Clough Divine institutions Lesson 13

Divine Institution #4, Government – Genesis 4:17; 8:21

In Genesis 4 we have the situation before the institution. Remember we have four divine institutions by way of review. A divine institution is a feature in creation that is unique to man and has essential spiritual function. We listed as the first divine institution volition, that all members of the human race are responsible. They are responsible before God to choose different ends and means in life.

The second divine institution, number two, had to do with marriage, and marriage is a divine institution meaning that it is for believers and unbelievers; two believers or two unbelievers but not mixed; no mixed marriages, believer with unbeliever. So in the Bible, in the divine institution of marriage, is actually a typology of the relationship between Christ and believers; and if you’ll see this and catch hold of the fact that marriage is not just some sociologically evolved institution but it’s an actual typology of an absolute truth, the relationship between Jesus Christ and believers. It does wonders for the whole orientation perspective of marriage and so on.

Then the third divine institution was the institution of family; the character relationship, we said, that typifies the relationship between God the Father and His church, or the body of Christ. And here we defined the body of Christ as including Jesus, His Son, and all who have been born again. So these two, marriage and family, these last two are types.

Now we come to the fourth, and the fourth one is different from all the previous because it happened after the fall. So now we have the institution of national government. This means that after the fall we pick up this fourth one. And so we would define the fourth divine institution as God’s delegated authority to mankind to judge its own evil until Christ returns. I think this, if we follow this definition it will bring certain elements into play here. First of all, it is a temporary divine institution in the sense that it is an ad hoc situation worked up between the time of the flood and the time of the Second Advent of Jesus Christ, during this interim in history. It essentially consists of delegated authority which we’ll build upon in a moment when we deal with the problem of capital punishment and military warfare.

In Genesis 4:17, here’s what happened in human society before the institution of national government. “And Cain knew his wife,” now where did Cain get his wife; I was at a group of ministers the other day and one of them was an evangelist and he said you know, students these days are asking difficult questions, like where did Cain get his wife? And if that’s a difficult question the students are asking I don’t know what the easy questions are. Cain obviously got his wife from a sister; where else do you expect he got her from. There was not incest at that time because of various genetic reasons and so on, Adam and Eve had one family and if you don’t hold to that, I’ve got news for you; if you don’t hold to a literal Adam and Eve you might as well throw out the cross of Christ because the cross of Christ and its efficacy depends that on every person is genetically related to Adam; they have the genes of Adam. So obviously Cain got his wife, who was one of his sisters.

Now at this particular point he “knew his wife; and she conceived, and bore Enoch: and he built a city, and called the name of the city, after the name of his son, Enoch. [18] And unto Enoch was born…” all these people and so on. Now at this particular time we have Cain; Cain went to this city to avoid something. What was it that Cain went to avoid? Cain got tired of his brother; good old brotherly love went into play here. It’s very funny, you know, the Bible tells the minister to treat young women like sisters. Well, I’m an only child, I’ve never had a brother or sister but from the way I look at the way some brothers treat their sisters if the pastor were to treat the young women like brothers treat sisters there would be something wrong. But the brothers back there had a fight and Cain and Abel, one was a believer and one was not. Abel was on positive volition because he brought nephesh, the sacrifice before God for his sins; Cain did not, he was on negative volition and he brought vegetables. Now there’s nothing wrong with vegetarianism and that’s not the problem with Genesis 4. It’s not saying that people that eat vegetables go to hell. Genesis 4 is talking about a violation… some people feel like they’re going to hell when they eat them…

In Genesis 4 what the point is, is that Cain overlooked the problem of sacrifice, that for sin there must be a sacrifice. And he violated this and he got kind of hacked at his brother. His brother was accepted. Now it doesn’t tell you in Genesis how he killed his brother; the New Testament does, for in 1 John 3 we have a reference where it says Cain slew his brother and the verb there means take a knife, a sacrificial knife, and evidently what happened is Cain went in and got Abel’s jackknife or whatever he used to cut the throat of his sacrifice and he used it on the throat of Abel. He said why, this kid likes to sacrifice an animal so I think I’ll just sacrifice him.

So how Cain killed Abel is explained in 1 John 3, which is a lesson to those of you who struggle with the interpretations of Genesis. Remember Genesis is what we call an elliptical text, which means there are thousands and thousands and thousands of details left out for the sake of brevity, and you pick these details up in the New Testament, like in Jude, in 1 John and Matthew 19, and Romans 5, Romans 8 and so on, 1 Timothy 2, you pick up passages that hint to what Genesis was saying. And this has led me to the conclusion that every detail you find in the Genesis text you’d better put full weight on, because the chances are there are thousands of details that would corroborate that that have just dropped out in the interest of brevity. So far from not taking Genesis seriously we should be overly scrupulous about how we take it because every time the New Testament amplifies Genesis it gives you more details, not less, and it takes it very literally.

So here in Genesis 4 the obvious point is that Cain slew Abel and God says He puts a mark on him, Genesis 4:11, “And now thou art cursed from the earth, and has opened her mouth to receive thy brother’s blood from thy hand. [12] When thou tillest the ground, it shall not henceforth yield unto thee its strength; a fugitive and a vagabond shalt thou be in the earth. [13] And Cain said unto the LORD, My punishment is greater than I can bear. [14] Behold, thou hast drive me out this day from the face of the earth; and from Thy face shall I be hidden; and I shall be a fugitive…” and so on, “every one that finds me shall slay me.” Obviously he had a problem, everybody that was existing then was in the family. And there was to be a family type vengeance and so therefore Cain was thrown out of the family and excluded geographically from that locale to survive, and he later built up a city from his own family.

Now the problem here is that when Cain went out he realized that there would be a problem of vengeance. Genesis 4:15, “And the LORD said unto him, Therefore whosoever slays Cain, vengeance shall be taken on him sevenfold.” Now this declares that at this point in history there was no capital punishment. It was absolutely forbidden because no man could take upon himself the prerogative of taking another man’s life. This is God’s prerogative and God’s alone. And therefore God said if there’s any killing going on, I will do the killing; you leave your hands off. We have application of that today as believers. Our job is not to discipline other believers; if you see another believer out of line you pray for him but you don’t gossip and malign and tear him down in front of other people or behind his back on the telephone. This is the way we do it, we don’t have to have a knife; actually that’s the worst kind, you can get slaughtered by what people say about you and it ruins worse than if they had taken a knife to you; knife wounds heal, sometimes. So at least in Genesis 4 here we have a situation of the antediluvian problem.

Now we come to the establishment of the fourth divine institution, government, in Genesis 8:21. Now here we have the universal flood, it says so in 2 Peter 3:9 and in Genesis 8:20 Noah built an altar, [22] “And the LORD smelled a sweet savor;” and He said natural law will now be uniform, and therefore the presupposition of modern science is valid from this point on but not before; it is invalid to extrapolate natural law beyond Genesis 8:22 as far as geology and so on is concerned. In Genesis 9 God goes on to say, and He makes this important announcement, [9:2] “The fear of you and the dread of you shall be upon every beast of the earth, and upon every fowl of the air…” Verse 4, the “flesh with the soul thereof,” there’s the phrase I mentioned before, “the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. [5] And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man’s brother will I require the life of man. [6] Whoso,” and Genesis 9:6 is the statement that sets up the fourth divine institution, “Who sheds man’s blood, by man shall his blood be shed; for in the image of God made he man.” Now watch it, it’s not saying “whoso sheds man’s blood God’s going to shed his blood.” It says “man is going to shed his blood.”

Now this is not talking about vengeance. Vengeance has nothing whatever to do with the subject here; all these people that talk about capital punishment always try to make it out as I’m saying that we’re for vengeance. Vengeance is not the motive here; the vengeance we saw in Genesis 4 is prohibited by God. What’s happening in Genesis 9:6 is that God assigns “the man” literally in the Hebrew, meaning equal to mankind. He now says I delegate My authority to take life to mankind, and hence we have the origination of the fourth divine institution. Capital punishment is the base of government. I don’t know what you think about capital punishment but as far as the Word of God is concerned that is the sign and the basis for government; it means that God, of all the prerogatives God has taken the highest prerogative, His right to take life, and has invested into the hands of mankind. Why? You have the explanation in the context. Genesis 9:11, “I will establish My covenant with you; neither shall all flesh be cut off any more by the waters of a flood; neither shall there any more be a flood to destroy the earth,” and that last phrase, “to destroy the earth” means not just the human race, this means geologically and in every way, a total complete destruction as amplified in 2 Peter 3:3-9 where Peter says the first heavens and the first earth are qualitatively different from the second heavens and the second earth.

But this last phrase in verse 11 indicates that God was going to set in motion a certain kind of history from the flood down to the Second Advent of Jesus Christ. During this time God says I will not discipline the human race and judge it. See up to this point evidently God directly judged. So if this be the case, put yourself in God’s position. How are you going to control sinful humanity if you have already promised sinful humanity that you’re not going to judge them? Do you see the problem? In other words, up to this point judgment was already imminent. For example, the prophet Enoch, who preached, he was the seventh man removed from Adam in the antediluvian civilization, you have one of his sermons recorded in the book of Jude. And in this sermon Enoch preaches about the return of Jesus Christ even before Noah. In other words, judgment was imminent upon the antediluvian generation but now, since the flood, God has promised I’m not going to judge you by a flood; He’s going to judge later on by fire, but there’ll be a long time period. So now if He’s going to postpone His judgment and not make it moment by moment imminent what does that do to control a sinful lust in human society? Well, He’s obviously got to set up some means of control and so that’s the reason for the fourth divine institution. Please notice, originally it was not set up for welfare; it was set up, not as a charitable institution; government was set up originally to control evil. Now that’s a prime function and to do so by the delegated rights that God has given it.

Now, capital punishment was used in the nation Israel. Turn to Exodus 20 and the commandment, “Thou shalt not kill,” which does not say “Thou shalt not kill.” Exodus 20:13, this is many, many centuries later, God has established the divine institution of government and now He’s using one operation of that which is found in Israel. In Exodus 20:13 He gives the ten statements, as the Hebrew says, and one of these is “Thou shalt not kill.” First of all we distinguish this verb; this is the verb to murder, it’s not the verb to necessarily take life all the time, it can be used that way, there are many other verses that indicate this. If God had wanted to say “thou shalt not absolutely kill,” then he would used another verb. The verb here means murder and if you want to check this out you look at the latest Jewish translation of the Old Testament, the new Jewish Version and you will see they have translated this “Thou shalt not murder.”

Now there’s an obvious reason why he says this, because in the rest of the Law how do they enforce it? How do they enforce the law in the Law? Stoning, that’s capital punishment. So the very law that everybody refers to as teaching “thou shalt not kill” contradicts itself if that’s your interpretation because God commands that the people who break this Law in a certain area, certain crimes, be killed, capital punishment.

Turn to Romans 13; you say well maybe that’s just for the Old Testament, certainly that doesn’t have to do with the New Testament, in the New Testament we have the Sermon on the Mount, turn the other cheek, capital punishment is outmoded. Is it? Romans 13:4-6, “…the minister of God to thee for good. But if thou do that which is evil, be afraid; for he bears not the sword in vain:” now who’s he talking about if he’s not talking about capital punishment. This is the Roman government and he’s saying this man who wears the sword on his side is “the minister of God to thee for good.” Now why is a minister with his sword on his side a minister “to thee for good?” It’s obvious, because he stands for capital punishment and the taking of life and the enforcement of law. And so in verses 4-6 Paul identifies and upholds the fourth divine institution, including capital punishment.

For example, you say well, you’re just talking about the Roman Empire; he himself basically wouldn’t go along with it. All right, turn to Acts 25:11, Paul is pleading his case before the court, he’s before Roman jurisprudence and he makes this point. He says, “For if I be an offender, or have committed anything worthy of death, I refuse not to die,” he says I have no moral scruples about capital punishment, “but if there be none of these things of which these accuse me, no man may deliver me unto them. I appeal to Caesar.” His appeal is to law and order and he says I uphold the law when it says capital punishment I will go with it, gladly. And the Word of God has nothing against capital punishment. You find in the last time, at the Second Advent when the Lord Jesus Christ comes in Revelation 19 He comes and what does He do? He exercises capital punishment.

So capital punishment is the modus operandi of the fourth divine institution, not that that’s the only thing but that is symbolic of the whole, [think he says Latin phrase, something so toto], the part for the whole meaning that we have here the capital punishment as a sign that God has delegated right to rule to humanity and it is all right for men to take other men’s life in due process of law. And that is the fourth divine institution.

Now, there are some limitations on government, two in particular, and these we must treat before going further. We didn’t say government; we said national government is the fourth divine institution. So we go to Genesis 11, the tower of Babel. Genesis 11:1, “And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech. [2] And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, they found a plain…” and so on, and they got together and built the first U.N. building, and the Lord said, in verse v, “And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men built. [6] And the LORD said, Behold, the people are one,” watch this analysis now of world government, “Behold, the people are one, and they have al one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do. [7] Go, let us,” Trinity, “go down,” God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit, “and there confound their language that they may not understand one another’s speech.” And with this God produced a linguistic and cultural fracture into the human race, and also racial fracture, here’s your origin of races; linguistic, cultural and racial fracture. But there’s a theological reason for this.

It’s not just a freaky evolutionary pattern of development, the reason for it is, and the best illustration I’ve ever come up with to explain this is think back to the Titanic; the whole point in the great ocean fiasco of the Titanic was can the United States build a hull that will survive a penetration in the other part of the hull; in other words, here you build a boat and you’re going to build it with different holds in it so that if the boat gets a hole in the hull and this hull fills up with water the boat continues to move because it’s sealed off from the rest of the boat and you have the boat still can go on. Of course, what happened to the Titanic, you had a slit right down through all of the holds that were flooding. But nevertheless they’ve redesigned hulls and so on since then, naval architecture. But the point here is that you have to divide the boat to save the boat. And that’s what God is doing with the human race. He’s culturally, linguistically and racially fractures it so that when you have the human race operate in history, say this is the whole human race, the sons of Adam, they are divided like this. This means that you could have one whole society go on negative volition and it’s contained within that society, and another society can be used to judge that society and so on, and you have national wars and the balance of power and so on throughout history. But one of the primary reasons for cultural, racial and linguistic divisions is the preservation of the human race because of the reason of verse 6.

Now admittedly there’s a tendency in our time, especially since the development of nuclear weapons, to desire some form of world order, obviously. This is very understandable to any thinking individual, but what God says is that it is unsafe to have world government until Jesus Christ returns, reason being that when you at last have the unity who’s going to be in charge at the top? Who’s going to be at the top? We know who the god of this world is, Satan. And so the tendency to world government has to be viewed with good and evil. In one sense it’s a legitimate desire to have world government, but on the other hand the Bible tells us you can’t have it until Christ returns because you cannot have the personnel to maintain the thing and make it go; you will destroy the human race, so therefore tendencies in our time toward world government are anti humanitarian and if they are allowed to continue with the destruction of national sovereignty, such as giving the United Nations parts of the United States sovereignty we are asking for destruction.

Any group that is campaigning for the decrease of the sovereignty of the United States or any other nation is a group that is anti humanitarian and is a group which, if allowed to continue, will ultimately wind up destroying thousands and thousands and thousands of people. We have already seen what world government will do; we have seen that world government, even in a weak form such as existed during the latter days of World War II when the so-called United Nations forces, which were not United Nations but are so-called in all the high school history texts now, the United Nations won World War II. The United Nations did not win World War II, they weren’t even in existence in World War II. So that’s a misnomer and a falsification in history books. The allies won World War II. But there again you have the problem that war was not conducted according to Biblical principles with the result that we never finished World War II and thousands and thousands of young American boys have lost their lives in police actions that are basically continuing World War II. Now you see this in Katanga, you saw this in the Congo, where you had these Congolese trying to solve their own problem within their own domain of national sovereignty, and you have the United Nations flown in there and by the time they got through we had people machine gunning Red Cross workers and ambulances and everything else. So that’s what happens when you have world government involved in something and so one of the great problems we as Bible believing Christians have today is the coalescence of thought around such concepts as decline of national sovereignty. This is, of course, anti Scriptural.

The second limitation on government, besides its being national and not international, is that of Matthew 22:21, this is a second restraint on government. In Matthew 22:21 we have the classic statement, “Render, therefore, unto Caesar the things which are Caesar, and unto God the things which are God’s,” and with this the Lord Jesus Christ declares that we as citizens of the greater kingdom have two allegiances. Under Jesus Christ we are to follow out His instructions for obedience to government authorities. If you’re ever around people, particularly young that fret and fuss because of authority, make it clear that we as Bible believing Christians do not submit to government authority because we bootlick the authority. We’re not submitting to government authority because we’re afraid of the authority. We’re not submitting to government authority because we’re trying to gather brownie points to these in charge. We’re not submitting to government authority because we like the people in charge. We submit to government authority because God Word’s tell us to do, period. And that’s why we submit to government authority. It does not depend on who is in charge and it does not depend on whether we like the man personally; we submit out of the principles of the Word of God; that is the basis for our citizenship allegiance.

Now, however, Jesus says there is a line; there is a time that comes when a Christian must disobey his government. That point is reached when the government explicitly contradicts the statements of the Word of God. When the government commands you and prohibits you from carrying out the Word of God and denying the Word of God, then the Christian is authorized to disobey. Now we have to guard this, there is a civil disobedience in Scripture but it’s of a different kind than you think. It’s not the kind pedaled by the National Council of Churches and other apostate organizations where you have clergymen going out and trying to ramrod something through the federal government, or where you have the riots start and where the clergymen are responsible for breaking this and throwing bricks at policemen and so on. If I ever see that I’ll get out with the policeman and throw bricks back at the clergymen and love it; the white cars make good targets.

In Matthew 22:21 we have this problem of civil disobedience. Now if you study the book of Acts the way in which the apostolic church disobeyed the government was the following: first, they were clear on what principle the Word of God had that was being violated. It wasn’t some random thing, it was a specific point of doctrine and specifically it was the prohibition of teaching the Word of God. The governmental authorities in certain places prohibited the teachings of the Word of God. If this happened, then we as Christians must disobey any such government edict. For example, if the genocide treaty passes the United States Senate and the cause about mental harm done to various minorities is not clarified, then all of Christian missions will be in violation of international law because this United Nations treaty says that no one has the right to cause physical or mental harm to any race, religion or any other group, subgroup of the human race. Well obviously the preaching of the gospel does cause something which clever lawyer could say causes mental harm, in which case, obviously, unless this is clarified, the Christian missions will be outlawed by international law. However at this point I would say to the Christian missionary, go ahead and disobey international law; this is rendering unto Caesar those things which are Caesars and unto God those things which are God’s. At this point Christian disobedience would be valid.

However, after they got the principle that then was being violated, they then submitted to the punishment. Nowhere in the book of Acts do you have them causing a revolution. Nowhere! Always the Christian disobeys prayerfully but always if he’s arrested he takes his knocks, always in the book of Acts. And this is what distinguishes the rebellion of today that’s passing for legitimate civil disobedience with the civil disobedience in the book of Acts. Christians in that day were willing to go to jail for their convictions and to stay in jail if that was necessary. And of course they had many great revival services in the jails and that was actually how thousands of people were won to Christ, through the jails. So obviously again there was no stopping these early Christians.

Well, these are the two restrictions the Word of God places on government; (1) it is not to be international, and (2) it is not to violate the mandates of the Word of God.

Now I would like to conclude by taking up certain problems with the area of capital punishment, three in particular; three classic objections are raised by Christians to the problem of capital punishment and why it is not valid. So I’d like to deal with each of these objections today and next time we’ll deal with the doctrine of war.

The first objection is that capital punishment does not deter crime. Capital punishment does not deter crime, therefore it is useless, therefore we should not have it. And they can site various statistics; that if it’s capital punishment’s job to deter crime it’s doing a miserable job because there does not seem to be a statistical difference in crime between areas of capital punishment and areas where they don’t have capital punishment. But there are two fallacies in this objection. The first fallacy is that basically capital punishment was never advocated in the first place to deter crime. It was advocated to carry out the judgment of God upon evil, so therefore capital punishment is retributive and now deterrent. Capital punishment is the retributive justice of God, and by the way, retributive justice is the only justice there is; there’s no such thing as redemptive justice, it’s only retributive justice in God’s Word. And so the first fallacy of this objection to capital punishment is that it was never intended to deter crime in the ultimate sense. It’s job was to carry out the judgment of God. If you wish a [can’t understand word] position I suggest John Calvin’s book on civil government. If you really want a picturesque one read Martin Luther’s treatment of the peasant’s revolt in which he, far from siding with the people that were revolting against government in his day said these people are so fixed I think we ought to unbutton their ears by shooting cannon balls through them. And that was how Martin Luther handled the problem in his day. So Martin Luther and John Calvin always sided with divine institution number four.

So fallacy number one is that it was not given to deter, it was given to carry out the judgment of God against evil.

The second fallacy of this objection is that if it were properly administered it would deter… if it were properly administered it would deter. What do I mean by “properly administered?” Just the way it was administered in the Old Testament. In the Old Testament capital punishment was only administered to certain crimes. And first of all there had to be a careful investigation and trial. And by the way, capital punishment was never given in the Old Testament unless there had been two eyewitnesses to the crime. There always had to be two eyewitnesses or more to the crime before capital punishment. It could not be done on circumstantial evidence; it had to be done by direct eyewitness, but if there were and it passed the trial, then the second way was that the executers were the witnesses; the people who threw the first rocks had to be the witnesses. Now this was very wise the way this was engineered, because if you know that your testimony is going to sentence someone to death and you’ve got to look them in the eye and throw a rock at them, you’re going to be careful what you say. So they had sort of, you might say a self-correcting device to straighten out the court system in that public execution was done with the witnesses casting the first stone.

The third thing about it was that the execution was public. It was public and the body had to be displayed until sundown. Now the reason for this wasn’t that people rejoiced in the gory details of death; it was a reminder that God’s wrath must be satisfied.

Now we find the objection of Edgar Smith who was a man who was sentenced to die in the Saturday Evening Post, April 1968, in speaking out said this, and he was talking about New Jersey where he was sentenced on death row for some ten years, and here he was seated and seated and seated and he’d go to trial and they’d put it off and all the rest of the rigmarole and he made this…and I think this was a legitimate objection to this point. He said: “the state claims it kills people to deter others from killing; yet the state goes to extraordinary lengths to keep killing hidden from the very persons intended to be deterred.” And his point was that really, put it in blunt terms the way today of carrying out capital punishment, if you’re going to do it the Biblical way is to have it on TV. Now that may be grotesque and brutal but that’s the way it should be if it is engineered to deter crime, that is must be public, a man must be condemned by eyewitnesses, positive proof and when he is, that should be done in public for all to view. So this is the way the crime deterrent [can’t understand word], I do not consider it to be a serious objection to capital punishment.

The second objection to capital punishment is the retributive justice theory. That says that you people who are for capital punishment, you hold to an idea of retribution, you hold to the idea that society must execute its vengeance on the criminal. And you people are bloodthirsty and so on. Now, the answer to this second objection is the following: there are two fallacies here. The first one is who is the one owed the debt? Here you have a criminal, let’s make three parties: the criminal, the victim, and the state. This criminal makes an assault on his victim; he kills the victim. What law has he violated? He has not violated or done wrong to the victim at all; he has done wrong to the state, the state made the law. I once asked this to a lawyer and he said that the crime is never against the person, the crime is against the state because it’s a state law that has been violated.

Let me illustrate: if you have children and you tell a child not to go down the street with his football because if he goes down there, sure enough he’s going to kick it through the neighbor’s window. So being an average kid he goes down the street just like you didn’t tell him and he kicks the ball and it goes right through the window. So now he’s broken the window. Whose law did he violate? Your neighbor’s or yours? He violated yours, you were the one that laid the law down and to you he must answer. So similarly the state lays the law down and the criminal violates the state’s law, not the victim; he violates the state’s law. This is why in the Bible the crime is never against the person hurt; the crime is always against God. And so in Psalm 51, David, after having raped this woman and slaughtered her husband he could turn around and say God, “Against Thee and Thee only have I sinned.” How could he say such a thing, when he committed this crime against this woman and against her husband? Because the crime was against the one who made the law; they didn’t make the law, God made the law. The crime is always against the one who made the law.

So therefore if God’s law says “thou shalt not kill,” then capital punishment does not proceed out of a social vengeance. Capital punishment proceeds out of God’s vengeance. It’s not society’s vengeance at all; society’s vengeance has nothing whatever to do with it. Therefore retributive… this is a wrong understanding of attributive justice; attributive justice means you owe God a debt, you violated His law and that law must be paid, therefore you pay it to God, His means is capital punishment.

The second fallacy of this is that retributive justice would have the desired social redemptive effect if it were, again, carried out properly. It did in Israel and in Israel you find out how it was carried out in a proper way.

Now the third objection and probably to me the most serious objection to capital punishment is that it cannot be justly administered and this carries great weight. Capital punishment cannot be justly administered. At that time he was Governor of Oregon, Governor Hatfield said in Christianity Today, June 21, 1963, “I am opposed to capital punishment but I’m not opposed to capital punishment on a religious basis because frankly I have not yet been convinced that our faith is clear cut in its teachings one way or the other.” Well, that’s because he hasn’t studied Genesis 9. “I’m opposed to capital punishment because of economics; that is, the poor die and the rich get off.” Now there he has a point, and it’s quite obvious. You know happens, the man who has the wealth to hire the shrewd lawyers always gets off; he gets himself declared insane or something else, momma dropped him on the head when he was a baby and his rattle fell in his eye or something and so this created some great distortion in his life and this caused him to go out and take a hatchet and axe three or four girls or something. So therefore we should let him out after 30 says so he can take his hatchet and axe some more, solve the population problem or something.

So we have this problem, that capital punishment cannot be justly administered. However, there is one fallacy basically to this: God knew that capital punishment could not be justly administered when He set it up. Do you know why? Whose son died under the mismanagement of capital punishment? Jesus Christ? God’s own Son died under the wheels of injustice. They didn’t have any right to execute Jesus Christ; no crime was ever proved against the person of Jesus Christ, and yet God foreknowing in His omniscience that His own Son would die under the wheels of capital punishment, unjustly administered, even set it up. So therefore the objection to capital punishment cannot be justly administered, I do not think carries any weight whatever. Though it’s true, and I think the solution is in our time with the courts the way they are we’d better straighten up the courts before we go back to capital punishment. That’s true, but the point is that ultimately before God this cannot stand; God’s reply to a person who says but God, you can’t enforce it, the courts make mistakes, innocent people someday are going to be killed. And I can just imagine God saying yes, and whose Son was it that got it? His own Son! So therefore this I do not consider an objection to capital punishment.

Our time is short tonight, next week we’ll get into the area of warfare and the Christian relation as a military officer and enlisted man and his role toward the Lord Jesus Christ in the military.