16 September 2024
Basic principle: The Lord is always holding out His hand of redemption.
Let's go back to the Covenant of Moses, one of the clearest statements of God's moral character. Yes, there were several items in the code that demanded capital punishment -- if you stuck around. As long as you were under the Covenant, the penalty generally stood. If you fled, you simply couldn't come back without an official amnesty. But there was no command to pursue someone into foreign lands. The whole point was protecting the covenant peace.
Nothing in any of this forbade you coming before the Lord to seek forgiveness. That was a separate matter. Covenant Law was one thing; your standing before God was another. The Covenant of Moses was not the only way you could serve Him.
And indeed, if the covenant community failed to keep it together, then they had no standing to carry out any capital punishment. Jesus clarified this in the episode of the woman caught in adultery. That was the whole point of His judgment about who could cast the first stone. The covenant community had been so badly breached and defiled that there was no covenant peace to preserve, so no one had standing to execute her.
That is, no one except Jesus, and His nation disowned Him. He extended to the woman the mercy of God that had always been available. Nothing in any covenant God ever offered portrayed a desire to see people suffer. There was nothing punitive in God's judgments on sin. There was a price to pay, and it may well be your life, but that was to protect the earthly community, not to satisfy God's anger. Over and over again, the declaration about God was His tolerance and mercy.
Anyone who promotes the idea of humans being tormented for their sins is working for the Dark Side, not for God. This has only ever come from Satan; it is a signature of his reign. Have you noticed what American "justice" looks like? It's rooted in the fundamental necessity of torment, not restoration. The American prison system is inherently wicked and an abomination before the Lord.
It doesn't matter what you may imagine someone has done wrong; if you cannot make room in your heart for redemption and restoration, then you cannot claim to know Jesus. You might know about Him, but you've never gotten to actually know Him. And if you want to get picky, I'll say it very clear: The Holy Spirit of God will never sponsor human torment, regardless of what they have done wrong.
Let's chase a rabbit here. There are people who are so badly broken that they are classed as psychopaths/sociopaths. Broadly, these are people with no conscience. It's not as if they can't discover they have something to lose and decide to behave themselves; quite a few of them do just that. My point is that they can be redeemed, if they join a redemptive community.
And one last rabbit: Scripture mentions that there are people who cannot be redeemed. The unforgivable sin is rejecting the Holy Spirit too often and/or too long and refusing to repent. What that looks like is an inability to distinguish between the work of God and the hand of the Devil. It isn't doing blasphemy, but being blasphemy against the Holy Spirit.
Child molestation is neither of those problems. I'll be glad to explain to you sometime the psychological profile of a pedophile or a child molester (not exactly the same thing). I'll be glad to explain why you cannot lock yourself up behind the common American hysteria about that particular problem, and start noisily demanding they be castrated, tortured and/or killed. I'll explain it, but you first must be able to tell me why America has such a big problem with it in the first place. Outside the West, it's a tiny issue. We've shared that often enough in our community that you should be able to echo at least part of it.
As a community of faith, it is our sworn duty to the Risen Christ that we will seek to redeem everyone except those who blaspheme the Holy Spirit. We need to have some idea of how we will receive someone who confesses they suffer the temptation that makes Americans panic. It's almost funny how church people seem ready to handle murderers, recovering addicts, repenting LGBT+ people, etc., but there is not a single church I've ever known that was ready to deal with those attracted to children.
Shame on America. I'm not listening to any more grousing about this; you don't speak for my Lord. I've met ordinary people outside the church, especially outside of America, who understood a whole lot better. Yes, they all love their children, same as we do. Whatever other problems they had, they didn't suffer our American idolatry of youth.
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