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?