Capital Punishment and Church Discipline: Lessons from Deuteronomy 13

If church discipline, and ultimately expulsion from the fellowship of the church, is the New Testament parallel to the capital punishment prescribed for certain sins in the Old Testament (as I have argued before), what can Deuteronomy 13 in particular teach us about the discipline of the church? Deuteronomy 13 has three specific stories of idolatry and false teaching, each with its own implications.

In Deuteronomy 13:1-5, Moses deals with false prophets, those who claim to speak for God or to have had dreams from God. These are not actually true prophets, but while claiming to speak for God, they were leading people to follow other gods. Moses says not to listen to these false prophets because God is using the false prophets to test His people, to see if they love Him completely (13:3). The people were urged to obey the commands of God completely (13:4) and to put this false prophet or dreamer to death. In so doing, they would purge the evil from among them (13:5).

What is the lesson for the church today? We must root out false teaching from the church. Those claiming to speak for God who are in fact leading people into idolatry must be removed from the church. These people are an evil that must be purged from the church if they refuse to repent of their false teaching. There are several important implications here. First, just because someone claims to speak for God does not mean that they really are speaking for God. We must test the spirits as John says to see what is from God (1 John 4:1). Second, we cannot sit idly by and allow false teaching to go unchecked. We cannot simply hope that it will go away or avoid the issue. False teaching must be dealt with by the church. As Paul says, we must nourished by the words of faith and of good teaching, but we should have nothing to do with irreverent and foolish myths (1 Timothy 4:6-7).

Deuteronomy 13:6-11 deals with a situation involving a close friend or family member. Moses mentions a person’s brother, their son or daughter, their wife, or their close friend. If any of these people tried to lead someone into the worship of other gods, then the person was not to spare or have sympathy on their relative or close friend, but they should cast the first stone in putting them to death for their idolatry (13:9). Their death was to serve as a witness or warning to all of Israel in order to prevent this kind of evil from happening among the people in the future (13:11).

This story is likely rather jarring to many Christians today. How could God command people to put their own family members to death, and what can this law have to do with Christians today? This law teaches us something very similar to what Jesus said in Luke 14:26, “If anyone comes to me and does not hate his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (ESV). If we refuse to obey the commands of God related to the discipline of the church because those who have broken God’s commands are our family or close friends, we are placing friends and family above God. This is a form of idolatry.

So the biblical command here is that we should not show partiality in how we obey God’s commands. If one of our friends or family members is causing problems in the church, teaching false doctrine, engaging in unrepentant sinfulness, then we should actually take the lead in expelling that person from the church if he or she refuses to repent. One of the reasons that church discipline is not practiced today is that church leaders are often afraid that if they deal with a certain person’s sins, then their parents or grandparents or children or friends, will be upset and leave the church because the church is “picking on” one of their family members. But here we see that family members or close friends should not oppose the discipline of those close to them, they should not shield them from that discipline, but they should actually take the lead in making sure that the discipline is carried out.

Another important principle from this section is found in Deuteronomy 13:11. The death of this idolator was to serve as a warning to the rest of the people so that they would be afraid and not engage in such evil. So the expulsion of a member from the church is to serve as a warning to the rest of the church. Paul makes the same point in 1 Timothy 5:19-20 in reference to church elders found to be in sin. If church leaders are found to be in sin, they are to be rebuked publicly “so that the rest might be afraid” (5:20). In other words, church leaders found to be in sin should not be fired discreetly, but they should be publicly rebuked before the church as a warning to the rest of the church. Here we see in both the OT and the NT that this act of capital punishment in the OT, now acted out through removing members from the church in the NT, is to be a warning or sign to the rest of the church that will hopefully keep them from similar kinds of evil.

Finally, Deuteronomy 13:12-18 deals with a situation where word has gotten out that an entire town has been given over to idolatry. Here Moses says that a thorough inquiry should be undertaken to make sure that these claims of idolatry are true (13:14). In other words, the people were not to act based on gossip or rumors, but they were to test the claims to determine if in fact that town was full of idolatry. If the claims of idolatry were substantiated, then the entire town was to be destroyed. They were to completely destroy the entire city so that God’s burning anger might be turned away from the land (13:17).

This text is slightly more difficult to make specific application because we have to ask what the modern parallel of this other town in the land would be. One possible application could be the relationships among churches today. Certainly some groups that call themselves Christian churches have been given over to idolatry. The are not worshipping the God revealed to us in His Word but some god they have created in their own image. I think Deuteronomy 13 would suggest that our churches must take pains to disassociate ourselves from these so-called churches that have become nothing more than houses of false teaching and idolatry. For some, this may mean disassociating from churches with which their church has a long-standing history when the other church begins to move away from God’s Word and obedience to God’s commands. God’s judgment will ultimately come on churches and pastors who are peddling false teaching and encouraging rebellion against God’s commands, and we should want to have nothing to do with alliances with those kinds of “churches.”

Finally, let me close with why I would write on a topic like this. First, I am preaching through the book of Deuteronomy, and much of this information simply comes from my recent sermon on Deuteronomy 13. But second, I think we as Christians need to be reminded of the unchanging nature of God, the continuity between the Old and New Testaments, and the continuing ability for God’s law to show us what godliness looks like. We are too prone to ignore much of the OT today, particularly the law, and we do so too our detriment. As I have been preaching through Deuteronomy, I have been reminded of the unchanging nature of God, and I have seen how an emphasis on the OT law can help us see what godly living looks like in the church and in our own lives. If our love for God is demonstrated by our obedience to His commands (John 14:15), then we certainly ought to want to know what His commands are and what obedience to those commands might look like today.

Capital Punishment and Church Discipline: Dealing with a Possible Misunderstanding

Earlier I made the argument that expulsion from the fellowship of the church is a New Testament application of the death penalty prescribed for breaking the Old Testament law in Deuteronomy. Before addressing some applications of this principle from Deuteronomy 13, I would like to address a possible misunderstanding of this claim.

Some Christians might look at this issue on its surface and think that the New Testament downplays the punishment for sin found in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy, people were to be put to death for sexual immorality (22:22 for example), but in the New Testament, people are to be removed from the fellowship of the church for sexual immorality. This seems, on its surface, to be a much lighter sentence. Some Christians might even express a sense of gratitude for not living in the days of the Old Testament because they feel they are not subject to these harsh Old Testament punishments.

This misunderstanding demonstrates an error concerning the nature of the church and the nature of church discipline. The author of Hebrews helps us understand this point:

28 Anyone who has set aside the law of Moses dies without mercy on the evidence of two or three witnesses. 29 How much worse punishment, do you think, will be deserved by the one who has trampled underfoot the Son of God, and has profaned the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and has outraged the Spirit of grace? 30 For we know him who said, “Vengeance is mine; I will repay.” And again, “The Lord will judge his people.” 31 It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God. (Hebrews 10:28-31, ESV)

The punishment for lawbreaking in the Old Testament, if confirmed based on the testimony of two or three witnesses, was physical death by stoning. The author of Hebrews shows us that the punishment for those who reject Christ is greater than the punishment for those who died under the law in the Old Testament. Those who reject Christ are subject to a fate worse than physical death, falling under the vengeance and wrath of the living God.

The New Testament does not lessen the penalties prescribed in the Old Testament, but in fact the New Testament demonstrates the true significance of the Old Testament law. Sin leads to death. And while it is true that sin leads to physical death, there is a fate worse than physical death, which is the ultimate consequence of sin, the judgment and wrath of  God.

Those who infer that the New Testament lightens the load of Deuteronomy’s punishments do not fully understand the importance of the church or the seriousness of church discipline. In removing a member from the church, the church is in effect proclaiming that the unrepentant sinner is subject to a fate worse than death. Paul refers to this as handing them over to Satan (1 Corinthians 5:5). As best the church understands, the unrepentant sinner is trampling underfoot the Son of God, and profaning the blood of the covenant by which he was sanctified, and outraging the Spirit of grace (adapted from Hebrews 10:29). Therefore this person has demonstrated that he is subject to the righteous vengeance and wrath of God as made visible in his removal from the fellowship of the church.

Church discipline is not an issue to be taken lightly, especially in a day when so many churches will welcome in those under discipline from another church. Church discipline is designed to help destroy the flesh of the unrepentant member (the unrepentant sin in their life). In other words, church discipline is intended to cause pain in the life of the unrepentant member with the hope that he will repent and be restored to God and to the church (1 Corinthians 5:5).

Some will object that the gospel is supposed to be good news, but this doesn’t sound much like good news to them. Where is the good news in all of this talk of church discipline? The good news of the New Testament is not that sin ceased to be a problem. In fact, the New Testament helps us to understand the dire nature of our enslavement to sin. But the good news comes as we see our desperate state of affairs in slavery to sin and death, and we realize that we can be free from the condemnation of sin and sentence of death through faith in Jesus Christ (Romans 7:24-8:1).

So we as Christians rightly ought to celebrate that we live after the coming of Christ. But we do not celebrate because the penalties of the Old Testament have been lessened, leaving us free from the penalty of capital punishment for breaking God’s law. We do not celebrate because we are free from the law in the sense that we can live however we choose, not having to worry about all those “bothersome” commands of God. Instead, we rejoice because we have seen the greatness of the solution to the problem of sin provided in Christ. We see what the Old Testament prophets longed to see (Matthew 13:17), and we see the fulfillment of what they prophesied about (1 Peter 1:10-12), the glory of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ. “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, that he might bring us to God, being put to death in the flesh but made alive in the spirit” (1 Peter 3:18, ESV).

Capital Punishment and Church Discipline

I have been preaching through Deuteronomy for several months now, and one issue that comes up repeatedly is capital punishment, specifically that capital punishment is prescribed by the law for certain sins. Deuteronomy 13 is a particularly drastic example of this. In Deuteronomy 13:1-5, the people are to put to death a false prophet or dreamer who attempts to lead them into idolatry. In so doing, they would purge the evil from among them (13:5). In Deuteronomy 13:6-11, they are to put to death a brother, a son or daughter, a wife, or a close friend who tried to entice them into idolatry. They were specifically not to shield this relative or close friend from the death penalty, but they were literally to cast the first stone (13:9). In so doing, they would cause the people to be afraid and to avoid this kind of evil and idolatry. And finally, in Deuteronomy 13:12-18, if it was confirmed that a city had been led away into idolatry, then the entire city was to be destroyed, including people and livestock, and the spoils of the city were to be gathered in the city square and burned.

In a sense, many of these passages on capital punishment are fairly easy to understand. But of course modern Christians will have many questions about how to apply these texts today. Some will apply these texts Christologically. In Deuteronomy 21:18-21, parents are commanded to take rebellious sons who refuse to respond to discipline to the elders so that the son might be stoned. Especially based on Deuteronomy 21:22-23, which talks about exposing the body of one executed by capital punishment on a tree, Christians will make application to Jesus, the obedient Son of God hung on a tree for those who had rebelled against God (Galatians 3:10-14).

Some will use these passages to point to the seriousness of sin and how all who have sinned by breaking God’s law are subject to death as punishment for their sin. I do not want to reject either of these views, but I do want to point to a further application of these laws on capital punishment based on Paul’s quotation from Deuteronomy in 1 Corinthians 5:13.

In 1 Corinthians 5, Paul is dealing with a situation in Corinth where a man was engaged in an inappropriate sexual relationship with his step-mother, his father’s wife who was not his mother. And not only did the Corinthian church refuse to do anything about this sexual immorality, but they somehow perversely took pride in it. Instead, the Corinthian church should have removed this person from their midst (5:2). In closing, Paul quotes from Deuteronomy to urge the people to “purge the evil person from among you” (5:13).

While Paul was quoting from Deuteronomy, we cannot highlight a specific verse from which he quoted because a form of this phrase is found 11 times in the book of Deuteronomy. In essence, what Paul did was take a phrase from Deuteronomy used to explain the reason for capital punishment, and he applied this phrase to the removal of a man accused of unrepentant sexual immorality from the church.

By implication here, we see one of the reasons for church discipline through the lens of capital punishment in Deuteronomy. In Deuteronomy, capital punishment was prescribed in order to purge evil from Israel. God was concerned with the purity of His people in the land, and rampant, unrepentant idolatry or immorality was to be purged from the land through death. The people’s continued existence in the land was tied to their obedience to God’s commands (Deuteronomy 28:62-63), and in order to maintain obedience to God’s commands and purity among the people evil had to be dealt with. The New Testament parallel to this punishment is not capital punishment, but expulsion from the church, the last step of church discipline (Matthew 18:15-17).

As in the Old Testament, so in the New Testament, God is concerned with the purity of His people. If God is concerned with the purity of His church, then we should have that same concern. The reason the church is obligated to remove unrepentant, persistent sinful members from the fellowship of the church is the same reason that the death penalty was prescribed in the Old Testament, to maintain the purity and holiness of the God’s people.

In the modern church, removing someone from the church is often considered unloving and cruel. Consequently, many churches have simply refused to obey the commands of Scripture, and specifically the commands of Jesus in Matthew 18:15-17,  regarding the discipline of the church. We need to be reminded that failure to keep God’s commands is not an act of love for God, nor is it an act of love for other people. Our love for God and our love for others is not to be defined by the world, but it is to be defined by obedience to the commands of God. As Jesus said, “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). Let us pray that the church will love God and love others by keeping His commandments, and that we will not allow the world to redefine for us what it means to love. Let us pray that the church will imitate the character of God by being concerned with the holiness and purity of the church so that we might serve as a witness of the transforming power of the grace of God.