> What happened to "Judge not, lest yourself be judged"? What happened to the golden rule? What happened to "Love your neighbour as yourself"? (Matt 22:37-39)

Erm. The first does not apply to a government trying and sentencing a criminal. If it did, it would therefore be anti-Christian for the government to imprison, fine, or otherwise punish anyone, or even, in fact, to allow a verdict of guilty or not guilty to be determined in its courts. If you think God is opposed to ANY form of legal justice attempted by human government, then that's a whole different argument (and a silly one, at that).

The second is irrelevant, and I have already explained in a previous post how capital punishment is NOT (or *should* not) be motivated out of hatred or vengeance anymore than any other sentence should be.

> What happened to the work of Christ on the cross?

Christ's work on the cross enables sinners to stand before God, sinless in his sight. It enabled people to have a way to receive mercy, by not going to deserved hell, and grace, by going to undeserved heaven. As capital punishment is not intended to determine where someone goes AFTER death, the relevance of what Christ did to the issue of capital punishment is not overwhelming me. Death row convicts are condemned to death, not hell. Consequently...

> To me, it's not a question of whether or not McVeigh is guilty or not, if he will repent or not -- it's just that we simply aren't allowed to take God's judgement seat.

...capital punishment is not an attempt to usurp God's rightful power to judge but instead an institution of human government endorsed by God for establishing *legal* justice in *this* life.

> And he has clearly stated that we shall ourselves be judged like we judge others. That is a scary thought.

Is it? According to the precepts of Christianity, which we both profess to follow, if you believe that Christ died on the cross and rose again, paying the punishment for your sins, then you WILL be judged sinless in God's sight. Any professing Christian, who has accepted Christ's gift of salvation (rather than trying to earn it by works), need not fear God's judgment, for our debts due to sin have been paid in full, and we have God's promise that he will remember our sins no more (Hebrews 8, I think). The certainty that we will stand trial on Judgment Day and be judged spotless is one of the greatest parts about salvation. We owe it to God to lead our lives according to his will concerning us, for by committing our lives to Christ, we acknowledge that we are no longer our own but His. But God calls us to be certain of the security of our place in the body of Christ. Therefore any true Christian need not fear his judgment at all.

> And I definitely cannot fathom how people dear to claim that Timothy McVeigh is in hell now. THAT is a matter in which God himself ONLY can decide.

I agree with you that no one can say for certain where McVeigh is now. However, let's not confuse "judge" with "discern." "Judge," biblically speaking, implies a determination of a just punishment. It's not "judging" someone to say, "what you did was wrong." I can watch you kill somebody and say, "You were wrong to do that" -- and SHOULD make that determination for myself rather than fall back and say, oh, it's not my place to say whether that was right or wrong -- without "judging" you. Where I might step over the line AS A PRIVATE CITIZEN would be to say, "You were wrong, and you deserve [some punishment]." Government can determine consequences for THIS world. God determines consequences for the NEXT world, and may occasionally intervene in this world's judgment as he sees fit.

What I'm leading up to is that just as Christians should "discern" sin, so also must we occasionally discern a fellow believer from a nonbeliever. I'm not about to accept spiritual guidance from a pastor who is not saved (and therefore going to heaven), and so I must make some effort of discernment to determine whether that person understands spiritual things in the manner that only people who have the Holy Spirit dwelling within them would. You will know them by their works, the Bible says. In making this discernment, I'm effectively making a guess about where that person is going to end up in the afterlife, because while the final judgment is indeed up to God, God's criteria for determining where people go is not a secret. Anyone with so much as a speck of sin on them falls short of the glory of God and is deserving of hell, and the ONLY way to be spotless in his sight is to accept Christ (John 14:6, Romans 10:9-10).

McVeigh is not someone I know by his works and professed statements to be someone that accepts that he's a sinner and believes that Christ died on the cross to save him. Maybe I'm wrong, and I'll be in for a happy surprise one day. But I don't think that it's wrong for me to assume he's in hell now -- it would only be wrong of me to assert that he should be.

I realize the above post says very little about the justness of capital punishment. Frankly, I don't think it's that important in comparison with the other issues you raise. As I've already shown, I'm more than happy to get into a capital punishment debate, once God is brought into the debate, it doesn't make sense to me to debate capital punishment anymore until everything else is in agreement.