p. 92 | The Death Penalty

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Mar 7, 1871

The Death Penalty.

The following questions are sent us from the Brighton (Iowa) Sabbath-school.

Are the people of God in this dispensation permitted to execute the death penalty as brought to view in Deut. 13: 6-11; Num. 15: 35; Lev. 24: 14, and many other places? If not, why not?

If it is answered that the ministration is changed, then can we appropriate to ourselves the blessings, or are we exposed to the curses, brought to view in Deut. 28?

Has God given a reason why the children of Israel were to abstain from the use of leaven on certain occasions, and what is it? See Ex. 23: 15, 18; Lev. 2: 4; Ex. 34: 25; &c.

ANSWER. The ten commandments were incorporated into the civil law of the Jews, and as such had the penalty of death attached to their violation. But they also occupied a higher position and performed another office as the moral law of God. As such they were binding on all the world, and had penalties attached which God will inflict at the general Judgment of the human race.

The Jewish government was at first a theocracy. God was their king. As such he gave them directions or laws in regard to their civil polity, or matters which concerned them as a nation. It was among these regulations that the penalty of death was attached to the violation of the commandments. So when an offender under that system was put to death, he suffered not as a violator of the law of God, but as a violator of the law of the commonwealth; that is, the penalty was not inflicted by God as the penalty of his moral law, but by the magistrate as the penalty of the law of the land; for the man who was thus put to death has yet to answer before God for his crime, the same as though he had not suffered death under that Jewish regulation.

In some particulars it is the same at the present day. Thus, God's law forbids murder. The law of the land also forbids it; and in some States the penalty is capital punishment. Now the man who is hung for murder pays the penalty of the prohibition against murder, so far as that prohibition is a part of the law of the land, but not so far as it is a part of the law of God; for he has yet to answer for the crime of murder before the Judge of all the earth.

With this view of the subject we can readily see how the abolition of the Jewish economy in nowise affects the perpetuity of the ten commandments as God's moral law, or the blessings and curses which attend their observance or violation as such. So the regulations of the Jewish civil law in regard to the sins forbidden in the ten commandments, do not affect the blessings and curses brought to view in Deut. 28; for these God attaches to the commandments as his moral law, the bestowal or infliction of which he retains in his own hands. And it will be noticed that the penalty of the moral law, God reserves to himself. In case of transgression, or obedience, the Lord is to do such or such things unto the people. But the infliction of the penalty of the civil law of the Jews was committed to them—“thou shalt surely kill him,” or “the congregation shall stone him with stones,” &c.

We do not know of any reason offered in the Bible for abstaining from the use of leaven on certain occasions. But it is the opinion of all Biblical critics to whose works we have access, that leaven is a symbol of corruption with the single exception of Matt. 13: 33, and its parallel passage, Luke 13: 31, and that abstaining from its use was to symbolize a state of separation and purity.