Under the Covenant of Christ, we don’t stone our covenant members for their grave sins against shalom as was done under the Covenant of Moses.
There are several reasons behind this. First is that the Covenant of Moses was meant to fail in a certain sense. It was staged as an experiment of what could be, what could work, if human nature wasn’t so damned weak. In particular, we suffer the arrogance of the intellect, so utterly sure it can handle everything. This militates against the fundamental requirement that we trust in God’s revelation, because the intellect is incapable of discerning what’s really real.
It wasn’t the Fall that gave us this arrogant intellect; that is what intellect is like. It must be guided by the heart. The Fall added to this weakness mortality: the inability to see or act beyond the space-time constraints. Our fleshly bodies are not all that different from our Eden bodies in terms of appearance, but radically different in substance (same as Christ’s resurrected body). In that sense, Eden isn’t a place on earth; Eden is earth. It’s not a place we go to, but a condition, an existence without mortality.
And the earth we see around us would be a whole lot different if we were in our Eden bodies with a full trust in divine revelation (eating from the Tree of Life). What we see in the natural world around us is the long term result of human mismanagement. We do not commune with nature and our plans, purposes and actions are not according to its design. We don’t commune with Creation because we don’t commune with the God that made it.
So the only hope we have is getting back to Eden and the Tree of Life by surrendering our arrogance and false sense of control. Humanity has been trying to return to Eden by every means they can dream up, but the only way is restoring that reliance on revelation. Over the centuries outside of Eden, humanity kept losing track of revelation. So in the Exodus, God had a nation He pulled out of the mass of human truculence about divine truth. He met with them almost face-to-face at Sinai and wrote with His own finger an outline of a covenant.
Moreover, the whole context of this revelation, with all its trappings, were very much what that nation would have expected. It was in their language, in their customs, and consistent with their best scholarship. They didn’t even get far away from Sinai before rebelling. Very quickly their arrogance took over, and they were convinced they could work things out for themselves. This went off and on for centuries.
Finally, God sent His own Son, His revelation in human form. His nation rejected Him, so He rejected them. He gave His final revelation to a whole new nation, one that was not in any way reliant on human frailties. It’s a new form of covenant; the national identity was His personal Presence in their hearts. There will be no mass of unredeemed hanging on to complicate things.
Today, we who follow Christ are allowed to see what the Covenant of Moses was trying to say. We carve off a lot of stuff that no longer fits our context. That includes the death penalties. We are no longer confined to a specific human identity with fixed national boundaries, saddled with family that refuses to fully embrace the covenant. What could have worked in the Old Covenant doesn’t work in the New. We have restored the ancient moral lesson of Babylon: We avoid any effort to place more than a tiny few under covenant rule. We are formed in thousands of tiny clans, each with a highly variable human content, but bound together by His Spirit.
In our New Covenant, “death” is simply dis-fellowship, declaring someone an outsider. If they refuse to act like an insider, then they are granted their obvious wish not to be an insider. Being an insider means compliant with the Spirit of Divine Law. We don’t stone sinners; we simply refuse to recognize them as family.
