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3. The Altar and Capital PunishmCapital Punishmentent

Provision is made in the law for an altar. The first word concerning the altar appears in Exodus 20:22-26, an altar of natural materials for the pre-tabernacle period, for the interim until its construction. This altar was not to be of man’s design or making, “for the altar was not to represent the creature, but to be the place to which God came to receive man into His fellowship there. For this reason the altar was to be made of the same material, which formed the earthly soil for the kingdom of God, either of earth or else of stones.”118

God’s pattern for the altar was subsequently given as a part of the law of the tabernacle (Ex. 27:1- 8; 38:l-7).119 It was built of acacia wood covered entirely with bronze, five by five by three cubits in size.120

The altar is, of course, of central significance religiously. Sacrifice sets forth the fact of atonement, that God provided a way for sinful man to gain salvation. This is clearly the first and central meaning of the altar. The animals offered on the altar typified Jesus Christ, “the Lamb of God, which taketh away the sin of the world” (John 1:29). In Revelation 1:5, Jesus Christ is described as the one who “loved us, and washed us from our sins in his own blood.” Apart from acceptance of the atoning sacrifice of Jesus Christ, there can be neither salvation nor Christian faith. Sacrifice is basic to biblical faith. A very large and fundamental aspect of all Scripture is the declaration of vicarious sacrifice and of a God-provided atonement. Chapter after chapter gives laws pertaining to sacrifice. Jesus Christ declared Himself to be the Son of man, come “to give his life a ransom for many” (Matt. 20:28; Mark 10:45). The apostolic declaration was this: “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and man, the man Christ Jesus: Who gave himself a ransom for all, to be testified in due time” (1 Tim. 2:5- 6). The altar signified Jesus Christ and His atoning sacrifice.

Unfortunately, it is at this point that the ecclesiastical interpretation of the Bible begins and ends. The significance of the altar is ably discussed at great length, but almost always with respect to a transaction basic to the life of the church, whereas it is in reality basic to the life of man in church, state, and all of life.

And there can be no doubt, that the representations just noticed, and others of a like description, concerning the death of Christ, do in their natural sense carry a legal aspect; they bear respect to the demands of law, or the justice of which law is the expression. They declare that, to meet these demands in behalf of sinners, Christ bore a judicial death — a death which, while all-undeserved on the part of Him who suffered, must be regarded as the merited judgment of Heaven on human guilt. To be made a curse, that He might redeem men from the curse of the law, can have no other meaning than to endure the penalty, which as transgressors of the law they had incurred, in order that they might escape; nor can the exchange indicated in the words, “He was made sin for us, that we might be made the righteousness of God in Him,” be justly understood to import less than that He, the righteous One, took the place of sinners in suffering, that they might take His place in favour and blessing. And the stern necessity for the transaction — a necessity which even the resources of infinite wisdom, at the earnest cry of Jesus, found it impossible to evade (Matt. 26:39) — on what could it rest but the bosom of law, whose violated claims called for satisfaction? Not that God delights in blood, but that the paramount interests of truth and righteousness must be upheld, even though blood unspeakably precious may have to be shed in their vindication.121

The altar thus sets forth, no less than the ark, the law and the justice of the law. So central is the law to God, that the demands of the law are fulfilled as the necessary condition of grace, and God fulfils the demands of the law on Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ, as the new Adam, head of the new humanity, kept the law perfectly, to set forth the obedience of the new race or humanity, and died on the cross as the sinless Lamb of God, to fulfil the requirement of the law against sinners. Grace does not set aside the law: it provides the necessary fulfilment of the law. Thus, the grace of God witnesses to the validity of the law and the full and absolute justice of the claims of the law.

Here again Fairbairn stated the case eloquently and clearly:

We must have a solid foundation for our feet to stand on, a sure and living ground for our confidence before God. And this we can find only in the old

church view of the sufferings and death of Christ as a satisfaction to God’s justice for the offense done by our sin to His violated law. Satisfaction, I say emphatically, to God’s justice — which some, even evangelical writers, seem disposed to stumble at; they would say, satisfaction to God’s honour, indeed, but by no means to God’s justice. What, then, I would ask, is God’s honour apart from God’s justice? His honour can be nothing but the reflex action or display of His moral attributes; and in the exercise of these attributes, the fundamental and controlling element is justice. Every one of them is conditioned; love itself is conditioned by the demands of justice; and to provide scope for the operation of love in justifying the ungodly consistently with those demands, is the very ground and reason of the atonement — its ground and reason primarily in the mind of God, and because there, then also in its living image, the human conscience, which instinctively regards punishment as “the recoil of the eternal law of right against the transgressor,” and cannot attain to solid peace but through a medium of valid expiation. So much so, indeed, that wherever the true expiation is unknown, or but partially understood, it ever goes about to provide expiations of its own.

Thus has the law been established (Rom. iii. 31) — most signally established by that very feature of the Gospel, which specially distinguished it from the law — its display of the redeeming love of God in Christ.122

To deny this second aspect of the altar is to fall into antinomianism. Such a perspective sees the altar as a witness to God’s unconditioned love rather than to a love “conditioned by the demands of justice,” to use Fairbairn’s phrase.

It must be recognized then that either the witness of the altar to, and the meaning of the altar as, law and justice are affirmed and upheld, or another religion, which is anti-Christian to the core, has assumed the garb of the Christian faith. The blood of the altar was a grim and sustained declaration of the inflexible and abiding demand of the law that the justice of God be fulfilled.

Third , then, the altar was clearly also a witness to capital punishment as basic to the law. The doctrine of capital punishment is not normally associated with the altar or the second commandment but rather with the sixth, “Thou shalt not kill.” This fallacy both limits the

meaning of the sixth commandment and also deprives capital punishment of its profound theological foundation. If capital punishment is not basic to God’s law, then Christ died in vain, for some easier way of satisfying God’s justice could have been found. If capital punishment is not basic to the second commandment, then the altar was a bloody mistake, and God has been needlessly worshiped by wantonly shed blood. But to imagine that atonement is possible without death, or that the altar can be by passed in man’s approach to God, is to set up a graven image of man, and of man’s capacity to save himself, in the stead of the triune God.

Not only is the death penalty required by the law, but it is specified that there can be no remission of the penalty: “Moreover ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, which is guilty of death: but he shall be surely put to death ” (Num. 35:31). Thus, when various Protestant and Roman Catholic church leaders, including Pope Paul VI, and civil authorities such as Queen Elizabeth II, tried to persuade the Rhodesian authorities to set aside the death penalty for some murderers on the claim that these were “freedom fighters,” they were defying and despising the law of God. They were also expressing their contempt of the cross of Christ, which sets forth the necessity of the death penalty in the sight of God, and establishingtheir word above God’s word.

The laws concerning the death penalty can be briefly summarized:

Numbers 35:31: Shall not be remitted.

Genesis 9:5-6; Numbers 35:16-21, 30-33; Deuteronomy 17:6; Leviticus 24:17: Inflicted for murder.

Leviticus 20:10; Deuteronomy 22:21-24: For adultery. Leviticus 20:11-12, 14: For incest.

Exodus 22:19; Leviticus 20:15-16: For bestiality.

Leviticus 18:22; 20:13: For sodomy.

Deuteronomy 19:16-20: For false witness in a case involving a capital offense.

Exodus 21:16; Deuteronomy 24:7: Kidnapping.

Leviticus 21:9: For a priest’s daughter who committed fornication.

Exodus 22:18: For witchcraft.

Leviticus 20:2-5: For offering human sacrifice.

Exodus 21:15, 17; Leviticus 20:9: For striking or cursing father or mother.

Deuteronomy 21:18-21: For incorrigible juvenile delinquents.

Leviticus 24:11-14, 16, 23: For blasphemy.

Exodus 35:2; Numbers 15:32-36: For sabbath desecration.

Deuteronomy 13:1-10: For prophesying falsely, or propagating false doctrines.

Exodus 22:20: For sacrificing to false gods.

Deuteronomy 17:12: For lawless refusal to abide by godly law and order, anti- law, anti-court attitudes and actions.

Deuteronomy 13:9; 17:7: Execution by the witnesses.

Numbers 15:35-36; Deuteronomy 13:9: Execution by the congregation.

Numbers 35:30; Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15: Not inflicted on testimony of less than two witnesses.

At a few points the penalties were altered in the New Testament, but the basic principle of the death penalty was undergirded and set forth by Christ’s atoning death, which made it clear that the penalty for man’s treason to God and departure from God’s law is death without remission.

The blood of the altar and the fact of the altar are thus a declaration of the necessity of capital punishment. To oppose capital punishment as prescribed by God’s law is thus to oppose the cross

of Christ and to deny the validity of the altar.

The altar therefore sets forth the principle of capital punishment. But, fourth, the altar is a declaration of life because it witnesses to death. It declares that our life rests in the death of the Lamb of God. It declares, moreover, that our life’s safety is hedged in and walled about by the fact of capital punishment. If God’s law in this re spect is denied, then “the land is defiled; therefore I do visit the iniquity thereof upon it, and the land itself vomiteth out her inhabitants” (Lev. 18:25). But the godly exercise of capital punishment cleanses the land of evil and protects the righteous. In calling for the death of incorrigible juvenile delinquents, which means, therefore, in terms of case law, the death of incorrigible adult delinquents, the law declares, “so shalt thou put evil away from among you; and all Israel shall hear, and fear” (Deut. 21:21). To deny the death penalty is to insist on life for the evil; it means that evil men are given the right to kill, kidnap, rape, and violate law and order, and their life is guaranteed against death in the process. The murderer is given the right to kill without losing his life, and the victim and potential victims are denied their right to live. Men may speak of unconditional love, and unconditional mercy, but every act of love and mercy is conditional, because, in granting it to one man, I am affirming the conditions of his life and denying others in the process. If I am loving and merciful to a murderer, I am unloving and merciless to his present and future victims. Moreover, I am then in open contempt of God and His law, which requires no mercy to a man guilty of death: “Moreover ye shall take no satisfaction for the life of a murderer, which is guilty of death: but he shall surely be put to death” (Num. 35:31). Moreover,

So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it. Defile not therefore the land which ye shalt inhabit, wherein I dwell, for I the LORD dwell among the children of Israel. (Num. 35:33-34)

Leviticus 26 makes clear the curse which rests upon the land which despises God’s law: if the people will not cleanse the land of evil, God will cleanse the land of its people. In terms of this, it is not surprising that history has been so continuously on a disaster course apart from God’s law- word.

This, then, is the meaning of the altar: it is life to the righteous in Christ, who are redeemed by His atoning blood, because it represents inflexible and immutable death to evil. The altar is the supreme witness to the death penalty, and to the fact that it is never set aside. For us, by the grace of God, it is fulfilled on the person of Jesus Christ. We cannot trifle with the law of God without despising Christ and His sacrifice and thereby revealing our own reprobate nature, “For if we sin wilfully after that we have received the knowledge of the truth, there remaineth no more sacrifice for sins, But a certain fearful looking for of judgment and fiery indignation, which shall devour the adversaries” (Heb. 10:26-27).

But for us who stand in terms of the altar, it is our life, and the guarantee of judgment against the enemies of God and His kingdom.