Ethical issues arise all the time and often times impact our country and our national debate. Gun control is certainly a part of the national discussion right now as we have had recent mass murders with the use of guns. What does God allow Christians to do?
So, that is the question we are interested in answering in this study and we plan to do so, as in every question, simply by allowing God to teach us through His word. My thoughts will be presented over three or four Daily Droplets.
PRELIMINARIES:
I wish to get two preliminary points out of the way but which undergird this whole discussion and we’ll emphasize these points several times in our study:
1. God is love (1 John 4:8). This is not to say that God “chooses” to love the unloveable. “Love” is not a choice with God. Love is God. God can never do an unloving thing. Never. In this discussion, that means that anything God does is the loving thing to do.
2. My physical life is not as important as my relationship with God. This is almost as important to grasp as the first point. Life is not my most precious possession; faith in God is my most precious possession. There are various passages that teach this concept (cf. John 12:25).
There are times, there are sins, that men commit that violates their relationship with God to such a degree that God takes their physical life from them. We will also notice that God puts into the hands of men the authority, even the responsibility, for taking the lives of wicked men.
Let’s begin in the beginning…
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THE WICKED IN THE DAYS OF NOAH:
The first murder in the Bible, of course, was when Cain killed his brother Abel, in Genesis 3. God did not kill Cain for that murder. Out of His grace, God allowed Cain to live. A few generations after Cain, we have Lamech who brags about killing a man who wounded him (4:23). God does not kill Lamech either. But, that line of wicked descendants of Cain intermarry with the faithful line of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth, and wickedness overwhelms the human population.
The earth became so filled with violence that God decided to destroy the earth. God brought the flood on the earth and destroyed everyone on earth except Noah and his family, eight people. God is love and God kills people. They had violated their relationship with God and, to preserve peace to some degree on earth, God killed everyone who would not listen to Him.
There is a significant statement made after Noah came off the ark. The statement is made in Genesis 9:6. This verse is extremely important because in it, God puts the authority, the obligation, the right of capital punishment into the hands of mankind. If one man kills another man, then the murderer is to be put to death by the community of mankind.
From that point on, God gives a society the right to kill (capital punishment) those who do wickedness against God and against their fellow man. There are some, select occasions where God kills; for example, in destroying the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah and various other cities in that area. The God of love did that because too many had violated their relationship with God.
But, once God creates the nation of Israel, He commands the nation of Israel to implement capital punishment on a host of evil actions…
Paul Holland
