We give people fish. We teach them to fish. We tear down the walls that have been built up around the fish pond. And we figure out who polluted it.

Today the logic goes something like this: 'Calling a ruler Son of God is out of style. No one really does that nowadays. We can support a president while also worshiping Jesus as the Son of God.' But how is this possible? For one says that we must love our enemies, and the other says we must kill them; one promotes the economics of competition, while the other admonishes the forgiveness of debts. To which do we pledge allegiance?

There are some  -  called 'death fatigue'  -  people who just grow so tired of death, so they don't want to keep perpetuating death and creating more victims and more anger and more pain. They want to heal from that, and I think that's exactly what God wants to do. And, interestingly enough, that's part of what God's original law was doing with the 'eye for an eye' thing. It was actually to limit the patterns of retaliation and then to begin to heal from that.

A pastor friend of mine said, "Our problem is that we no longer have martyrs. We only have celebrities.

All around you, people will be tiptoeing through life, just to arrive at death safely. But dear children, do not tiptoe. Run, hop, skip, or dance, just don't tiptoe.

It's unilaterally true that it costs more to maintain the death penalty than the alternatives to it, and we can leverage more resources to victims families. We can do all sorts of creative ways of healing the pain that people have done by channeling the energy and resources to other more redemptive forms of justice.

David, Moses, Saul of Tarsus, these were all people who did terrible terrible things  -  they were murderers. The Bible would be a lot shorter without grace.