Postby dolfan » June 26th, 2008, 4:14 am
This decision, this issue, touches close to most of us in one way or another. We all probably know either or both a victim and/or perpetrator. We don't make these statements lightly about the ultimate fates of the guilty. We also don't make them in a vacuum from God's requirements of us.
Jesus said that whoever hurts one of these little ones, it would be better for him that he had a millstone (a large, heavy, grinding stone) tied around his neck and be thrown to the water's bottom. In other words, according to Jesus, tie a rock around their neck and let them sink head-first, fighting every inch of their way through the water as they sink, and drown them. Did he say to actually do that? No, not in so many words.
But, consider what He said about Judas in Mark 14:21 -- "The Son of man indeed goeth, as it is written of him: but woe to that man by whom the Son of man is betrayed! good were it for that man if he had never been born." Jesus didn't kill him, and the apostles didn't gang up on him and lynch him. But, by the time Judas dies, the biblical authors who mention it uses no terms of regret, no wistful backward glances of the Judas-that-might-have-been. I can almost see Matthew and Luke figuratively dusting off their hands after they write the passages concerning Judas' death.
My point is this: The pleasure in vanquishing such evil as that done by a child rapist or child molester is genuine and not against God's ways. It isn't tidy, it isn't pretty, it isn't something you can rally the crowd with on Sunday morning. It is, however, a true fact of life that harming children, offending little ones (in any number of ways) is something that God deemed important enough to mention in the Biblical record. And, He wasn't milquetoast about it.
If I have to err in one direction or another, I'm going to err on the side of those whom Jesus specifically classified as worthy of such protection from harm that anyone who crossed that line should die a horrible death. If that makes me a bad guy, not Christ-like in someone's estimation, or somehow lacking in sympathy, go tell it to the abused kid. Tell it to the therapeutic foster parents who try to help them. The social workers. The counsellors. Try and tell them that they are not being very Christlike as they ruminate over the pure evil of someone doing the unspeakable (but undeniably real) ruin of these innocent little babies. In my own estimation, an abortionist is less culpable than a child rapist who consigns a child's life to unimaginable-to-most-of-us consequences, inescapable pain and all for the payoff of a few seconds of self-pleasure. If that doesn't make you want to throw up on them and then do them bodily harm, then I guess you can pat yourself on the back for being more like Jesus than I am.
Human government bears the same relation to hell as the church bears to heaven. (David Lipscomb, On Civil Government, 72).