I.
I would like to draw your attention this morning to these words of Our Savior, in the tenth chapter of Matthew, verses fourteen and fifteen:
“And if any one will not receive you or listen to your words, shake off the dust from your feet as you leave that house or town. Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”
Jesus is speaking here to his disciples, commissioning them, sending them out, and giving them instructions for preaching.
What is of significance is the penalty applied for ignoring the message of one of these commissioned preachers.
There has been considerable discussion in the news these past weeks of the death penalty—something that was abolished in Connecticut in 2012—which is to say, some fourteen years ago.
To my knowledge, there is no serious discussion underway about bringing it back.
That has not prevented heated discussions from taking place. What crimes—if there are any, in the enlightened, humane, civilized year of 2026—are deserving of death?
Has the Bible—particularly the Old Testament—got anything relevant to say?
Are sodomy, witchcraft, and adultery really deserving of death?
Would any civilized people do such a thing?
Put a man to death because of whom he loves or a woman to death for believing silly things and thinking she can cast spells?
These are the questions people have been asking.
And the answer invariably is—from both sides of the political aisle—from conservative Christian and progressive alike: “Surely, not.”
The reasons for this resounding “No” range from “That’s barbaric,” to “Jesus forgave the woman caught in adultery,” to “the Old Testament needed the New Testament.”
Well, this morning’s reading from Matthew is in the New Testament and the words we hear spoken are Jesus’ words: “Truly, I say to you, it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”
The citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah were up to their necks in depraved sexual sin and violence, yet Jesus says just for not receiving one of His preachers—for such a small thing as not wanting to listen to a preacher—a town will suffer a worse fate than Sodom and Gomorrah.
Now, I ask you to please tell me exactly how the Old Testament needs the New Testament, or how the grace Jesus shows to the woman caught in adultery softens His words now?
The grace Christ showed the woman will not be applied to the towns that refuse Him.
No precedent has been established, no verdict overturned. Rather, the sentence of death stands.
Our problem is that we wince, we shy away from—let me speak plainly—we are embarrassed by the biblical penalties for sin, so we label them “Old Testament” and tuck them away, so we don’t have to think about them.
Meanwhile, we ignore the New Testament, which not only repeats these biblical penalties, but raises the stakes significantly.
Not only are the Old Testament penalties still in effect, but the New Testament promises to make things worse for sinners.
Truly:
“It shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”
II.
Very well, let us turn now to Exodus. Let us consider this story from another perspective, from the perspective, not of villagers who reject the preachers Jesus sends them, but of a nation—a people—who hear God’s word and receive it.
Israel has left Egypt, and they come to Mt. Sinai.
That fact is significant, because the defining moment of Jewish national life has yet to happen.
The law has yet to be given.
Moses goes up the mountain and God calls to him.
God says in verse four, “Thus you shall say to the house of Jacob, and tell the people of Israel: You have seen what I did to the Egyptians…”
Let’s pause there for one moment to remember what God did to the Egyptians.
He afflicted them with ten plagues, each one more terrifying than the last.
The last plague was the worst. God killed each of the firstborn of the Egyptians, both children and livestock.
That is horrific. Inhumane. Barbaric. Something we would never condone.
Something that, if we were commanded to do ourselves, we would surely refuse to do.
We would say, “Thank God we have the New Testament. Thank God we have Jesus’ example of mercy.”
Now, here is something interesting to point out. Nothing in God’s law—which He is about to give to Moses—asks us to go to such an extreme.
It turns out that God’s law is much less severe than His judgment—and God only ever asks us to obey His law, never to execute His judgment.
For instance, the penalty for sodomy is death. Leviticus 20:13 says, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination; they shall be put to death, their blood is upon them.”
That is an example of the lex talionis, an eye for an eye. However, God’s judgment on the city whose name is synonymous with the crime is much more severe.
The law limits man and man’s vengeance. In this case, only the two men involved are to be put to death—“their blood is upon them.”
God, however, destroys entire cities in His wrath, and the New Testament increases the penalty for sexual sin.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians 6:9-10, “Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God” (ESV).
How does that increase the penalty?
Because the Old Testament law of Moses only put a man to death in the kingdom of this world.
But the New Testament tells us that such men are also put to death in the kingdom of God.
Whose judgment is more severe, the justice executed by man under God’s law, or the judgment meted out by God Himself?
Truly: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God” (Hebrews 10:31).
There is, however, an unwillingness on the part of the Israelites to keep the covenant.
It’s not unlike the unwillingness we feel when we are asked if God’s word still applies as the standard of justice for today.
After all, who wants to put a man to death because of whom he loves?
Horrific! Barbaric! Cruel! Uncivilized! Unchristian! That’s not in the New Testament!
Yes, the Israelites paid lip service to obedience to God’s law in verse eight.
They say, “All that the Lord has spoken we will do.”
This is not unlike Christians who pay lip service to biblical authority today:
“We believe the Bible, consisting of the Old and New Testament, to be the only inspired, inerrant, infallible, authoritative Word of God written.”
It’s very easy to say those words. It becomes hard to defend them when accusers try to back you into a corner because of what the Bible actually says.
As we learned last week, Israel did not fail to obey the law of worship.
In Psalm 50:8, which we read last week, God says, “I do not reprove you for your sacrifices; your burnt offerings are continually before me.”
Rather, they failed to execute the law of justice.
Israel failed to execute justice upon both idolater and sodomite—and the two crimes frequently went together.
And so God poured out His judgment upon Israel, first at the hands of the Assyrians in 722 B.C. and then at the hands of the Babylonians in 586 B.C.
Had the law been kept and its penalties applied, then the promise God made to Moses in verse six would have been kept. Israel would have been to God “a kingdom of priests and a holy nation.”
But the law was not kept, which brings us back to Jesus’ words in Matthew 10, “it shall be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom and Gomorrah than for that town.”
Grace offered and refused is worse than grace never offered.
God never sent preachers to Sodom and Gomorrah to warn them, but He did send preachers to “the lost sheep of the house of Israel.”
God loves His own people enough to send preachers to warn them, but if they reject Him, they receive a double portion of punishment.
What could be worse than the destruction of two entire cities from among the kingdoms of earth?
The only thing worse than death on earth is death for all eternity: eternal, conscious death.
Jesus says in Matthew 10:28, “do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.”
The justice God asks men to apply in this world is limited to this world. The judgment that God visits upon sinners who die in their sins is eternal.
III.
That puts us in a very awkward position, because, it turns out, the embarrassing part of the Bible isn’t the law—it’s God.
As part of His preacher training course, Jesus says “for it is not you who speak, but the Spirit of your Father speaking through you.”
Because it is the Father speaking, the result is shame and embarrassment. Jesus continues, “Brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and children will rise against parents and have them put to death; and you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.”
These preachers will be hated—not for the law’s sake (the Pharisees—unlike us—had no quarrel with God’s law) but because the Spirit of the Father speaks through these commissioned men.
When Moses went up the mountain to receive the law, God reminded him of what judgment without limits was.
“You have seen what I did to the Egyptians,” God said.
Speaking on behalf of the murmuring people—people who, two chapters before, complained to Moses:
“Why did you bring us up out of Egypt, to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?”—speaking on behalf of these ingrates, Moses might have been tempted to say to God:
Yes, we all saw what you did to the Egyptians, and you have made it very difficult for us should we have to go back there!
All this death and destruction—this plunder of Egypt—we’re now associated with it, God. Your Name and our name, God, are associated with violence.
Is this not how we feel when we are called to explain God to the Egyptians—when someone, perhaps even a candidate running for public office—puts us nice Christians on the spot?
Us nice Christians—right?—we just want the world to know how much we love them and want what’s best for them.
Our progressive brothers and sisters in Christ think this means telling the world that sin can be a source of pride.
Our Bible-believing brothers and sisters think this means Christians will never be called upon to execute biblical standards of justice upon the ungodly. (It goes without saying that the execution of justice properly belongs to the magistrate—Romans 13:4—not to the mob or vigilantes.)
Progressives deny the law’s standard; evangelicals deny its execution.
Most Christians try to bypass God’s law entirely and appeal directly to God.
But unmediated access to God—like His unmediated judgment—is not something we’re made for. “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God.”
So, we have an absolute need for a mediator or we will perish in God’s hands.
God’s law is a mediator. It mediates His judgment into justice that man can execute. Limited. Proportional.
The biblical principle of “let the punishment fit the crime” is the foundation of our legal system to this day. But we need more than law to be saved.
IV.
Who we need is Jesus Christ.
Paul writes in today’s reading from Romans 5:1-2, “Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ. Through him we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand, and we rejoice in our hope of sharing the glory of God.”
Here is the other mediator—and He is not a rule-book, not a legal code—but a man.
Elsewhere, Paul writes, “there is one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5).
On the cross, Jesus accomplished what the law never could: He bought us peace with God.
That said, there was something terribly disproportionate, terribly shameful, terribly embarrassing about the way Jesus died.
The cross is embarrassing. His disciples fled. Peter denied Him three times. Golgotha. The very name is synonymous with shame.
The cross is disproportionate, because, as Paul also writes in today’s reading from Romans, “While we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.”
Why should the strong die for the weak? Why should the godly die for the ungodly? There is no justice here—if you define justice as “let the punishment fit the crime.”
Furthermore, why should God the Father be satisfied by the death of His own Son? There is no making sense of this in human terms.
The cross is not an example of God’s justice in that proportional, mediated sense.
Rather, it is an example of His wrath and judgment—wrath and judgment for the sins of the whole world—poured out in full on one man, made poor and entirely contemptible by our loss and contempt, Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
Christ on the cross shows what happens to man when he tries to stand unmediated before God naked and alone, outside the law—an outlaw.
V.
So the choice is clear: we either live by God’s law or we die under His judgment.
Unmediated access to God destroys; in Christ we get access and live.
Living by God’s will requires us to execute it. Saying that will make us unpopular.
It will get us canceled. They will call it hate speech. They will primary our candidates.
I said earlier that progressives deny the law’s standard; evangelicals deny its execution.
Don’t pat yourselves on the back because you’ve left (or never gone to) one of those rainbow-flag-flying churches.
If you’re not willing to execute God’s justice, you’re no better than those who deny His standard.
As Protestants, one of our solas is Sola scriptura—scripture alone. We therefore can never be ashamed of or allow ourselves to be caught off guard by what God’s word actually says.
There is a hinge, however, upon which all this swings. This hinge is peculiar to the Reformed faith and to the Connecticut experiment with covenant communities.
At the end of the day, these covenant communities, the town-churches—the ecclesiastical societies—of Connecticut were voluntary associations.
No one was ever forced to live in Woodbury. No one was ever forced to become a member of Woodbury’s First Church.
Yes, for almost the first two hundred years the residents of Woodbury—members of this church or not—had to pay a tax to support it.
But the voluntary principle waxed, while the compulsory principle waned.
Eventually, citizens could assign their tax to the church of their choosing.
By 1818, the church tax was abolished altogether.
But I have to wonder, and I have to ask, especially of those candidates who promise to lower our taxes: Whose yoke was lighter? Christ’s or Caesar’s?
How much did it really tax the townsfolk of Woodbury to support this church? How much more are we taxed today?
The voluntary nature of the town-church meant that the execution of God’s law in these communities was limited in so far as adherence to it was voluntary.
One was free to leave if one did not want to put up with the discipline of living under Puritan rule or pay the tax to support it.
Practically speaking, this meant that the biblical penalty of death for many crimes was often commuted to banishment or exile from the colony.
There were exceptions: for murder—abolished in 2012—and, of course, during the colonial era, for witchcraft.
This voluntary principle defines what it means to be an American, to this day. Unfortunately, for the most part, it has devolved into individualism: “No one can tell me what I can and can’t do.”
The Christians who first settled Connecticut were willing to take a risk: that God would bless His people with unprecedented freedom—freedom from king, freedom from an established religion—provided they subjected themselves to His law, voluntarily.
Now that we have removed God’s law in every sphere of public life—including from the church—what is there left of our voluntas, our free will, and the obligations we freely undertake?
The answer, as I see it, is not much.
The man that will not voluntarily do what is right is eventually compelled.
The path to slavery is not duty, but vice.
