1 – Numbers 35:32-34 (ESV) 32 And you shall accept no ransom for him who has fled to his city of refuge, that he may return to dwell in the land before the death of the high priest. 33 You shall not pollute the land in which you live, for blood pollutes the land, and no atonement can be made for the land for the blood that is shed in it, except by the blood of the one who shed it. 34 You shall not defile the land in which you live, in the midst of which I dwell, for I the Lord dwell in the midst of the people of Israel.”
RAF: Once a nation can suspend this most basic concept, other corruptions must inevitably follow. It is at this point that the value of human life is first devalued in society. To let a murderer live, and not maintain that human life is so precious that it cannot be rightly punished apart from the death of the murderer, is to make man less than the image bearer of God. First, it says the innocent victim’s life is worth less than the life of the one motivated by hate. Second, it says society has deemed man is not really that special at all. His death is now put on par with other material and petty crimes.
No one can argue that the way the death penalty in our own country is carried out (i.e. its inordinately long process and racially imbalanced application) is horrifically distorted. Yet the more we abandon it altogether, the more fundamentally flawed we are in the way we view humankind, and what that means to God Himself.
