and not the will of God. Even though I do not hold to sola scriptura myself, I believe it is a grave error to so casually discard these passages. For one thing, there is no evidence of this chapter being fabricated except for personal discomfort with it. Also, passages that usually are accepted, such as the woman taken in adultery, make it clear that the death penalty for such sins was a genuine law in Jesus’s time, and one that he did not call out as being a false doctrine, even though he did so for other man-made laws.

Jesus Divided?)

Of course, the example of the woman taken in adultery further complicates things. In that story, Jesus does not say, “don’t kill her, that’s false doctrine,” but at the same time he does find a path that spares her the death penalty. And Christians today follow his example by not seeking to kill every blasphemer or adulterer. If we accept that the Jehovah of the Old Testament said what He said, and that the Jesus of the New Testament pardoned what he pardoned, are we left with the same being contradicting himself? Does Jesus’s mercy frustrate Jehovah’s justice? Or is there something larger at play here that often goes overlooked?

I believe that there is. I will spend the next couple posts going into detail on this matter, but to cut to the chase, I believe that the sacrifice of Jesus is the fulfillment of every death penalty for every mortal sin. I do not believe that Jesus and Jehovah contradict one another. I believe that Jehovah’s death penalty is still in full force to this day, only it is executed upon Jesus instead of us. This perspective neatly resolves any seeming contradiction in divinity, leaving us only to come to terms with the fact that absent Christ’s sacrifice, the death penalty for certain sins would still be the divine mandate today.

I will dig into that matter with tomorrow’s post. If Jehovah’s death penalties are just and correct in principle, why do they feel so wrong to us today?

Posted on by Abe Austin

Tests of Love

Those who put conditions on what others must do to prove their love is real,
Are actually putting conditions on their own willingness to love in return.
Which just goes to show, they don’t understand love at all.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Leviticus 20:24-26

24 But I have said unto you, Ye shall inherit their land, and I will give it unto you to possess it, a land that floweth with milk and honey: I am the Lord your God, which have separated you from other people. 

25 Ye shall therefore put difference between clean beasts and unclean, and between unclean fowls and clean: and ye shall not make your souls abominable by beast, or by fowl, or by any manner of living thing that creepeth on the ground, which I have separated from you as unclean. 

26 And ye shall be holy unto me: for I the Lord am holy, and have severed you from other people, that ye should be mine.

Today’s verses echo verse 7 at the start of the chapter. And back when I commented on verse 6, I grouped verse 27 with it as it also echoed the same sentiments against wizardry. It seems like there might be a chiasmatic structure here, with each thought at the start rhyming with those at the end in inverse order. That would explain the seemingly sudden shift of subject in verse 27, giving it poetic intent. That being said, things do get muddled in the middle and it is hard to see the continuing reflection pattern in verses 9-21. Perhaps there was once a poem through here and all we have remaining today are the bookends.

In any case, these verses reiterate God’s message to Israel that they are to be a separate, even a severed people. They were to stand out, to be peculiar, to resist the pull of their surrounding environment, to override their human instinct to conform and adapt. This is a hard thing. It goes against our basic nature. But so is resisting temptation and sin. Our nature, including our desire to conform and also our appetites, are given to us for good reasons, and they lead us to many good things, but both must be reined in, mastered, and at times surrendered entirely.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Leviticus 20:22-23

22 Ye shall therefore keep all my statutes, and all my judgments, and do them: that the land, whither I bring you to dwell therein, spue you not out. 

23 And ye shall not walk in the manners of the nation, which I cast out before you: for they committed all these things, and therefore I abhorred them.

These verses repeat the language heard at the end of Leviticus18, about the previous owners of Canaan all participating in each of the dark and evil acts described in this chapter, and for this reason being spued out of the land. Israel would be as well if they followed the same pattern. This further supports the idea I presented earlier that these chapters are a second account of the law, giving the same message with a slightly different recollection of the scribe who wrote it down.

The addition of death penalties to the crimes in this account further explain why Israel was commanded to go to war with the Canaanite nations and drive them out of the land. God had said that the Israelites who engaged in these profane practices would face being cut off or executed on a personal level, so it would make sense that the Canaanites who engaged with these sins as a regular part of their society would face the same punishment on the national level. The wars that Israel would engage in were separate from the category of mere conquest, they were to execute God’s judgment upon the condemned.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Leviticus 20:17, 19-21

17 And if a man shall take his sister, his father’s daughter, or his mother’s daughter, and see her nakedness, and she see his nakedness; it is a wicked thing; and they shall be cut off in the sight of their people: he hath uncovered his sister’s nakedness; he shall bear his iniquity. 

19 And thou shalt not uncover the nakedness of thy mother’s sister, nor of thy father’s sister: for he uncovereth his near kin: they shall bear their iniquity. 

20 And if a man shall lie with his uncle’s wife, he hath uncovered his uncle’s nakedness: they shall bear their sin; they shall die childless. 

21 And if a man shall take his brother’s wife, it is an unclean thing: he hath uncovered his brother’s nakedness; they shall be childless.

Today’s verses continue with other abominable sexual relationships between near kin, but I grouped these together as the ones that were of a lesser offense, given that none of them carry a death penalty. There is being cut off, bearing one’s iniquity, and dying childless, but no execution for approaching one’s sister, aunt, stepmother, or sister-in-law. This makes sense, as none of the natural effects of these acts are as ruinous to the bloodline or the community as those mentioned earlier.

The last prohibition against taking a brother’s wife is interesting, because Ancient Israel observed Levirate marriage, in which if a man died, his widow could be married to one of his near kin, including his brother, and any children born to that union would be raised under the deceased brother’s line. It would seem that the prohibition in verse 21 is excluding that particular instance. Or…maybe not. Since any children born to this union would belong to the original husband’s clan, the brother would remain legally childless in that relationship, though the sister-in-law would not.

This brings us to the end of penalties for perverse sexual relations. It is clear that the power of giving life was sacred and closely guarded, with clear and numerous laws to preserve it for the manner that God has prescribed since the creation of Adam and Eve. It is not an evil power, but it is a power that can be used evilly. And when it is, the natural ramifications on the home, the bloodline, and the society are severe, thus the penalties associated are similarly severe.

Posted on by Abe Austin

Scriptural Analysis- Leviticus 20:11, 12, 14

11 And the man that lieth with his father’s wife hath uncovered his father’s nakedness: both of them shall surely be put to death; their blood shall be upon them. 

12 And if a man lie with his daughter in law, both of them shall surely be put to death: they have wrought confusion; their blood shall be upon them. 

14 And if a man take a wife and her mother, it is wickedness: they shall be burnt with fire, both he and they; that there be no wickedness among you.

Today’s verses cover the familial sexual relationships that warranted a death penalty, and they all have to do with parent-child relationships, including parent and child in-law. Continuing with the pattern noted in the last post, these are the sorts of relationships that would destroy a bloodline, creating confusion in the natural and orderly way God has given us to know our heritage and our ancestry.

Families are given to us in what is naturally a hierarchal chain, with grandparents, parents, children, grandchildren and so on. It tells us where we have come from and where we are going. It makes each person both the hope and succession of all that came before, and the guardian and progenitor of all that will follow. It ensures that each member is born with both great support and great responsibility, every member a part of something greater than the self, but also each self is essential to the continued existence of the whole.

It is a beautiful design, but when parents and children fold the chain back onto one another, it becomes a meaningless mass of ambiguous heritage and vague responsibility. So, it is a death of the line, and accordingly a death penalty is assigned to it.