Samuel Rutherford's view of OT Judicial Laws

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For [Samuel] Rutherford, the Old Testament judicial or civil laws are “temporary” and no longer binding upon the New Testament Christian, except insofar as their general equity allows (see note 7 below [see the journal article] for more explicit comments from Rutherford about this). Nevertheless, it is true that in many of Rutherford’s other writings, his convictions about the judicial laws, especially with regard to penology, do seem to contradict his clear statements about their being temporary. But these apparent “contradictions” are due to Rutherford’s expansive idea of natural law rather than to any real contradiction in his thought concerning the continuity of the judicial laws. In other words, the reason that Rutherford believes that the death penalty should apply to things like blasphemy, for instance, is not because the Mosaic case law states that the penalty for blasphemy is death and is to be applied to us today as it was given then, but because every person knows, by natural law, that there is a God and that he should be worshiped and not blasphemed and that this is among the most serious of offenses. For more on this in Rutherford, see his A Free Disputation against Pretended Liberty of Conscience (London, 1649) 177–191. See also the Westminster Confession of Faith, §19.4.​
Guy Richard, “In Translatiōne: Samuel Rutherford, Of the Civil Magistrate, From Examen Arminianismi,The Confessional Presbyterian 4 (2008) 270-271, note 5. This extract is a translation with notes of chapter 19 of Rutherford's lectures on Arminianism, Examen Arminianismi (Utrecht, 1668). Published posthumously.

Here is one quote from the translation:
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p. 272.
 
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