Deuteronomy 21:4

⁴ And the elders of that city shall bring the heifer down to a valley with running water, which is neither plowed nor sown, and shall break the heifer’s neck there in the valley.

Chris Matthew tackles another concern regarding sacrifices and theonomy:

Let me make this clear from the beginning. Sacrifices qua sacrifices are not illegitimate in the New Testament period. We are exhorted to offer up our own bodies as “living sacrifices” in God’s sight (Rom. 12:1), for instance. The question, then, is not whether there should be sacrifices today, but what sort of sacrifices. The onus is on the objector to demonstrate from Scripture that all legitimate sacrifices today are, say, “spiritual” or “bloodless” in a way that is consistent with the theonomic hermeneutic.

We know that repentance on the part of the offender doesn’t, in any way, remove the death penalty. The pollution of the land is remitted by the shedding of blood. For every crime, there is an eternal consequence (cancellable by repentance and faith in Christ) and a temporal consequence (meriting the appropriate civil penalty). The Levitical sacrifices correspond to the former, whereas the sacrifice described in Deut. 21 corresponds to the latter. The writer of Hebrews informs us that the former is fulfilled in the antitype of Christ’s work on the cross, but we cannot thereby reason that the latter is likewise inoperative.

If the death of Christ put an end to the need to slay the heifer, then, logically, it must be concluded that Christ’s death also put an end to the need to execute the one that the heifer’s death was symbolic of ─ the murderer!

Concerning the different types of atonement, Paul Williamson observes,

 

[T]he Day of Atonement (Leviticus 16) encompasses the entire community, as do similar provisions such as Aaron’s censer of incense (Numbers 16), the water of cleansing (Numbers 19), and the bronze snake (Numbers 21). Indeed, even the Passover sacrifice (Exodus 12) and the intercession of Moses (Exodus 32-34) seem to have a general rather than a particular focus, in that these benefit the Israelite community as a whole rather than some subgroup within it (such as an elect remnant) . . .

 

This does not imply, however, that each individual Israelite was thus equally atoned for and thus “eternally forgiven.” Such was evidently not so, as is clear from the judgments experienced by both renegade individuals and apostate generations. National atonement provided for the purification and survival of the nation as a nation; apparently it did not secure the permanent purification and survival of each individual or generation it embodied. Rather, personal transgressions had still to be atoned for, so as not to evoke God’s judgment on either the individual or the community as a whole. It is clear, therefore, that any atonement Israel experienced and appropriated at a national or corporate level must be carefully distinguished from that experienced and appropriated at a more personal or individual level. [1]

As a matter of fact, the notion that the community sacrificed the unworked heifer as an efficacious atonement for the sin of murder (as opposed to a substitute for civil atonement) is, frankly, an affront to God:

 

If the Israelite had been allowed to compensate a capital offence by the blood (life-death) of an animal, would it not have scandalously minimized the gravity of sin and created an illusory confidence in a real efficacy of the sacrifice? The unmerited grace of God’s forgiveness would have been reduced to a trivial scale of costs in which the payment of the corresponding sacrificial tax would free the guilty party from all charges. On the contrary, it was precisely unwilling or minor sin that was dealt with by a kind of sacrificial taxation, a reminder that all sin is deadly. The special role of blood in the main sacrifices, which did not pertain to any particular sin, would have reminded all worshipers that they were sinners whose very lives depended on God’s forgiveness. [2]

Does it suffice to say that the sacrifice of the unworked heifer belonged to the ceremonial law? Could we implement a ceremony that is identical in every respect, except for the sacrifice? On close analysis, no. Although the Levitical sacrifices belonged entirely to the ceremonial law, there are important moral and civil aspects to the provisions set forth in Deuteronomy 21. Note that the sacrifice is not being done by the priests, but the civil leaders. This isn’t a normal substitutionary sacrifice, which Christ would have fulfilled. This was a substitute for the atonement of the death penalty itself ─ another form of atonement sacrifice which was not within the purview of the Levitical priests (cf. Num 15:27-31).

William Einwechter succinctly writes,

 

The death of Christ was substitutionary, i.e., He died in the place of the elect to forgive their sins and secure their salvation. The death of the heifer was not substitutionary in that sense. The heifer did not die in the place of the murderer to effect his forgiveness. The heifer was not a substitutionary sacrifice for the magistrates and people either. The heifer’s death was a ceremonial execution whereby the people expressed innocence in the murder and their resolve to punish the murderer by death. There was no typology at work in the slaying of the heifer; Christ is not the antitype of the slain heifer of Deuteronomy 21:4. [3]

It stands to reason that, if the principles behind the sacrifice are still in effect today, then the sacrifice is still in effect today. If God’s law still requires men to punish murder with death, if the guilt of innocent blood is still charged to all who fail to punish murder with death, if every murder must still be accounted for by an execution, then the law of Deuteronomy 21:1-9 must still express God’s will for us today.

Being theonomists, we do not look for some passage in the New Testament that might reiterate the sacrifice of the heifer. We reason that, because the New Testament has not abrogated the law, either directly or by category, the law is abidingly valid. A consistent outworking of the theonomic hermeneutic demands that we honour the provisions ─ indeed, all of the provisions ─ of Deuteronomy 21 today.

Consider. Is it at least possible that our attitude to Deut. 21 is motivated by cultural biases, and not biblical considerations?

 

It is often when the OT seems most culturally remote from us that we need to pay closest attention to its challenge. What ought to strike us from this law is not the oddity of a cow with a broken neck in an uninhabited wadi, but the expected response of a whole community through its civic, judicial, and religious leaders to a single human death. In our society, a violent death has to be particularly gruesome or shocking (e.g., of a child or of the defenseless aged) to become even newsworthy, let alone a matter for public penitence. We have lost not only any concept of corporate responsibility (having rejected a sovereign moral God to whom we might be corporately responsible), but we have increasingly lost any sense of the sanctity of life itself. . . We can tolerate millions of abortions. What need have we for rituals of cleansing that would acknowledge responsibility even where personal guilt cannot be assigned? Shedding innocent blood (v. 9) has become a fact of life, silently sanitized by statistics. Symbolic reenactment is left to the commercialized catharsis of cinema and television. [4]

Rushdoony explains, “Clearly it is God’s purpose that every wrong be righted. Where the criminal cannot be apprehended, the state of the community must make atonement and restitution.” [5] Examine the issue carefully, brothers.

─ Footnotes ─

[1] Williamson, Paul. “Because He Loved Your Forefathers”, in From Heaven He Came and Sought Her (2013).

[2] Nicole, Emile. “Atonement in the Pentateuch”, in The Glory of the Atonement: Biblical, Theological & Practical Perspectives (2004), 44.

[3] Einwechter, William. “Guilt of Innocent Blood”, The Christian Statesman.

[4] Wright, Christopher. Deuteronomy, in New International Biblical Commentary (1996), 233-234.

[5] Rushdoony, Rousas. Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), 613-617.