The news of their adultery shocks your local church and reverberates throughout the community. The cause of Christ is harmed and your church is given a black eye. As a leader in your church you aren’t sure how you should handle the situation.
In your morning devotion you come upon Leviticus 20:10. “If a man commits adultery with the wife of his neighbor, both the adulterer and the adulteress shall surely be put to death.”
Is this your answer? Do you take these adulterers out into the cornfield behind your church and start pelting rocks at them—or perhaps put them to death by some other means?
I don’t know of many people that argue these two adulterers should be put to death. But I want to argue that our answer should actually be “yes” and “no”.
Why We Don’t Put Them to Death
We don’t burn witches anymore. And I imagine all of us celebrate this fact. But what is your justification for saying that the Old Testament no longer applies on these issues? This is an important question because how we answer this determines whether we’ll give muddy responses to contemporary issues related to morality.
The most common answer is the ‘Cause Jesus Argument. We no longer burn witches or stone adulterers because of Jesus. His example in John 7 is informative. According to Law he should have stoned the adulterous woman but he offered her grace. This should be our same response. We don’t follow the Old Testament law because it is trumped by grace.
While there is a good deal of truth to this position it doesn’t give us a full picture. If we believe that Jesus always responds to adultery with a “go and sin no more” we aren’t going to have a place for Revelation 21:8. It’s not popular but there will be a day when Jesus puts all of the unrepentant into the lake of fire.
So, why don’t we don’t we stone adulterers and burn witches? We don’t do this because we aren’t Old Testament Israel. Christians living in America aren’t living in a theocracy and because of the nature of the church I’m not sure we should even desire to be. America is not God’s chosen nation. Or Canada. Or any other nation where you live—even (in my opinion) modern Israel.
God’s people are those who have bowed a knee to King Jesus. We are his kingdom. This changes the way we apply civic laws in the Old Testament. I believe Tremper Longman III is correct:
God chooses to make his special presence known in the assembly of the saints. He will tolerate no blasphemy, heresy, or idolatry in the midst of his priestly people. God has given spiritual weapons to his spiritual people to fight these spiritual enemies. Thus, instead of seeking the death of blasphemers the church proceeds with their excommunication. (Longman, 122)
How We Do Put Them To Death
The one place where I would reword Longman’s quote is that I believe church discipline/excommunication is a type of death penalty. This I believe is, in part, what Paul is saying in 1 Corinthians 5:5 when he says, “you are to deliver this man to Satan for the destruction of the flesh”.
To excommunicate an unrepentant sinner is to put them into the region of death. This is equivalent to the death penalty. Life is found where God’s Word is found and God’s Word is found in His church. To be cut off from the people of God is to be cut off from her Head, and to be cut off from Christ is to be cut off from life.
But isn’t church discipline supposed to be restorative? Doesn’t 1 Corinthians 5:5 continue, “that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord”? Absolutely.
What happens when one who is in Christ, and has been raised with Christ, hits the region of the dead? Resurrection happens. Life is restored. That resurrection power which bolted Christ out of the grave is the same one which calls the sinner into repentance and back into the fold of the living.
This is why church discipline is so important. It’s important in the same way that it was important to Old Testament Israel, in order to create an increasingly holy people. Sin spreads. That is the sad tale of the history of Israel. They didn’t deal with sin in the camp and they became increasingly wicked.
But there is another reason why church discipline is important. Because sometimes we get to see a resurrection of sorts. The church faithfully responds to God’s call to cast out (to issue a death penalty of sorts) and then resurrection happens and such a person turns from sin and is restored.
