> I second what Nyperold said. God never changes; He is immutable.
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> The Bible also says that government is ordained by God for specific purposes. And one of the functions of any government is to punish wrongdoers; to protect its upstanding citizens from the criminal element.

God doesn't change, but, as Nyperold said, the method for atonement does. In the Bible, there are actually seven different ways in which God's rules about salvation from sin are applied, Moses' law being the fifth and the current salvation by faith in Christ being the sixth. (Christ's millennial reign is the seventh.) One can speculate why God does this, although the answer is not necessarily important (the short answer is that God has the right and authority to do what He wants), but possibly it's to give humankind every possible chance. But getting back to the point, capital punishment is upheld by God in every such period after the second, that being when Cain killed Abel, and God put a mark on Cain saying that no one should touch him for that crime. (In that period, God's rules were that people should follow their conscience's lead about right and wrong; in the first, Adam and Eve were in the garden, initially *without* sin and simply had to avoid falling into it.) Capital punishment is upheld in the New Testament, as it meticulously documents what Old Testament rules change by Christ on the cross and which ones do not. Capital punishment is not explicitly obsoleted and actually supported in one of Paul's epistles -- alas, I forget which one.