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Exchanged Glory III: Wise as Serpents
His commandments were designed to build strong families. Strong families tend to produce people who work hard for one another. People who work hard for one another create strong societies. Strong societies bring wealth, health, and happiness. God’s rules are based on love.
In the Old Testament, a number of sexual sins called for the death penalty.
If a man commits adultery with another man's wife — the wife, say, of his neighbor — both the man and the woman, the adulterer and adulteress, must be put to death.
(Leviticus 20:10, The Message)
This penalty in the above verse was for a sexual act between two people, not for lusting after someone in your heart. As I mentioned earlier in this book, though both sins are considered adultery, one is more harmful to society than the other.[65]
I don’t believe these sorts of penalties are appropriate in modern nations, but I do believe we can learn from the principles behind them. What are those principles? First, God takes family very seriously. Our homes are the most important life training schools, psychiatric centers, and preventive medicine practices in the world. When the family falls apart, the entire culture gets sick. Studies have shown the damage done by the breakdown of the relationship between husbands and wives.[66] These sorts of laws help us to see that violating the marriage union is a major violation of God’s love.
God designed sex to be an exclusive bond between a man and a woman. We can’t step outside His boundaries without causing great pain. He established the death penalty for adultery to protect ancient Israel from the damage this sin would produce.
Second, the death penalty laws for adultery (and many other sexual sins) had the effect of driving those sins into secret. The punishment could only be carried out if there were two or three witnesses.
But only on the testimony of two or three witnesses may a person be put to death. No one may be put to death on the testimony of one witness. The witnesses must throw the first stones in the execution, then the rest of the community joins in. You have to purge the evil from your community.
(Deuteronomy 17:6-7, The Message)
How often is a sexual sin witnessed by two or three witnesses besides the participants? If the adulterers were careful, it was unlikely that they would be caught. It was only when they were open about their relationship that witnesses were likely to see them.
The effect of these laws was not so much to stamp out adultery and other sexual sins, but to limit their damage by driving them from sight. God knows that when sexual sins are flaunted, they tend to spread.
I also received a report of scandalous sex within your church family, a kind that wouldn't be tolerated even outside the church: One of your men is sleeping with his stepmother. …Your flip and callous arrogance in these things bothers me. You pass it off as a small thing, but it's anything but that. Yeast, too, is a "small thing," but it works its way through a whole batch of bread dough pretty fast. So get rid of this "yeast." … (emphasis added)
(1 Corinthians 5:1; 6-7, The Message)
When bread is made, only a small amount of yeast is needed. It quickly permeates the entire batch of dough. In the same way, when sexual sin is openly practiced, it tends to spread among us. If the United States is an example, we see that now that we have let immorality into the open, it has grown to the point where it pushes at us from every side. The Law’s punishments were put in place to avoid this sort of situation.
I believe that the current state of a number of criminals in western countries teaches us a third reason for the death penalty: Once a person has crossed the boundary into certain sexual crimes, it is hard for them to stop. They tend to become repeat offenders.[67]
While I was writing this chapter, I read a newspaper article which stated that many communities have started to post on the internet the names, addresses, and sometimes the pictures of convicted sex offenders. Why are we doing this?
Consider the internal struggle of a sex offender before committing a crime. Basic human decency and fear of punishment keep most of us from seriously considering sins of this nature. A sex offender, however, is driven by an evil that is so powerful that it overcomes even these strong deterrents. There is a fire burning in his heart that is not easily quenched. For some, jail time does little to extinguish it.
Our society is searching for a deterrent that will be powerful enough to hold it back. We know that if it isn’t controlled, it will lead to similar crimes in the future. We post the identities of sexual predators on the internet in the hope that if the community is involved, their watchful glare will be able to keep the offender’s inner demons from rising to the surface.
The sorts of sexual sins that lead to crimes are one flavor of what I call stubborn sexual sins. I am grateful to God that my own flavor didn’t tempt me to illegal activities, but I know that if it did, the thread of punishment would not have quenched its driving hunger. Overcoming these sorts of sins is not simple. Though I have been able, by God’s grace, to avoid falling into outward sexual sins for decades, I walked with Jesus for more than thirty years before I resolved my emotional struggles. It will take me five books to describe my journey. It is not easy to go through a spiritual, emotional, and mental sexual reorientation.
One purpose of Old Testament punishments was to “purge the evil from your community” (Deuteronomy 17:7). I believe that the death penalty was implemented, in part, because once a person had given himself over to certain sins, it was extremely difficult for the person to purge the evil from themselves. God knew that the inner insanity that led to these crimes couldn’t be easily satisfied, changed, or caged. In ancient Israel, before the coming of the Messiah, there was little hope of redemption. The Righteous Judge decided that it was best for everyone if the offenders were removed.
Since the coming of the Messiah, the world is a different place. We have the blood of Jesus and the power of the Holy Spirit in ways that weren’t available to ancient Israel. We have the church to be salt and light (Matthew 5:13-16). We can become dead to sin through baptism (Romans 6) and can receive a new nature in Christ:
Therefore, if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creation; old things have passed away; behold, all things have become new.
I mentioned earlier that I believe the work of Jesus allows us to show mercy in our punishments, but we should also remember that it only changes the nature of those who turn to Him. While we offer a chance for transformation, we must also stress the seriousness of the battle. If we underestimate what we are facing, we will create societies in which perversity spins out of control. In many ways, I believe western societies are doing that.
Unfortunately, rather than turning to the God who has sent His Son to bring us the answers, some are trying to cage only the most extreme demons through external rules and threats. I hope that we succeed well enough to protect ourselves from heinous crimes, but we aren’t getting to the root of the problem. Jesus is the only real answer.
What is interesting to me in all of this is that we are learning through experience what I believe God taught ancient Israel through its civil punishments. Sexual sins bring great trouble to a culture, and it is difficult to rehabilitate those who become bound by them.
Solomon spoke of the justice that came to those who had committed adultery. Thank God that we can be saved from this through the mercy of our Savior.
…she said to him “…Come, let's make love all night, spend the night in ecstatic lovemaking! My husband's not home; he's away on business, and he won't be back for a month." …Soon she has him eating out of her hand, bewitched by her honeyed speech. Before you know it, he's trotting behind her, like a calf led to the butcher shop, like a stag lured into ambush …Countless victims come under her spell; she's the death of many a poor man. She runs a halfway house to hell, fits you out with a shroud and a coffin.
(Proverbs 7:13; 18-19; 21-22; 26-27, The Message)
Do you see the connection between the Law and God’s love? When I was young, I had a difficult time understanding it. I tended to think that if you loved someone, you would help them to feel good about themselves, and the Law seemed to have the opposite effect.
My confusion resulted from my love of simplicity. Life was more complicated than my naïve heart could comprehend, and I needed God to open my eyes to the truth. He used the Old Testament civil punishments to help me see. His commandments were designed to build strong families. Strong families produce people who work hard for one another. People who work hard for one another tend to create strong societies. Strong societies tend to bring wealth, health, and happiness. God’s rules are based on love.
In closing, I need to once again warn against becoming a vigilante. I have written this Appendix to help us understand sex, not to encourage private citizens to take matters into their own hands. Vigilantes are guilty and deserve to be punished as criminals themselves.
If we want a just society, we have to proclaim what God says about all of our sins, starting with our ungodliness. If we don’t fix that, we won’t be able to fix much else. Only the God of the Bible can enable us to see what is happening to us. Until large numbers of people find a relationship with Him, our culture won’t be able to make sense of our humanity. We won’t know how to deal with the inner condition that produces sex crimes.
Vigilante violence against those who sin sexually is so far from what we need that I can hardly speak against it strongly enough. Let’s pray for repentance, faith, and widespread revival. Let’s offer the gospel of Christ which brings true hope to the world. Along with that, we can work through our legal system to do what makes sense in our nations. But remember, if those steps aren’t enough to turn back evil in our lifetime, we have to trust the Judge of the earth who told us to love our enemies (Romans 12:19-21).
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