Apologetics

The Sword Is Not Inadmissible

(Genesis 9:5, 6) (Romans 13:1-4) (Numbers 35:30-33)

On the morning of October 10, 2026, the official account of the bishop of Rome told the world that the death penalty is inadmissible. Here is the post in full:

That is not a small claim. It does not say the death penalty is often abused, or that a given nation should use it rarely. It says the penalty is inadmissible. It cannot be allowed. And it gives a reason: taking a murderer’s life attacks the dignity of the person.

Scripture says the opposite, and says it in the very place the post plants its flag. God did not merely tolerate capital punishment. He commanded it, grounded it in the dignity of man, and placed the sword in the magistrate’s hand as His own servant. What God has ordained, no pulpit on earth may rule out.

Genesis 9 — Older than Moses, wider than Israel

The flood has just ended. Noah stands on a cleansed earth, and God renews His word to the whole human race through him. He gives animals for food (Genesis 9:3). Then He speaks about blood. God says He will hold beast and man alike to account for taking a human life, down to the man who kills his own brother (Genesis 9:5). When one man takes another man’s life, men are to take the killer’s life in return, and the reason God gives is that He made man in His own image (Genesis 9:6).

Three facts settle a great deal.

First, this command comes before Sinai. It is not a ceremonial rule for Israel that passed away with the temple. It is given to Noah, the father of every nation that now exists (Genesis 9:1, 19). The rainbow covenant still stands (Genesis 9:12-16). Every time a rainbow hangs over a courthouse, the covenant that contains this command is still in force.

Second, God names human agents. He does not say only that He will avenge blood Himself. He says men are to put the murderer to death. God appoints human hands to carry out His reckoning.

Third, the reason is the image of God. The murderer is executed precisely because man bears God’s image. To destroy the image-bearer is to strike at the God whose image he bears. The penalty is not a denial of human dignity. It is God’s own measure of how great that dignity is.

Moses — No ransom for the murderer

The law God gave Israel at Sinai applies the Noahic principle with care. The man who strikes another and kills him is to be put to death (Exodus 21:12). If the killing was not planned, God appoints a place of refuge (Exodus 21:13). If the man killed his neighbor by scheming and treachery, he is to be taken even from God’s altar to die (Exodus 21:14). Law already distinguishes murder from accident, and the distinction is God’s, not a modern refinement.

Numbers 35 presses the point. The cities of refuge protect the man who killed without intent until the congregation judges the case (Numbers 35:11, 12, 22-25). The deliberate murderer is to be put to death (Numbers 35:16-21). No one dies on the word of one witness. There must be more (Numbers 35:30). Then God forbids accepting any payment to spare a murderer who is guilty of death. He is to be put to death without exception (Numbers 35:31). Murder defiles the land, God says, and nothing cleanses the land of that blood except the death of the man who spilled it (Numbers 35:33). The Lord dwells among His people, and He will not have their land defiled (Numbers 35:34).

Notice what is forbidden. Not cruelty. Ransom. A substitute payment that lets the murderer live. Lifelong detention, offered as a way to meet the requirements of justice without the murderer’s death, is exactly the kind of substitute God refused for the murderer. The civil details of Israel’s law expired with Israel’s polity, but the moral equity behind them did not, because it rests on Genesis 9 and the image of God.

Romans 13 — The sword in the hand of God’s servant

Some will say this is all Old Testament. Paul answers in the New. He tells every Christian to submit to the ruling powers, because God is the source of all rule and has Himself put every ruler in place (Romans 13:1). A man who rebels against them rebels against God’s own arrangement (Romans 13:2). Rulers should frighten wrongdoers, not those who do right (Romans 13:3). The ruler serves God for the good of his people. The wrongdoer has reason to fear him, Paul says, because his sword is not for show. He is God’s servant, appointed to repay the evildoer with wrath (Romans 13:4).

The sword is not a jail cell. It is the instrument of death. Paul writes this to Christians in Rome under Nero, and he does not ask them to oppose the sword. He tells them God gave it.

The order in Paul’s letter matters. One verse earlier, he forbids Christians to avenge themselves and tells them to leave room for God’s wrath (Romans 12:19). Then, in the next breath, he names one of the ways God’s wrath arrives: the magistrate’s sword (Romans 13:4). Private vengeance is forbidden because public justice is ordained. Peter says the same. Governors are sent by the Lord to punish evildoers and praise those who do good (1 Peter 2:13, 14). Jesus told Pilate that Pilate would have no authority at all unless it had been given him from above (John 19:11). Even a corrupt governor held a power Heaven had appointed.

Paul and the thief — The guilty admit it

Two men facing death in the New Testament speak to this directly.

Paul, standing before Festus, tells Festus that if he is guilty of a crime that deserves death, he will not try to escape dying. But if the charges are empty, no one has the right to hand him over (Acts 25:11). The apostle does not call capital punishment inadmissible. He says some crimes deserve death, he submits to it if guilty, and he demands justice if innocent. That is the Christian position in one sentence.

On the hill outside Jerusalem, one condemned thief rebukes the other. He admits that the two of them are being punished justly and are getting what their crimes deserve, while Jesus is innocent (Luke 23:40, 41). Jesus does not correct him. He does not tell the thief that his execution attacks his dignity. He promises the man that before the day is over, he will be with Jesus in paradise (Luke 23:43).

The confessions say what Scripture says

The Reformed churches confessed this plainly. The 1689 Baptist Confession teaches that God, the supreme Lord and King of the world, ordained civil magistrates under Himself for His own glory and the public good, and “armed them with the power of the sword” to defend the good and punish evildoers (1689 LBCF 24.1). The Westminster Confession says the same in its own chapter on the civil magistrate (WCF 23.1). The Westminster Larger Catechism, listing the sins the Sixth Commandment forbids, names “all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defence” (WLC Q. 136). Public justice is the first exception named. Calvin taught that when the magistrate punishes, he is not acting on his own but carrying out the very judgments of God (Institutes 4.20.10).

Rome herself did not always speak like the post. The Roman Catechism issued after the Council of Trent (1566) taught that the lawful execution of criminals by civil authority is obedience to the commandment against killing, not a violation of it. The post’s opening sentence follows the 2018 revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church (para. 2267). The newer wording is the novelty.

The early church — Confirmation and honest disagreement

The early church did not speak with one voice, and honesty requires saying so.

Augustine confirms the principle. In The City of God (written AD 413-426), he explains that the command against killing has exceptions God Himself made. Those who put criminals to death by public authority, as God’s ministers acting under law, do not break that commandment (City of God 1.21). Augustine also wrote to the Roman official Marcellinus asking him not to execute certain Donatist offenders, even for violent crimes (Letter 133, AD 412). That was a plea for mercy from a magistrate who held the sword. It was not a denial that he held it.

Others disagreed. Tertullian (c. AD 155-220), in On Idolatry (c. AD 200), held that a Christian should not take a public office that passes capital sentences. In his world, that office came wrapped in pagan sacrifice and oaths. Lactantius (c. AD 250-325) went further in his Divine Institutes (c. AD 303-311) and held that a just man should not bring a capital charge or take a life at all.

Those voices deserve a hearing, and they deserve an answer. The answer is Genesis 9:6 and Romans 13:4. When a church father and the Word of God part ways, the Word stands.

The post against God’s decree

Now take the post at its word, line by line.

It calls the death penalty inadmissible. God commanded it for the whole human race after the flood (Genesis 9:6). He commanded it again in Israel’s law and refused any ransom for the murderer (Numbers 35:31). He named the magistrate’s sword as His own ministry of wrath in the New Testament (Romans 13:4). A penalty God has commanded cannot be inadmissible. To call it so is to say that what Heaven ordained, earth may not allow. That is a direct contradiction of God’s decree, not a development of it.

It calls the penalty an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person. Genesis 9:6 gives the reverse reasoning. The murderer’s life is required because man is made in God’s image. The inviolable person in a murder case is the victim, and the one who attacked that dignity is the murderer. The post moves the dignity from the slain to the slayer. God’s word holds the slayer answerable precisely because the slain bore His image. The post makes human dignity the reason against the penalty. God makes human dignity the reason for it.

It says justice can be met without capital punishment. Justice is not measured by what prisons can manage. It is measured by what God requires. Detention may protect citizens, but Paul does not describe the magistrate only as a protector. He calls him an avenger who brings wrath on the evildoer (Romans 13:4). Justice gives a crime what it deserves. Moses forbade the substitute payment that lets a murderer keep his life (Numbers 35:31-33). Calling lifelong detention a full meeting of justice’s demands for murder is offering the very ransom God refused.

It says execution deprives the guilty of the possibility of redemption. Redemption is not a possibility held open by the length of a sentence. It is the work of God, decreed before the foundation of the world and applied by the Spirit on His schedule (Ephesians 1:4-7) (John 6:37, 44). God numbers a man’s days before one of them comes to be (Psalm 139:16) (Job 14:5). The executioner cannot shorten a day God has not already numbered, and he cannot close a door God has opened. The proof hangs beside Christ. A condemned thief, under a sentence he admits was just, receives the promise of paradise hours before he dies (Luke 23:41-43). His execution did not take redemption from him. It was the setting God chose to give it. Every man the Father gives the Son will come to Him, whether from death row or from a palace (John 6:37). God is not blocked by a scaffold.

None of this is personal contempt for the man who wrote the post. It is a judgment on the claim. The claim sets a modern sentiment against the Noahic covenant and the apostle Paul, and the claim loses.

Objections

The commandment says not to kill. The Sixth Commandment forbids murder, the unlawful taking of human life (Exodus 20:13). The same God, in the very next chapter, commands death for the murderer (Exodus 21:12). He does not contradict Himself in consecutive chapters. The commandment governs private men taking life on their own authority. The magistrate’s sword is God’s own appointment.

Jesus refused to condemn the adulteress. The account is absent from the earliest manuscripts, but take it on its own terms (John 8:3-11). The accusers brought the woman and not the man, though the law required both (Leviticus 20:10) (Deuteronomy 22:22). They came to trap Jesus, not to do justice (John 8:6). Jesus was not sitting as a civil judge, and He refused that role elsewhere (Luke 12:14). He sent her away with a command to leave her sin behind (John 8:11). He did not repeal Genesis 9, and nothing in the account touches murder or the magistrate’s sword.

Mercy should win. Mercy belongs to God, and He shows it to whom He wills (Romans 9:15, 18). Earthly courts are not authorized to pardon what God commands them to punish. The Lord detests a court that lets the guilty walk as much as one that condemns the innocent (Proverbs 17:15). The Preacher observes that when punishment for a crime is slow in coming, men grow bold to do wrong (Ecclesiastes 8:11). The deepest mercy available to a murderer is not a longer life in a cell. It is Christ, who bore the wrath of God for every sinner the Father gave Him (Isaiah 53:5, 6) (John 10:11, 15).

Courts convict innocent men. They do, and God anticipated it. No one dies on one witness’s word (Deuteronomy 17:6, 19:15). A false witness receives the penalty he tried to bring on his neighbor (Deuteronomy 19:16-19). God forbids putting the innocent and righteous to death (Exodus 23:7). The answer to corrupt courts is honest courts, a high standard of proof, and real punishment for perjury. Prisons also hold innocent men. Error in applying a just penalty calls for reformed procedure, not the abolition of what God commanded.

Providence and the courthouse

Behind every true verdict stands the King of Heaven. Solomon says the Lord steers a king’s heart like a stream of water, wherever He chooses (Proverbs 21:1), and that even a thrown lot lands where the Lord decides (Proverbs 16:33). When a magistrate rightly sentences a murderer, he is not seizing a power God withheld. He is executing a decree God made over Noah’s altar and confirmed through Paul. The nations that abandon the sword do not escape God’s justice. They simply refuse the instrument He gave them and leave the land polluted with blood the law says only blood can cleanse (Numbers 35:33).

For the man who must answer

When someone tells you the death penalty is beneath Christian dignity, do not flinch. Start where God starts. After the flood, He told the whole human race that men must put the murderer to death, because man bears God’s image (Genesis 9:6). Show them that God did not regard the penalty as a slight to dignity but as the defense of it.

Then go to Paul. The magistrate’s sword is not decoration. He is God’s servant appointed to repay the evildoer with wrath (Romans 13:4). Remind them that Paul, under Roman rule, said he would not refuse death if he deserved it (Acts 25:11), and that the thief beside Christ admitted his sentence was just and still went to paradise (Luke 23:41-43).

When they bring up mercy, give them Christ, not a cell. When they bring up wrongful convictions, give them Deuteronomy’s witnesses and the false witness’s penalty, and agree that courts must be honest. When they bring up a pope, a council, or a catechism, answer with the Word that rules them all.

You will not win every exchange. You do not need to. God’s decree does not wait on your eloquence. Say plainly that what Heaven has ordained, no man may call inadmissible, and leave the outcome with the One who holds both the sword and the soul.

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