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.