I'm Not Weak for Saying Televising the Execution is Unbiblical: Here's my case

0:01 There's been a lot of talk about the death penalty recently, specifically televising it. Initially, Trump's administration announced they were going to televise this death penalty. Then they said it's canceled, which I think is a good thing. I think it's biblical to not televise an execution, even though having a public execution is in fact biblical. I'm going to explain what I mean by that. It sounds like I'm contradicting myself to some people. This video is going to be an explanation of why I think the scripture suggests that a televised execution is not necessary and that one which can be handled in public but not on screens, not video footage and images, one that can be held in public, that simply word of mouth will be shared about it and reporting, that's good enough, that fulfills what God requires regarding death penalties, at least in the law. So I'm going to go through a verse that actually unpacks this specifically, and I hope you'll follow with me here, because I've shared this online and there's a lot of confusion. There's a. There's not a lot of people actually responding to what's on your screen right now. These actual verses that we're going to get into, and I'm going to try to answer objections as well.

1:08 Let's think biblically about televised executions. That's what this channel is about, helping people think biblically about everything. And I have a number of ways of doing that, but the best way is just going to the text. So Deuteronomy, chapter 21 here, it talks about the death penalty. I'm going to read it straight through. This is like a little Bible study. We're going to read it straight through. Then I'm going to go back over it more slowly. We're going to. Going to look at individual sections of it to show you why this is my case against a televised execution. Before I get into it, just know, public versus televised, these are two different kinds of topics.

1:40 If an execution is public throughout human history, it means if you attend physically, if you come to the location where the execution takes place, you got to see the execution. It was public. However, if you were not there, you only get to hear about it. You don't get to see it. You don't get to see recordings of it. They didn't exist. You didn't get to see the body long after none of that. Right. So that's what I'm gonna suggest is our standard, and I'll offer a number of arguments against this. Gavin, uh, Ortlund made a video where he argued in great ways against the televising of the execution. People are saying it's weak, that Trump is weak because he canceled it, that I'm weak because I'm arguing against it. I'm saying that logic is weak. Listen to the actual arguments. Some of the arguments are the following before we go to the text.

2:25 When you videotape or take photos of an execution, it is permanent in the memory of people for all time because we're in the nature, because of the nature of the Internet. It's going to be memed, it is going to be visualized, it is going to come across people's feeds unexpectedly. It's going to be put in compilation videos. It is going to be something that is on display for all to see. By making it televised, you have now no control over the constant reoccurring images of the execution.

2:52 That is not something that is some kind of ideal. It's not something that is good, that is morally wonderful to repeat over and over again. It is going to be memed and joked about and laughed about and mocked, and it's going to devalue the ultimate gravity of the thing. Yep, it'll be shocking the first time you see it, but over time it will devalue it. And Gavin Ortland offered some really good arguments. I'll put his video down below. You guys can check it out. Here's my biblical argument against it, using specific text of Scripture, Deuteronomy 21.

3:19 And then I'll answer objections. This is about a guy that's going to get executed. And it says, then all the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones. So you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear and fear. And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death, and he's put to death, and you hang him on a tree, his body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day. For a hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not be defile your land that the Lord your God has given you for an inheritance.

3:48 All right, let's go back over these few verses, and I'm going to give my case, and then I'll answer objections to the case. First off, all the men of the city stones him to death with stones. This is not the men of, uh, millions of people of a city. Rather, this is all the men of the city in a local area. They gather together and it's the men, not all the citizens necessarily, and they stone him. So their community is involved in the judgment and in the execution. This is not for them to satisfy bloodlust. This is, it seems, for the community to collectively say, we reject what this man does, we judge what this man does, and we're punishing him for it.

4:25 So the community does get involved. Okay, so a firing squad or a group of individuals that are taking out the criminal seems consistent with at least the equity we have in the Old Testament here with the justice that we have here. Then it says, so you shall purge the evil from your midst, and all Israel shall hear and fear. There's two things I want to highlight. The first one is doing this purges the evil from your midst. That is, executing people who are guilty of capital offenses is inherently a cleansing impact on the community. It purges the evil from their midst. It doesn't say that it does this if you lock them in prison for life. Now, I have a different video on whether the death penalty is justifiable, whether biblically, whether the Bible demands we support it. I, uh, will link that video down below.

5:10 This is a total no brainer though. The Bible's clear about the death penalty both in the Old and New Testaments, Romans. Yes. It's very clear that it is in fact a moral requirement that God has. He even judges nations for not doing it because it didn't purge the evil from their midst when they didn't do it.

5:26 Not everything's a death penalty offense, but some things are. No, this doesn't make us under the law. Doesn't mean I have to enact the death penalty for any reason we saw in the Old Testament. But there's one that's transcendent over any Old Testament law, and that is murder. Murder gets the death penalty by command of God. Genesis 9, 6. I'll take us there real quick. Just because I have some viewers who will see this and you haven't heard this argument, I'll just share this. Whoever sheds the blood of men, by man shall his blood be shed. That's a command, not an observation. For God made man in his own image, right? The person violated the image of God. God himself says, now you will lose your life.

6:05 That is a requirement of God. In fact, I'll back up to verse five. It says, and from for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning. From every beast I will require it. And from man, from his fellow man, I will require a reckoning for the life of a man. That's the death penalty. God requires communities to enact the death penalty judiciously. And rightly. And only in instances where you know there's guilt. And all the. You check all the boxes of justice, but you are required by God Almighty to enact the death penalty according to Scripture. Romans 13 gets into this and suggests that it is. Doesn't just suggest I'm being gentle with my words here. It reveals this is very much still in place. It is part of God's justice. They're obeying God when they do it. Okay, but I'm not going to get into that more in this video. This is about televising an execution.

6:53 Should we televise the execution? And that, uh, I'm going to say this verse suggests. These verses suggest you should not. So you shall purge the evil from your midst. We covered that. Now let's look at the next phrase. And all Israel shall hear and fear. Think for a minute. God gave them prescriptions about the death penalty that were sufficient to accomplish his desires for justice and his goals for the death penalty.

7:21 One of those things was you do it publicly. The men of the city stone him to death with stones. It's the community itself that has to demonstrate their enacting justice. Another one is this purges evil from your midst. And another one is that even though Israel didn't see it and all they did was hear about it, that was good enough. All Israel shall hear, not see, not visualize, not see artist drawings and see, not have to travel to the place.

7:49 No, they hear about the justice. And that's good enough. It's good enough that the community knows that the person was executed for their crime. That is good enough. It was good enough in the Old Testament. It's good enough now. We don't need to televise the death penalty. It may feel strong, it may feel macho, it may feel just. But if you think not televising it is somehow inadequate, then you're saying that God's own solution was inadequate in Deuteronomy 21. And you're not thinking biblically, but there's more. Let's read on. And if a man has committed a crime punishable by death and he is put to death and you hang him on a tree, why does it say hang him on a tree?

8:25 It's not because he was like Old west style. He was hung and that was the method by which he was killed. That is not what's happening here. Instead, he's hung on a tree because he's being put on display after having been killed. That's what I believe is happening here and I think is accurate. He's hung on a tree.

8:43 First he's put to death and then he's hung on a tree. That's the order of the events it seems here. So this is about displaying the body. Now displaying the body is kind of like televising, isn't it? Yeah, kind of, sort of. But the body was not allowed to be left, uh, up for display. If you wanted to see it, you had to travel to the location where it was at. It didn't come to you. You're in China and the man's executed in Florida. You're not seeing it in China. You have to come to Florida or you don't get to see it. And the display was temporary.

9:12 It was localized and it was temporary. Look at this. His body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day. That was a requirement of God. And this was a really big deal to the Jews in Jesus time. The Romans, they took the opposite. They took the televise, the execution perspective because they would put someone on a cross and they would leave them up on that cross for days, weeks, for long periods of time. Because they wanted, in fact, they put them on a road, uh, uh, so anybody coming and going from the city is going to see it. And they would have rows of crosses. Could be a hundred crosses, a thousand crosses. There are stories that there were so many people crucified in the rebellion of the Jews against, uh, Rome that they ran out of wood, they ran out of stuff to put them on. So they would leave them up for display, typically.

9:58 But in Jerusalem, in Israel, the Jews pushed so strongly against this habit the Romans had of leaving people on display that they had gotten the Roman government to give them special permission. And the permission was, when people get crucified in your cities, you Jews can take that body down the same day and you can bury them before nightfall, just like your law demands. Right. His body shall not remain all night on the tree, but you shall bury him the same day. This was obviously enacted with Jesus. This is why Jesus was taken down. By who? By the Sanhedrin, By Joseph of Arimathea, Nicodemus, The Sanhedrin members who were responsible for burying the crucified dead.

10:36 They take him down, Joseph puts him in his own tomb because he knows Jesus is legit. And it's a beautiful story, but that happened because of this command. But this command means something. It means that God did not want long term displays of the crucified people. In fact, he even gives a justification as to why. He says for a Hanged man is cursed by God. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God has given you for an inheritance.

11:01 Now you may be thinking, oh, uh, maybe he was actually hanged because of the way this is worded. That's irrelevant to the main point I'm making. I don't think that's the case, but maybe I'm wrong there. I'll just say that's irrelevant to the point, which is the person is physically on display there. They are seen.

11:16 Now take them down. They cannot remain up past nightfall like they got to be down and buried by nightfall. And then God adds this. You shall not defile your land that the Lord your God is giving you for an inheritance. It seems to me the context of this passage suggests that if you just simply leave on display long term those who've been executed, you are defiling the land. That is, there's a danger in executions where they go too far, where they display too much, where they remain available for too long, and it has a defiling impact on the land. You're leaving dead bodies, dead human bodies on display in your land. This is wrong. This is what we're doing. If we televise the execution, as the bullets fly into this man's body and rip apart his body and blood and viscera come out, or bones shoot out of his face, and if you're offended at me describing it to you, you were, um, up until recently, you were about to see it. And you weren't just going to see it once. You were going to see it every so often on the Internet when it popped up. You were going to see it because you looked for it, because you just wanted to see it again and watch it in slow mo.

12:18 It's a defilement to dwell too much on the death of the wicked. And that is something that we're being kept from in this case. Take the body down. Now. There are those who push back on my argument here. I want to say before you push back, did I or did I not analyze this accurately, look at the passage and realize, yes, public, no, not televised. Yep.

12:42 All Israel hears and fears and, um, them hearing and fearing is enough. And then you can't leave his body up. You have to bury him the same day. He shall not remain on the tree all night. No, because that would defile your land. It seems. So. Responses to this have been things like, well, Mike, you're weak.

12:58 This is what's wrong with evangelicals. They're so weak. Your brain is weak. If you think this, you're obviously not Dealing with the text. I'm looking at the text of Scripture. Was God weak when he demanded the taking down of the body? Now we do have some pushback. So there's one example in the book of Judges of a man who is a priest and his.

13:19 It's a horrific story. The woman he's with, they're attacked. He gives her over to this mob. They abuse her, um, and then she dies. And even how she died is a little bit of a mystery. Was it him who did it or was it the mob that did it? It's not 100% clear, um, that, well, they did it. They did a lot of it. Anyway. It's a complicated story. So he takes her body and guys, this is not for kids, okay? As you should tell from the title of this video, he takes her body and he severs her into parts and he sends the parts of her body throughout Israel with probably information like documents or messengers to say, this is what Benjamin, the tribe of Benjamin did to this woman, all Israel. Then in response to this, overreacts. Do they overreact? Absolutely, they overreact. They gather together and they just start slaughtering the people of Benjamin. And they destroy so many of them, so many of them, that Benjamin, the tribe of Israel is almost gone. And they have to like arrange for marriages in order for them to just repopulate and survive. Now certainly they didn't deserve all of that. You find the culprits and you get them. But they went wild and crazy. So my suggestion is in the Book of Judges, this is not a highlight of a great thing to do.

14:31 It's the closest thing to televised I can find. You take an actual piece of the person's deceased body and you send it around for people to look at, right? Because you want them to feel it. And this is what people want. I want them to feel this guy being killed. And it's going to have that impact. It's going to really change things for people.

14:46 I think you're overestimating the impact it will have and underestimating it in some ways. I'll tell you about in a second. So there's an example and what happened was an overreaction that led to violence and death above and beyond what was appropriate. That almost destroyed one of the tribes of Israel. That's the only example I can see where they did that. We also have an example where, um, uh, in Scripture where there's bodies being hung on display and, uh, David's men go and take the bodies down, right? I think it was David's men go and take the bodies down as a way of stopping this horrible thing of displaying these bodies. So there seems to be a general awareness that this is not a good thing to do. Now, some say, But, Mike, there's numerous passages that say that all the people of Israel would gather together. All the people would gather together for these executions.

15:33 And there's some nuance that we should have here. When Israel, they have different times and seasons, right? Israel, when they're traveling in the wilderness, they're all part of one large camp. They're not spread out across the nation. They're all part of one large camp. So, yes, they're one local community and they can all go out. But when executions are happening after they've landed and they've split up into cities, generally just the people in that city or the people that were local are coming for the execution.

16:00 The rest of Israel, as scripture says, will hear and fear the proper fear of the death penalty. So I think that's a false parallel to suggest that we have all these examples of all the people, um, seeing. Well, now you have to look at the details here. The only other pushback I have heard that I thought was worth addressing is. And then I'll share one last thought about how maybe this will backfire.

16:22 The idea of a televised execution of a terrorist could actually backfire in a significant way. Um, and, uh, before I get into that, though, I'll say, the one pushback I heard in addition was in Revelation, where there is a very public, very public display of the judgment of the wicked. There's smoke rises up forever, and there's rejoicing and stuff. Um, yeah, that absolutely happens. My only caveat is to tell you that is not your example of you judging.

16:52 Right? That's God bringing his wrath, not an example of how he wants you to handle judgment. Right? We are to wait upon God's wrath. And if he chooses to do things publicly, so be it. He chooses. He's God. It's also not a permanent replaying video image that they're going to see forever. So it doesn't seem to me to relate. It doesn't seem to me to relate. I'm very strong for the death penalty because of my biblical convictions, but I'm very much against a televised execution for the same reason.

17:20 It seems to contradict what scripture says. And, uh, one last thing I'll add is this. Specifically when dealing with terrorists, when dealing with the kind of guy who did the Fort Hood shooting, these evil men whose names we shouldn't speak, whose Faces we shouldn't even look at. We, uh, should blot them out. That is the greatest thing that would help them fear is that they would know that they'd be blotted out, that they wouldn't get pressed, that they wouldn't. Of course you'll televise what happened, or not televise visually the execution, but you will.

17:50 I use the wrong words there. You should publicize what happened as far as letting people know that this person did this crime and that they were taking it out. Uh, but using their name. I think we use their name, let them be blotted out. That's the best thing. Because they want their names famous. They want to be famous.

18:05 Researchers have shown this mass shooters want to be known. They want their faces plastered everywhere. They want people to be impressed by them or even scared of them, because infamy itself is a type of fame. So we don't want to bring them more attention than is appropriate. And that's exactly another reason why you don't want to televise this stuff. This guy wants to be on tv probably, right? He desires to be seen. He wants to be given last words, something to proclaim, make faces, do something. He wants to be seen because he sees this as part of his martyrdom before Allah, his Islamic faith in action. Him murdering groups of people, Christians, um, and non Christians, but because they are seen as the Christian west coming against the Taliban. Right? That was his reason.

18:49 So when you give them the stage and when you give them the infamy, you do two things. You give them what they want, which is not something we generally like to do. We'll do justice either way. If you like it or not, we'll do it. But the other thing you do is you encourage others that they can have that if they come against you as well, and it can actually encourage. We want to make the execution something that is not desirable for the terrorists, where they go, ah, so if I go on a shooting spree in the US they'll televise my execution and I can stand up as a call for more martyrs and more violence and stuff. It's not wise to present it that way.

19:25 So that's one argument that is not biblical, but that seems valid. And, uh, uh, was something I wanted to share with you guys that I was told. I did a Twitter spaces on this. And that argument was presented by, um, an atheist, of all people, uh, who has spent many years encountering terrorism. And he was like, people don't understand these terrorist groups.

19:45 It will only stir up more if you televise it that way. We want to do it in a strategic fashion. But I'm going to rest my case on I don't think it's biblical and that's what this video is about. I'll watch the comments. I want to hear pushback. But if you push back against me and you do not acknowledge the specific passages, the exact phrases that I covered in Deuteronomy 21, I will not be paying much attention to your pushback because I want to think biblically about this, not just be talked into a different perspective. There's my thought. This is why I think it's wonderful they're not going to televise the execution and they shouldn't televise any executions at all. You can always simply report. You can tell people what happened. You can show a picture of a casket, you can show a picture of a body bag if that's what it is. That's very different than televising the actual execution which is unnecessary and may defile the land.