From lesson 2:
From lesson 3:The laws of God concerning human life do not simply reflect the character of God; they also take into account the fallen condition of mankind. Some men will obey God's laws; some will not. God has invested in man the responsibility for enforcing His laws, seeing to it that evildoers are brought to justice....
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God's arm of justice today is the state, and the death penalty is His method of punishment for murderers. Capital punishment is not murder. God ordained it not to cheapen the sanctity of human life but to preserve it.
From lesson 5:Some make God a sort of condoning grandfather who had to go along the the barbarous social ethics of the times - implying that today with the greater awareness of humanitarian principles among men, God wouldn't think of allowing such destruction. Others take a variant of the same view. They say that warfare in the Old Testament was a part of the ignorance which God winked at along with such things as polygamy and the inequity of the sexes.
Any such response to warfare in the Old Testament, however, inevitably softens the tone of God's command into a spongy compromise with man. Thus the rightness of God's command falls to something like this: God actually knew better, but this was the best He could do under the situations. And further, God Himself is reduced from the high and holy One whose ways are altogether right to a humanitarian in a predicament.
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This view obviously lacks in understanding both of the integrity of God's character and of the high purposes of His revelation. God would never do or command his people to do what is ethically wrong. We have but to look backward to the horrors of the flood or forward to the One who "treadeth the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God" to know that God can in perfect righteousness execute greater terrors than any earthly wars.
So while the warfare of the Old Testament was not God acting like the gods for Israel's sake, yet it was revelatory of God. The people of God in that era were a nation, and through that nation and her wars God revealed Himself. He was not a god of a tribe, but a distinct God of all the earth beside whom there were no others...No other nation ever was saved by the leader's stretching out his rod over the sea, or by death angels, or by blindness in the camp of the enemies, or by hornets...Here was God, not a god.
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God is a God of love, but the revelation of God Himself, including that which came via the warfare of the Old Testament, was necessary to give His love at Calvary its full significance.
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God is a God of justice, and He cannot look lightly on man's sin, whether it be private, individual sin or public, national sin. By commanding Old Testament warfare, God etched against the dark sky of man's history a mighty arm gripping a gleaming sword. Any who will dare to look at the faithful Record without attempting to alter the picture will not dare to say that Calvary is all God has ever said about sin.
Rather, in the truth of the gleaming sword, the radiance and wonder and love revealed by the cross shines but brighter. In the understanding of justice, mercy is beyond comprehension.
The law of Christ is a law of love and redemption. That law is operative in the church, but it was never intended to be the operating ethic of a civil government...To the church is given the ministry of reconciliation. That ministry cannot be done by the sword...To the state the sovereign God has given authority to rule, to make laws, and to enforce laws for the purpose of protecting the good and punishing the evil; but that authority does not come through the Lordship of Christ.
