The Penalty Done Away

IT is frequently urged that the Sabbath has been done away, because the penalty attached to its violation under the former dispensation, has been done away. Those who urge this objection seem to lose sight of the fatal flaw in their argument; which is, that the same penalty was attached to the violation of every one of the ten commandments that was attached to the violation of the Sabbath, and that the penalty has been done away just as much in reference to the other nine, as in reference to the Sabbath.

It is a significant fact that every argument brought against the Sabbath from either the Old Testament or the New, is just as much an argument against all the other commandments of the decalogue. That ten-commandment law is a unit; its ten words are inseparably united, and stand or fall together.

The following references show that the penalty of death was attached to a violation of other commandments besides the Sabbath:—

Idolatry was punished with death. Lev. 20:1-5; Deut. 13:6-11.

Dishonoring parents was punished with death. Lev. 20:9; Ex. 21:17.

Adultery was punished with death. Lev. 20:10.

Murder was punished with death. Lev. 24:17.

Taking God's name in vain was punished with death. Lev. 24:16.

Theft was punished with death. Deut. 24:7.

Here are six commandments besides the Sabbath, specified as having the penalty of death attached to them. And Lev. 18:26-30; 20:22, show that all God's commandments were then enforced in the same manner. But this penalty was all done away with the introduction of this dispensation. Now it is wholly outside of reason, it is unworthy any candid person, it shows but a superficial, one-eyed view of the subject, to claim that the Sabbath has been done away because the penalty has been abolished, and that other commandments, the penalty of which has been done away just as fully, still remain.

But some may perhaps query whether all the commandments may not have been done away, because the penalty has been abolished. Have we then no commandments against the acts forbidden in the decalogue? Oh! yes, say some, they have been re-enacted. Then we ask, When? how? where? by whom? How long after the old was abolished before the new was introduced and made binding? This idea of the reenactment will not stand. It is compassed with difficulties absolutely insuperable. The ten commandments, or even nine of them, cannot be found repeated in the New Testament. The shortest three are given verbatim, evidently because they could not well be given more briefly. There is a reference to the commandments, but no re-enactment of them.

It still remains to be explained how the penalty could be done away and the law survive. It can be easily done. All the difficulty arises from overlooking the fact that there were in that dispensation different kinds of laws, and that the principles of the same law appeared in different relations. Thus God gave them his moral law, the ten commandments, as spoken by himself from Sinai, and written by himself on tables of stone. These circumstances sharply distinguish this from any other law; besides, these commandments are called by themselves a law. But, secondly, the form of government was theocratic. The people took God to be their king, and he took them to be his people. As such he gave them a civil law peculiar to them as a people during the time they should bear such a relation to himself; and in that law he incorporated the principles of the ten commandments, and to them, there, he attached the civil penalty of death, to be inflicted by the hands of men. But that people have ceased to be God's people, as a nation; that theocratic form of government has passed away; that civil law is no longer in force; the penalty attached to it is, of course, no longer inflicted. But the ten commandments stand on their original basis, as the moral law, expressing God's will to men, just as they stood before.

If this distinction should be denied, then we ask, Does any one suppose that when the murderer suffered death in the Mosaic dispensation, he thus paid the full penalty of his crime? Has he no further account to settle at the bar of God? Illustrate this by the laws of our own time. When a man is hanged for murder, or serves out the rest of his natural life in prison, is that the whole of his punishment? Has he not still to answer for his crime at the bar of divine justice? The law of the land says, Thou shalt not kill. He breaks it and pays the civil penalty by hanging or imprisonment for life. But the law of God says also, Thou shalt not kill. And for the violation of that law he is still to answer to his Maker. Now if the penalty of the law against murder should be abolished, and the murderer go absolutely unpunished here, would that affect the law of God, or the man's accountability to him? Not in the least. Neither does it in the other case.

The penalty has been abolished only as the civil penalty of a civil law. The penalty of the commandments as a moral law has not been abolished. For it is still true that "the soul that sinneth it shall die." and that "the wages of sin is death." The Lord now leaves it to men to regulate their own civil law, and reserves still to himself the execution of the moral penalty, to be inflicted at the time of which he speaks when he says, "Vengeance is mine, I will repay, saith the Lord."