Latest / The Speak Life Podcast / Why is Trump Rethinking This Execution? || SLP686

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Why is Trump Rethinking This Execution? || SLP686 · The Speak Life Podcast

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_03: In 2009, Nadal Hassan shot dead 14 people and injured 30 more in Fort Hood in Texas.
• 0:07
  SPEAKER_03: He is going to be executed on the 3rd of December this year.
• 0:12
  SPEAKER_03: Will it be live streamed?
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_03: Pete Heggseth, who is the U.S.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_03: Secretary of Defense, has said that it will be live streamed.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_03: When asked about it, he said this.
• 0:21
  SPEAKER_03: No-brainer.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_02: Execution by firing squad.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_02: Army major betrays his country.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_02: Radical Islamist kills a bunch of Americans at Fort Hood.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_02: Of course we're going to do it at Fort Hood.
• 0:30
  SPEAKER_02: Going to do it on a Thursday.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_02: We're going to do it at one o'clock, which is when he did it.
• 0:33
  SPEAKER_02: And it's going to be soldiers with rifles executing the firing squad.
• 0:38
  SPEAKER_02: It hadn't been since World War II since we've done that.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_02: Well, I kind of like the mentality we had in World War II, which was win.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_02: Which was uh understand when the enemy attacks you, you need to stand your ground.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_02: We know what it is.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_02: It was a radical Islamist attack in uniform inside the ranks.
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_02: And so he's going to get a firing squad of soldiers, as it should be.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_02: And we'll make sure that people are able to watch it, that it's public, uh, because people need to understand that what this is uh there's serious consequences for these types of things.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_02: Do you has Major Hassan made any uh final request, reach out to the president, anything like that to your knowledge?
• 1:10
  SPEAKER_02: Don't care.
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_02: We'll see him on December 3rd.
• 1:13
  SPEAKER_03: The vice president is not sure that he wants to watch.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_01: This is a guy who brutally murdered a lot of innocent people.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Now that said, I mean, look, if it's ultimately live streamed, I'm not going to be watching it.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_03: And now the latest news is that Trump is rethinking the entire thing.
• 1:28
  SPEAKER_00: Donald Trump is reportedly having second thoughts about plans to live stream a military execution by firing squad in December.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Mass shooter Nadal Hassan was sentenced to death after killing 13 people and wounding 32 others at a Texas military base in 2009.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: He's now paralyzed from the chest down.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_00: It's been reported the US President is concerned about the optics of broadcasting the execution of a wheelchair-bound man.
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_00: There are fears extremist groups could use the images to paint her son as a martyr and recruit terrorists.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_03: Pete Heggsith said, we will see you on December the 3rd.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_03: Who is we?
• 2:10
  SPEAKER_03: And what will they see on December 3rd?
• 2:13
  SPEAKER_03: J.D.
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_03: Vance is not sure he wants to see it.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_03: And Trump is the one, most of all, who is thinking about the optics.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_03: Of course he's thinking about the optics.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_03: He got the optics just right for his McDonald's drive-thru photo shoot.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_03: He got the optics very wrong in 2020 when he posed with a Bible outside the White House.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_03: But whether he gets the optics right or wrong, he knows the power of the optics, and he is sensing that the optics are all wrong for an execution of a man in a wheelchair.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_03: That seems to be a decisive factor in his consideration.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to think about that just for a second.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_03: What are the optics of a public execution?
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_03: This involves three different questions, really.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_03: There's the moral legitimacy of the death penalty to begin with.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_03: There is the public nature of such an execution.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_03: And then there is the idea of live streaming it, and thereby having a death become content in a social media age.
• 3:13
  SPEAKER_03: We're going to go through those three things very, very quickly, and we're going to get to the stage of saying it is true.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_03: Optics really, really matter, but not really the way that Donald Trump thinks.
• 3:24
  SPEAKER_03: And we're going to finish by considering there is a public execution that we must see.
• 3:31
  SPEAKER_03: We must pay attention to.
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_03: We must focus in on.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_03: We must witness a public execution in order for our moral intuitions about any of this to actually make sense.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_03: My name's Glenn Scrivener from Speak Life.
• 3:44
  SPEAKER_03: We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_03: If you like trying on a pair of Jesus goggles, even just for a little bit, why don't you give the channel a subscribe?
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_03: We'd love to help you with that.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_03: Now, as to the first question, is capital punishment legitimate?
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_03: Well, I guess right back from Genesis chapter 9, there is the idea that because humanity is made in the image of God, therefore murder is to be punished like for like, death for death, with the death penalty.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_03: And there it is in Genesis chapter 9, long before, long before the Mosaic Covenant, which is a very time-bound covenant.
• 4:19
  SPEAKER_03: The old covenant under Moses had all kinds of capital crimes, that is true.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_03: And we'll think about the ways in which the New Testament picks up on those old covenant capital offenses.
• 4:31
  SPEAKER_03: But even if you think the New Testament utterly transforms all of those capital crimes, you've still got to deal with Genesis chapter 9.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_03: And I find it very confronting as somebody who has grown up in countries that have had nothing to do with the death penalty.
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_03: All the media I've ever consumed, all the stories I've ever heard about the death penalty are things like Green Mile, in which the death penalty has a massive question mark above it, and the condemned criminal might well be innocent.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_03: That culture has shaped me utterly to the point where I really don't want to find any permission in the Bible for the death penalty.
• 5:07
  SPEAKER_03: But I think in Genesis chapter 9, I think there is a permission that because of the image of God in humanity, therefore there are occasions where the death penalty is an appropriate upholding of the image of God.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_03: So I think it's permissible.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_03: Obviously, in the old covenant, there are all kinds of capital crimes.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_03: There are these kinds of capital crimes that are crimes of anger, i.e.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: murder.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_03: There are these kind of capital crimes that are crimes of lust, i.e.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: sex.
• 5:39
  SPEAKER_03: And there are these kinds of capital crimes that are religious crimes, blasphemy charges.
• 5:45
  SPEAKER_03: And under the Mosaic Covenant, for those particular people, the Israelites in the land of Canaan, between the time of Moses until the time of the Messiah coming in the flesh, that old covenant theocracy had a death penalty, and at times it is stipulated that those deaths are to be carried out publicly as a warning to others.
• 6:07
  SPEAKER_03: But then Christ does indeed come in the flesh.
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_03: And how does he treat the Old Testament law?
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_03: Well, he says that he has not come to abolish the law but to fulfill it.
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_03: But the first thing he does in order to fulfill the law is to say that we are all murderers through our anger, we are all adulterers through our lust, and therefore all of us are worthy of this death penalty.
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus himself in Matthew 19 says that Moses gave to us non-ideal laws because our hearts were hard, but it was not so at the beginning.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, there is a shape to the scriptures, and we are to read the Bible according to that narrative shape, a goodness in the beginning that falls into hardness of heart and a non-ideal situation that Moses is legislating.
• 6:51
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus has come to bring us up to the perfection that was intended in the beginning.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_03: So we should not simply grab an Old Testament law of Moses and simply apply it today.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_03: Jesus did not want us to do that.
• 7:04
  SPEAKER_03: And Jesus in Matthew 18, right where you would expect him to talk about capital crimes, actually talks about excommunication rather than execution.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_03: Certainly the Apostle Paul picks up on that.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_03: He actually quotes a phrase that is used again and again in Deuteronomy about public execution.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_03: Purge the evil person from among you.
• 7:24
  SPEAKER_03: And Paul says, yet do that not by executing, but by excommunicating.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_03: And you excommunicate with the hope that the person is restored back to fellowship again.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_03: So there's absolutely no death penalty in the church, in the people of God.
• 7:38
  SPEAKER_03: Is there still a space for the state to bear the sword?
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_03: Well, interestingly, Romans chapter 12 says that God will avenge, it is his to repay.
• 7:48
  SPEAKER_03: Therefore, the individual believer must never take vigilante justice into our own hands.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_03: God can and will avenge, and he is very good at his job, and we are to leave all of that into his hands so that I individually am never to avenge certain crimes or sins.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_03: Actually, the fact that God is very good at doing justice means that I can devote myself to mercy.
• 8:10
  SPEAKER_03: That's what Paul calls us to do.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_03: And then in Romans chapter 13, he says, Now the state is a bearer of the sword of God's justice and is a legitimate authority that can to some degree bring retributive justice.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_03: So there is space for the state to bear the sword.
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_03: Now, does that mean that the state needs to put people to death?
• 8:31
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think the state needs to put people to death at all.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_03: The sword is still being wielded when you incarcerate somebody.
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_03: The state has a monopoly of violence in that sense, but force is still being used in states that have completely abolished the death penalty.
• 8:47
  SPEAKER_03: And Romans thirteen certainly does not command a state to use the sword to kill people.
• 8:53
  SPEAKER_03: You might as well say that Romans thirteen is commanding people to use cruel and unusual punishment or to torture people.
• 9:01
  SPEAKER_03: If you think that Romans thirteen actually legitimates any use of the sword, then you are completely overreading Romans chapter 13.
• 9:09
  SPEAKER_03: I don't actually think that Romans thirteen necessarily legitimates the death penalty.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_03: Certainly, if you were in a country that had the death penalty, just as the Roman Christians in the first century were in Nero's Rome, so such Christians were not to rebel against such authorities, but to live quiet lives and get on with sharing the gospel.
• 9:30
  SPEAKER_03: What Paul is saying in Romans 13 is that Caesar's gonna Caesar.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_03: Nero's gonna Nero, right?
• 9:36
  SPEAKER_03: That that is the thrust of Romans chapter 13.
• 9:39
  SPEAKER_03: And the ways in which Nero actually carried out public executions was incredibly pagan and disgusting.
• 9:47
  SPEAKER_03: He would use Christians as flaming torches in his parties, burning them alive as they're impaled on stakes.
• 9:55
  SPEAKER_03: He, of course, was into the gladiatorial games, and all that spectacle, all that excitement, all that bloodshed, all that frenzy, that is utterly pagan.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_03: And putting people to death for the sake of public spectacle is Nero, not Paul.
• 10:14
  SPEAKER_03: So what is therefore the place for public execution?
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_03: Well, if you're going to carry out the death penalty, you want to be incredibly careful about the optics, about what is seen and who sees it.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_03: Pete Hegseth said in his message to Nadal Hassan, we will see you on December the third.
• 10:32
  SPEAKER_03: Well, who will see Nadal Hassan?
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_03: Who has the right to see that moment of immense gravity?
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_03: Jihadists would see that moment and gain a very different perspective on the execution to the one that Pete Hegseth wishes people to have.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_03: Random doom scrollers just going through Instagram will get a very different vision to what is legitimate if this is made into content chopped up and put on the internet.
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_03: Children will see this, people entirely detached from the gravity of the situation will see this and consider it to be spectacle.
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_03: So then what should we think about this live streaming thing?
• 11:16
  SPEAKER_03: I think it is paganism.
• 11:18
  SPEAKER_03: I think it is the kind of spectacle that Nero would have bought into, rather than the kind of capital punishment that Paul left space for in Romans chapter 13.
• 11:28
  SPEAKER_03: And it is thinking about the optics in all the wrong ways.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_03: The optics of all this is really, really important because what we look to shapes us and forms us.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_03: Which is why early Christians were continually against the gladiatorial games, they were against the blood sports, they were against those sorts of public executions.
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_03: Athenagoras, an early church father, said, But we, deeming that to see a man put to death is much the same as to kill him, have given up such spectacles.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_03: To see a man put to death is to kill.
• 11:59
  SPEAKER_03: I mean, that's that's put very, very strongly.
• 12:01
  SPEAKER_03: But it is to draw that very important link between the optics and your soul.
• 12:06
  SPEAKER_03: What you consume can end up consuming you, or Augustine in uh The Confessions.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_03: He talks about uh this friend who went along to the gladiatorial games, and he didn't want to look, but he kind of found himself looking, which I think is what would happen if we live streamed a public execution.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_03: I didn't want to see Charlie Kirk's death, it just it was just online, and I was online, and it met me.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_03: And I wasn't ready to see that.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_03: I don't think people will be ready to see these images.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_03: And here is what uh Augustine's friend said when he came across the spectacle of the blood sports.
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_03: He says, as soon as he saw that blood, this is Augustine speaking of his friend, he therewith drunk down savageness, nor turned away, but fixed his eye drinking in frenzy unawares, and was delighted with that guilty fight, and intoxicated with the bloody pleasure.
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_03: Do we really want to live stream this?
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_03: Think of the optics.
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_03: Think of what it would do to our souls to treat death as spectacle, as content.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_03: So optics really matter, which is why I as a Christian don't think that the execution should be live streamed.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_03: But optics really matter for Donald Trump, and he is rethinking the live streaming for a different reason.
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_03: And the different reason is that Nadal Hassan is in a wheelchair and think of the optics.
• 13:28
  SPEAKER_03: Think of the optics of the condemned man appearing to be a helpless victim.
• 13:34
  SPEAKER_03: What does that look like?
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_03: No matter how guilty Nadal Hassan is of those crimes, and he is guilty, nevertheless, for him to appear as a helpless victim who is being executed by an uncaring state, what does that remind you of?
• 13:52
  SPEAKER_03: Donald Trump knows, even if he couldn't articulate this, he knows what optics are, he knows how people tick, he knows the culture that has elected him twice, he knows he can't be seen to be like Rome executing Christ.
• 14:09
  SPEAKER_03: You see, that is the public execution that we have all seen, that we have been meditating on for 2,000 years.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_03: That is the most famous icon, the most famous image of anything, is an image of public execution.
• 14:25
  SPEAKER_03: And it's a cross that then puts a question mark over all our experiences of death and judgment and punishment.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_03: The cross is the most famous symbol, certainly religiously, but probably the most famous symbol of anything.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_03: And for the last 2,000 years, the most consequential witnessing, the most consequential looking to any image has been the looking of multitudes towards a helpless victim who is put to death by an uncaring state.
• 14:57
  SPEAKER_03: And in that execution, it is the victim that is vindicated and it is everybody else that is questioned.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_03: The state that is putting Christ to death is clearly in the wrong.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_03: The people who handed Christ over to the state are clearly in the wrong.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_03: The bystanders who are there for entertainment are clearly in the wrong.
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_03: Those who are hurling abuse at Christ are clearly in the wrong.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_03: There is only one righteous person in the entire scene, and it's the most surprising thing that the one who is condemned is the one who is the helpless victim, who is in fact innocent, who is in fact God.
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_03: And everybody else is guilty.
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_03: Everybody else is complicit in his death until they start to see things rightly, until they start to see the innocence of that victim.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_03: And then, oh my goodness, the criminal next to Christ suddenly recognizes, we are getting what we deserve, but this man has done nothing wrong.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_03: Remember me when you come into your kingdom.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_03: Suddenly he recognizes Jesus as the king of the kingdom, or the centurion, you know, the man who, in all likelihood, thrust the spear up into the side of Christ to finish the job.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_03: He looks to Jesus and he says, Surely this man was the Son of God.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_03: There is a meditation upon the cross that actually reorients our moral intuitions, and no one can see a public execution since the cross without wondering how questionable this whole thing is.
• 16:32
  SPEAKER_03: Whether you're Athenagoras or Augustine in the early church, or whether you're Pete Hexeth and Donald Trump in the year 2026, the optics do in fact matter, and the one who is guilty is not necessarily or not solely the person who is being executed.
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_03: Christ has taught us to consider ourselves as those who might be worthy of that same punishment because of our anger and lust, our murder and adultery, perhaps we are those who ought to stand where Jesus is standing.
• 17:16
  SPEAKER_03: We can never witness an execution without thinking should I be standing where this person is standing?
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_03: And we can never witness an execution without thinking is there a dignity to this victim that I have been overlooking, that I have been blind to?
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_03: That doesn't mean that justice cannot be carried out, but it does mean that Christian justice will look very different to Nero's justice.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_03: And if you even want to aspire to being a Christian nation, then if you want to take the name Christian nationalist, then you should have a further incentive to rethink the way you do justice, and to make sure that the way you do justice is not the way of Nero, but it is the way of Christ.
• 18:09
  SPEAKER_03: If this execution is live streamed, do not watch it.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_03: But instead, can we all pay attention to the public execution that actually properly humanizes us, that properly convicts us of guilt and that shows us the true face of God.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_03: The true face of God is revealed on an implement of torture.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_03: Don't look at a live streamed execution, but do look at the public execution that transforms everything.
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_03: Behold the man upon a cross.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_03: My sin upon his shoulders.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_03: Ashamed I hear my mocking voice call out among the scoffers.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_03: It was my sin that held him there.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_03: Until it was accomplished, his dying breath has brought me life.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_03: I know that it is finished.
• 19:03
  SPEAKER_03: Or think of Isaac Watts, see from his head, his hands, his feet, sorrow and love flow mingled down.
• 19:11
  SPEAKER_03: Did e'er such love and sorrow meet, or thorns compose so rich a crown?
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_03: Or the old spiritual, were you there when they crucified my lord?
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_03: Were you there when they crucified my lord?
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_03: Oh it causes me to tremble, tremble, tremble.
• 19:28
  SPEAKER_03: Were you there when they crucified my lord?
• 19:31
  SPEAKER_03: It's the strangest truth in the world that a public execution is where we find our guilt and culpability, it's where we find our humanity and forgiveness, it's where we find wisdom, it's where we find God.
• 19:48
  SPEAKER_03: Those optics really matter.
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_03: Keep on beholding the man upon the cross, and in his face, I think you will start to see everything else differently, including the question of capital punishment.
• 20:03
  SPEAKER_03: The truly Christian view about capital punishment is not found in this Pope's Declaration or that Pope's Declaration, whether they agree or not.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_03: The real view of capital punishment is not found from this isolated Bible verse or that isolated Bible verse.
• 20:24
  SPEAKER_03: The truly Christian view of capital punishment, the truly Christian view of everything, is had at the foot of the cross when we behold the Lamb.
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_03: That is where true wisdom is found.
• 20:36
  SPEAKER_03: And if you want to keep on exploring that true wisdom about Christ and Him crucified, we've got a free course that you can do.
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_03: Whether you're a Christian or just looking into these things, go to 321Course.com and see life according to Jesus.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_03: When you come and meet the Christ who was crucified for you, he gives you a vision for God, the world, and you that is utterly transformative.
• 20:55
  SPEAKER_03: You can do all the material, binge it in a couple of hours on the website, or do it in person if you find a church nearby that's doing it.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_03: There's a church finder on there where you can find a place where you can do 321 yourself.
• 21:07
  SPEAKER_03: Well, that'll do us for this video.
• 21:08
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• 21:12
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• 21:17
  SPEAKER_03: God bless.