“Murderers must die!” is a divine command.

When reading the bible one must ask, “Why is this here?” The bible isn’t just some random collection of folktales from a bygone and more primitive age; it is a holy history lesson. It was written to inform and enlighten those who would come later of how and why to live.

Genesis 9:6, God’s statement of why the flood, is clear: anyone who takes the life of another for any reason other than accident or self-defense (as made more clear elsewhere in the law) is to pay for his crime with his own life.

The first murder in human history is recorded in Genesis 4. This murder of Abel by his brother, Cain, is also the first human death recorded. Sin was new to the race and these new sinners had no concept of how sinful sin really was. To guide the race in its understanding of sin, God commanded that the guilty go free in this instance. As an aside, whenever we wonder why God allows the wicked to prosper and sin to flourish, we need only look to the first 11 chapters of Genesis. The absolutely worse thing we can do to someone who has embraced sin is to leave them to the consequences of their desire to be their own god. Sin pays a terrible wage in sorrow, disappointment, cruelty, and death. A sinner left unpunished will take an entire civilization into the pit. And so with Cain. He was not immediately punished for murdering his brother and the consequence was such degradation and depravity of the race that God’s only recourse was to push the restart button and begin afresh.

Murders are up almost by 1/3 this year over last. I was listening to the district attorney for Philadelphia decrying the prevalence of guns on the street and the senseless slaughter of men and women on the streets of the City of Brotherly Love. If I could, I would have shouted at him, “When was the last time Philadelphia executed a murderer within two years of the crime?” The answer would be, “Decades ago.” The secular left have used the law against the people by protecting murderers from the due penalty for their crimes. Where the Proverbs makes clear that God hates both the condemnation of the innocent and the acquittal of the guilty, the “enlightened” progressives in both church and law have determined that the innocent should suffer at the hands of the guilty.

Philadelphia is not unique. Texas is executing a man for a murder he committed 30 years ago. Executing 30 years after the fact is not justice. Justice demands immediate retribution. Our cities are awash in blood for two reasons: 1) because justice goes crying in the street and men with guns set out to bring about the justice the law denies them; and 2) the law is a toothless nag.

America is in need of a spiritual revival and a legal reset. Progressivism must be rejected as proven never to work when embraced. It must be rejected by the church as an attempt to make man appear wiser than his creator, and it must be rejected by the people as always leading to social disintegration and decay.

Crime must be punished appropriately by the people for the protection of the spirit as well as the body.