Posted on by Abe Austin

The Gospel and the Death Penalty- A Prisoner Set Free

A Different Pattern)

Thus far in this study I have noted that God created this earth life, defined its purposes, and introduced us to it as His gift to help us cultivate our souls to their full potential. Given all of that, He also has the right to determine when a person is so contrary to that purpose that they ought to be removed from this life. He also has the right to determine when the penalty is delayed to give the offender time to repent. He sets these bounds according to His wisdom, and wherever He does place them He is justified in so doing.

Looking at the scriptural record, we see that those bounds appear to have evolved from the Old Testament to the New. According to the Mosaic Law, adultery was one of the sins for which the death penalty would always apply. In the New Testament, Jesus seemed to make this law even more strict, proclaiming that anyone who “looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart” (Matthew 5:28). So, did this mean that now the death penalty would apply to anyone who even had a lustful thought? One might think so, at least until the incident with the woman taken in adultery occurred.

And the scribes and Pharisees brought unto him a woman taken in adultery.

"Moses in the law commanded us, that such should be stoned." 

Jesus lifted up himself, and said unto them, "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone at her."

And they which heard it, being convicted by their own conscience, went out one by one, and Jesus was left alone, and the woman standing in the midst.

He said unto her, "Woman, where are those thine accusers? hath no man condemned thee?"

She said, "No man, Lord."

And Jesus said unto her, "Neither do I condemn thee: go, and sin no more."
-John 8:3-11, shortened

It is worth asking, why was adultery a sin punishable by death under Moses, but then when Jesus was presented the woman taken in adultery, he chose to extend mercy instead?

Reason for the Change)

I already spoke a little on this in the first post of this series and also in prior posts, but I think the important thing to realize is that Jesus didn’t, in fact, contradict the law as it was given. Nowhere do we hear him say that having death as a consequence of adultery was unjust. Nowhere does he say that his new law was “correcting” the old one. Instead, he told his disciples:

Think not that I am come to destroy the law, or the prophets: I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil. For verily I say unto you, Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one tittle shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled. (Matthew 5:17-18).

Furthermore, Jesus’s statement “neither do I condemn thee” seems to suggest that he rightfully could. If Jesus, however, let the adulterous woman go without executing her, did a jot or a tittle of the law go unfulfilled? No. Because as it turns out, there was an execution carried out for her sin, only it was carried out in Jesus’s body and not her own. In that moment that Jesus let her go, he was assuming her place.

And this is not only for the woman in that one instance. Every adulterer, or blasphemer, or rebellious son ever since has been spared a death penalty. Not because the penalty was withheld, but because it was executed upon Jesus. When Jesus died on the cross, he stood in for the execution of all of mankind.

Change of Subject, not Policy)

The important thing to recognize here is that Jesus did not change what most people seem to think he changed. He did not change either the principles or the policies underlying the Law of Moses. The principle is that severe violation of the purpose of life warrants removal from that life. The policy is that a man must be killed for mortal sins. Now the principle and the policy still hold true, but the person is put to death in Jesus.

Mortal sins remain mortal sins, the wages of sin are still death, the law is still just as strict in imposing justice, all that has changed is the subject upon whom the punishment is exacted. By this, mercy can be offered to us without robbing justice one iota.

Note: I am aware that the authenticity of the story of the woman taken in adultery is debated. Even if it turned out that such did not occur, it is still clear that the Christian movement included deferment of the death penalty, and the reasons why remain the same.

Posted on by Abe Austin

The Gospel and the Death Penalty- Dangers of Interpretation

The Wages of Sin)

In my last post I examined each of the categories of sin for which God prescribed a death penalty. During my study I noticed a pattern that the death penalty seemed to be associated with sins that particularly defied the purpose of life, which purpose is to cultivate our souls into ones that can receive paradise. When a person detaches themselves from that divine purpose, they are no longer participating in life as it is intended, and God has the right to rescind that gift of life.

But even as I drew those conclusions, I knew there was an important issue to address. I saw how this line of thinking could be used to justify a whole slew of harsh and merciless policies. At the end of the day, all sin is an act of rebellion against God’s plan for us. All sin is contrary to the purpose for us being here. So, wouldn’t that justify the death penalty for all sin? Well, according to Romans 6:23, yes: “For the wages of sin is death.” It does not say only certain sin, it seems to mean all sin.

Furthermore, I can say from my own experiences that as I have been convicted of my own sins, I have felt that any penalty that God chose for me would be warranted. Be it death or be it hell, if God were to call for it, I could not say that He was unfair in so doing. I was very grateful to receive mercy instead, but I wasn’t entitled to it.

So yes, the death penalty can be argued as the just response for every sin that there is. Does that mean I would support a nation carrying out executions for every stolen library book, every angry insult, and every lustful thought? Well, no. That conclusion would be an incorrect interpretation of scripture. It would be focusing on just one aspect of the gospel, while ignoring all others.

Balance of Purpose)

Let us not forget, the whole point of my last post was that the death penalty could be justified for those who were no longer in agreement with the purpose of life, which purpose was to cultivate our souls to be fit for heaven. But we are imperfect beings, and all of us sin. To kill us all at the first offense would also frustrate the purpose of mortal life by cutting short our opportunity to repent and cultivate our souls. There clearly ought to be a threshold. Lesser sins, though still deserving of death, should have that penalty deferred so that there is a chance for repentance, while those who more seriously detach themselves from the purpose of life could still face immediate judgment.

And where should that threshold lie? How should we be able to tell when someone is in enough rebellion against the purpose of life to warrant death? These are questions that I do not need to answer. It is not in my jurisdiction. Life is created by God, and it is up to Him which penalties should apply to which violations. This is one of the reasons that the law was even given to Moses: so that God could answer these questions and His people would not have to make imperfect judgment calls of their own.

In summary, there is a justification for the death penalty for any sin. God would be justified wherever He applied that penalty, even for the most minor of offenses. It would be justified, but it would not be ideal for the accomplishment of His purposes. Wisdom therefore requires a threshold to allow both an opportunity for repentance and preservation of the natural order. It is God’s prerogative, and God’s prerogative alone, where that threshold should then be set.

Acknowledging the justification for the death penalty is not a carte blanche invitation for human authorities to kill all sinners. It does mean, though, that God has a field of choice in where to place the bounds of mercy and justice. He may even set one bound at one time, and adjust it at another, and that would be acceptable and appropriate. Which, of course, God appears to have done. He assigned the death penalty for adultery under the Law of Moses, but in the case of the woman taken in adultery, Jesus chose to extend mercy instead. Did something change? We will turn to that question in our next post.

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.