Within our society today there is a determined effort to eliminate personal responsibility. The criminal is therefore not morally corrupt, according to this philosophy, but simply a product of his or her environment. For this reason, they surely must marvel that God said, “He that smiteth a man, so that he die, shall be surely put to death” (Exodus 21:12). After all, they maintain that the death penalty is cruel and unusual punishment, defining their morality in terms outside the absolute truth of God’s Word (Romans 13:1-4).
Similarly, many of these same people have no problem with women aborting their babies by the millions. In the same paragraph Moses recorded the Lord’s words, “If men strive, and hurt a woman with child, so that her fruit depart from her, and yet no mischief follow: he shall be surely punished, according as the woman’s husband will lay upon him; and he shall pay as the judges determine. And if any mischief follow, then thou shalt give life for life…” (Exodus 21:22-23). By God’s own record, an unborn baby’s life is treated as any other human life, and an action that caused the death of that unborn child was to be treated the same as an action that caused the death of any other person.
Sadly, in our country today, we sanction the murder of innocent children and have great protests that make the news each time some guilty criminal is executed. Sadder yet is the untold number of Christians who sit idly, say nothing and even implicitly endorse ungodly positions, trying to separate their politics from their responsibility to God. “We ought to obey God rather than men” (Acts 5:29).
