Lon,
Look man, I'm sorry to be so direct and this won't be easy for you to hear but if you are a pastor, you need to resign. You literally do not know right from wrong! How could you possibly lead a congregation?
I simply could not believe what I was reading when you were talking about wrestling with whether it was better to allow people to be murdered so that they could go be with God rather than to stop the murderer from taking their lives. Can you not think past those individual lives and realize the pain and anguish and sorrow that the victim's families would be put through? We, as believers, will always have Jesus. If Jesus can wait for our presence in Heaven then so can we, don't you think? Besides that, it isn't the murder's right to decide that it someone's time to go meet Jesus and Jesus certainly did not predestine the murderer to go destroy dozens of lives and families so as to bring those individuals up to meet Him. The murderer, by virtue of committing murder, has forfeit his right to live. It is not immoral in any sense of the word to remove his life from him in the defense of innocent victims.
Lastly, (sorry I'm so short on time) I want to address the way you answered my hypothetical. My goal here is to hopefully show you something about not only God and His word but about how right and wrong works...
In the Law of Moses there are several laws (obviously). Some of these laws were religious in nature, some of them were moral in nature. Now, to be clear, it was always a moral issue if you were going to break one of these laws. Sometimes a person was forced to break a law and other times they weren't forced but it was done for good reason (e.g. Matthew 12:1-8). Let's look at a situation where one was forced to violate the law because it gives us a view of how law works and also how morality works and why your answer to my hypothetical was very wrong...
The law required that male children be circumcised on the eighth day of their life. The law also required that no work of the flesh be done on the Sabbath. Circumcision was obviously an act of the flesh. What then are you to do when a child's eighth day landed on a Saturday (or any other sabbath for that matter)? Well, you went ahead and circumcised the child because circumcision preceded the law and in fact was a symbol of it. Thus, you would rightly break one law in order to keep another.
Now, the reason that is important is because matters of morality generally cannot conflict in this manner. There is never - I repeat - NEVER - a situation where you are forced to rape a woman in order to save her life (or her soul). You will never be faced with dilemma of robbing your neighbor or burning his house down with him in it. You won't ever have to slap a man's wife across the face in order to prevent yourself from stealing his watch.
On a side note: There are situations, almost all of which are hypothetical in nature by the way, where one might be forced to choose between two moral issues but they are few and far between and generally not difficult to judge with a little distance from the situation. For example, do I flip this lever to keep dozens of people safe but at the expense of my daughter's life because she's wondered into a dangerous location where she'd surely die if I did flip the switch? For me, that's easy. My daughter will not die by my hand. If it costs a thousand other lives, including my own, so be it. I am not God and I am not those people's savior. If their safety costs the life of my daughter - to bad for them. In that case, I can't say with certainty that such a decision would be the "right decision". Perhaps there is no "right decision" in such a case. Perhaps such situations are a consequence of living in a fallen world and that salvation from such things is a key part of what the gospel is all about. Either way, I'll let God make that decision when the time comes for me to stand before His judgement and I'll be leaning very heavily indeed on His grace.
Getting back to the point at hand...
My hypothetical, I had hoped, was of sufficient gravity that you couldn't possibly have any difficulty answering it but you found a way to quibble anyway. This tells me that you do not know right from wrong. I picked a crime that there could be no justification for and I picked a totally ARBITRARY time frame during which the crime could be committed. What does a blue moon month have to do with anything? It doesn't! And whether God uses an evil act, such as a rape, as an opportunity to get a woman saved does not imply that He sanctioned her rape, nor would it ever enter into the mind of God to do such a horribly wicked thing! An eventual good that come as a result of an evil action does not turn the evil into good. God's sacrifice of His Son at Calvary was a good thing which came as a result of Adam's sin. Does that make Adam's sin good? Is God's universe better because of Adam's sin? Certainly not!
If God sanctioned the rape of women in the 20s during blue moon months, then it wouldn't mean that rapes that happened once every blue moon would be good, it would mean that God is evil. Why? Because there is no way for such a God to be consistent, either with Himself or with any code of conduct that is conducive to life (see opening post on why such consistency is important). It would mean that God was arbitrary! You cannot be both just (i.e. righteous) and arbitrary. The two are opposites.
That's all the time I have! This is a bit all over the place and I'd normally edit things and reword/rearrange things but this is all I have time for for now.
Clete
