We cannot edit the law.

Many of us have sympathy for the Biblical civil law’s list of crimes. We find murder, rape, theft, adultery, theft, and even blasphemy highly objectionable, and we can see how at least a little punishment would be just. But, really, capital punishment for adultery, for blasphemy? We think, standing in our very human boots and looking at God’s law, that we can separate the penalty from the condemnation. The fact of the matter, though, is that penalty is integral to law; without penalty, law is meaningless and nonexistent.

The operating principle here is God’s justice. A moral law identifies certain choices as good and other choices as evil. God, being just, treats each action according to its nature. A good action thus results in blessedness; an evil action thus results in cursedness. Thus, penalty (and reward) are inherent to moral laws, when they are real. If the law is real, if it truly identifies and evil, then by the necessity of God’s nature that evil will receive a penalty exactly commensurate to its magnitude.

Consider the contrary supposition. If we came across a command in Scripture which said, ‘You shall not do X, but God will not judge the choice to do X, not even by imputing it to another who will bear its judgement. There is no penalty at all.’ The implication would be clear. Because God is just, and because justice requires all evil to be punished proportionally (Lev. 24:17-22), punishment is always proportional to transgression. A complete lack of punishment thus indicates a complete lack of transgression, God being just. So a sin without punishment must not be a sin; the idea is self-contradictory and thus impossible, given God’s self-consistency.

If we attempt to remove the punishment from a law while retaining the condemnation, we perpetrate an act of nonsense. The punishment is necessitated by the condemnation; the punishment, in the typical format of the Old Testament’s civil law, is often the means of condemning. Remove the punishment, and the condemnation is literally empty. It means nothing; it’s at best an emotive declaration.

Of course, we typically don’t want to outright remove the punishment, being not antinomians in that full sense. Murder, we think, should indeed be punished, but perhaps by life imprisonment instead of death (so great our wisdom, to discover a punishment better than God’s prescription!); blasphemy, we insist, should be punished, but only by God, not by the state, to which God gave a small portion of that responsibility in Leviticus 24:16. We want to alter the punishment, not get rid of it entirely.

This seems at first a solution to the problem, keeping the condemnation without the icky punishment. But, really, it’s little improvement. When we modify the punishment, we declare that the thing condemned is of a different proportion and shape. We may keep the shape and proportion of the sin-as-sin, but we alter its proportion as a crime. In other words, we change the law, including its condemnation; our new iteration of the law is not obedience to His written law but obedience to our own law wearing that text as a skinsuit, as an excuse. Our discretion has re-written his law.

Weigh the gravity of so adding to His law, of removing from it (for modification does both). Deuteronomy 4:3 presents the judgement for that sin (summed in verse 2) by reference to history: “The Lord your God destroyed from among you all the men who followed the Baal of Peor.” Changing His law is tantamount to idolatry, for which God levied destruction in the midst of His people. Dare we?

God bless.

P.S. It is mete here to recognize that not all sins are crimes. God does not list punishments for many sins; this does not mean they lack punishments and are thus counterexamples to the above. No, these are simply sins whose punishment is left to God, understood to be His to punish. He assures us that all sin will receive justice, and thus passages like most of the Decalogue have no need to repeat the reality of punishment; it is implied by the condemnation.