“Do not allow a sorceress to live. Whoever has sexual intercourse with an animal must be put to death. Whoever sacrifices to any gods, except the Lord alone, is to be set apart for destruction.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

The death penalty debate doesn’t rage quite as hot today as it did in the fairly recent past, but there are nonetheless still pretty strong opinions on both sides of the matter. The fact is, not very many people are put to death for crimes they have committed in this country as compared with where that annual number used to be. There are a number of reasons for this, some of which I personally find to be more compelling than others. In any event, one of the sources of support many death penalty proponents point to in order to justify their position is the Bible. Verses like this are often why. Not everyone, however, agrees. Let’s talk about what we see here and what we are supposed to do with it.

So far in the laws we have discussed, the death penalty has been assigned as the just punishment in several different cases. These three situations, though, are the first ones in which it is assigned for crimes that only involve one person who hasn’t physically done anything to anyone else. As for the second question of what we are supposed to do with this, the short answer is nothing. These laws were not for us and they don’t apply to us as members of the new covenant. The truth is that laws like this one should not have any impact on our death penalty debate because they are part of an old covenant that wasn’t meant for us. They were laws established for a nation that was being designed from the ground up to be a theocracy. That does not reflect our political or cultural situation at all. Thus, we shouldn’t take our cue from passages like this one.

From a larger perspective, there’s nothing in the Old Testament that somehow mandates that modern societies utilize the death penalty as a means of crime deterrent. My Old Testament professor in seminary, a man who had spent his life studying the Old Testament and its application to the modern world through the lens of the New Testament, was a committed pacifist and a staunch death penalty opponent. He engaged with these texts carefully and came to the conclusion that God’s clear preference was for life, and pursued those convictions accordingly.

Theologically speaking – and we have talked about this before – the truth is that all sin is deserving of death. When a person commits a sin, he is taking control of his life from the God who created and rightly claims ownership of it. The only means of getting right with God again is to give back what was taken. Because what was taken was our life, giving that back means not having it anymore. When you don’t have life, you have death. This is why the apostle Paul would much later write that the wages of sin is death. Because God is just, He will ultimately deliver that penalty to us. Because He is loving and compassionate, though, He does not do it right away. Sometimes, in some situations, He determines it to be wise and right that this particular punishment be delivered immediately, but in the vast majority of cases, He waits to allow a great deal more time for us to repent and receive the forgiveness available in Christ. As for why which situations merit which response, we don’t know. Sometimes it’s fairly obvious as with the matter of capital murder, but other times – like in the situations we see here – it’s not.

There are three situations here for which the death penalty is assigned. The first is practicing sorcery. A sorceress was a woman who utilized drugs and herbs for occult purposes. That word has come to have all sorts of other connotations in the centuries since, but the Hebrew word being used here is referencing that specific situation. A sorceress was someone who sought contact with the dead and the various powers believed to have authority over them. The second crime doesn’t require much in the way of explanation. Beastiality is something that has existed throughout the centuries of human history and is still a niche (and deviant) sexual practice today. The third situation here is someone who is actively worshiping the gods of the nations around Israel. The theme tying these three situations together is that they were all connected with pagan practices of one sort of another. These were all different manifestations of pagan worship.

Pagan worship was what the rest of the world did. It is what people have always done. It has taken on a variety of different forms over the centuries, but it has been the norm. Even today and even in modern, western nations it still happens. The gods have changed and the practices have changed, but it’s still there. Today we worship gods like the environment or science. In many parts of the cultural West, the current chief god is personal autonomy. Consider some of the laws that have been passed in various parts of the world lately like Scotland’s law that explicitly allows for criticizing religion, but calls for up to seven years in prison for doing something like “misgendering” another person. Consider the fact that by survey report, Americans are by-and-large not comfortable with the idea of abortion, especially abortion after the mark of viability outside the womb, and yet since the overturning of Roe with the Dobbs decision have voted against in restrictions on the practice in the various states the issue has been presented to voters. We don’t like to be told we can’t do something. If the god of personal autonomy demands human sacrifice or the allowance of personal mutilation, we will oblige.

The people God was making in Israel, was supposed to be different. Totally different. They were to reflect His own character which was the opposite of the world at every point. Now, as we have talked about, there were places He recognized they were further from that point than others such that He had to help them by meeting them where they were in order to move them in that direction more in some areas than others. But in order for them to become the fundamentally different people He was creating them to be, there were some things the people around them did that they simply could not do. Allowing for the existence of those things would weaken their foundation so much that they would not last as a unique people for any length of time. These practices would make them just like everybody else, ruining the whole program God was designing. If the world didn’t see they looked different, the world wasn’t going to recognize how much better life in His kingdom was than in the world.

As a result, God directed the people to totally and explicitly prohibit some practices. What’s more, He directed them to set the penalty for engaging with these as high as they possibly could. He wanted it to be clear to the people that these things were going to destroy them as a unique people and so the person who engaged in them would have to be destroyed as a consequence. When you are in the process of foundation building, you have to be extra careful to make sure you don’t have cracks early on in that vital phase of construction. This doesn’t mean that you’re okay with foundation cracks later, but you’re a little better protected from them once the foundation has been laid and the building has commenced.

Incidentally, we see something like this idea come into play in Acts 5 when the apostle Peter confronts Ananias and Sapphira for lying to the Holy Spirit about how much they were giving to the church. As we talked about a minute ago, God determined that the just penalty for their sin in that moment needed to be delivered immediately and stuck both dead on the spot for their sin. It served as a wake-up call to the rest of the church as to just how seriously they needed to take what it was they were doing together.

Now, none of this means for a second that the church should be looking to put anyone to death for any sins they commit. Like I said earlier, this passage (and Acts 5, for that matter) does not serve as an argument in favor of the death penalty. Nowhere in the Scriptures is the church given that kind of authority over anyone. Only the state is given that power. And remember that the state the apostles had in mind when they said God reserved that power only for the state was a explicitly pagan and anti-Christian government of Rome; they were not imagining a Christianized state when they said that.

At the same time, we are still called to be different as a people. God made us to be different. As the apostle Peter wrote in his first letter to the churches of modern-day Turkey, quoting from Leviticus, we are to be holy after the pattern of God’s holiness. Anything less won’t do. Things that make us look like the rest of the world we simply cannot abide. The pattern we follow in those times, though, is Jesus’ example of patience and gentleness in our calls for repentance and efforts toward restoration.

If you are a part of the church and you have a pattern of ongoing sin in your life, you need to get rid of that. You are supposed to be different from the world, not just like it. That’s true when it is a public pattern of sin; that’s doubly true when it is a private one. Private ones are like secret foundation cracks that you don’t notice until they finally grow big enough that they are threatening to bring down the whole building. Not a few entire ministries have been brought down because of a secret pattern of sin that stayed secret until it was big enough to wreck the house. You – we – are to be holy like God is holy. WIth His help and the loving accountability of one another, we can.