You know, that sounds nice and all. It even makes sense - if one makes Jesus into a Mother Theresa - Ghandi type.
Mother Theresa was flawed just as was the racist Ghandi. Jesus was not.
Sure - we ALL have too much sin in our lives. They did in the OT, too and the death penalty was on the table then - ordained by God both before and during the Law.
Yes it was on the table then. For the same reason as was a lot of the other cultural laws. But they aren't stoning anyone today either.
The purpose of the Cross was not to support or oppose the law. OT law or the laws of governing authorities.
The purpose of the Cross was to pay the spiritual penalty for mankind's sins. But that doesn't mean that individual human beings are released from paying consequences for their actions.
I didn't say they were released from paying the consequences. I just believe that what Jesus did on the Cross demands that we, as His followers, always support grace and mercy for those who have wronged us or who have set themselves up as our enemies.
HE ALWAYS seemed to advocate the opposite or something contrary to whatever the state was for.
And if we're not gonna trust the ones who have murdered 55 million to honor Christ with their actions toward the unborn, why would we trust their judgment with the born?
Paul said that we are obey governing authorities - he even said that they are avenging ministers of God and they don't bear the sword for naught. Don't you think that the governing authority of Paul's day - Rome - was evil and corrupt just like America?
Yes,but God has always used governments to bear the sword. He never says they are justified or righteously doing so.
It makes perfectly good sense for God to ALLOW governments to do this as it would be consistent with(when you take their stance on abortion into consideration) the government's anti-life stance.
It highlights just how much more we should be advocates of life and always grace and mercy when someone's life is at stake. It would be the type of display of love that would cause a lost world to pause just as it did when it heard that one of the family members told Dylann Roof that she forgives him.
He also said at one of his trials that IF he had done anything worthy of the death penalty that he did not refuse to die.
He also understood that he couldn't be killed unless GOD allowed them to do the killing. And there would still be nothing righteous about it.
The death penalty is nothing to scoff at, applaud, or boast in. But it is a necessary part of our laws and the corporate sins of a nation do not - according to Paul - nullify that.
It's a part, not even necessary, of MAN's laws. The Cross completed the need to do so in God's law.
Paul understood that an unrighteous government would do just the opposite of what a holy God would.
