Death Note and Divine Justice 1: Judge of All the Earth

“I will become the god of this new world.”

Death Note E1, ‘Rebirth’ (2006)

Suppose, then, that you somehow get hold of a notebook whose inside cover is inscribed with a proclamation that any human whose name is written in it shall die. And suppose, for argument’s sake, that you give in to curiosity and try it out – not really believing that it might work, but nonetheless using the name of some good-for-nothing criminal you saw on the news, just in case. And suppose said good-for-nothing criminal immediately drops dead. All of a sudden you find yourself in possession of the power of life and death over virtually everyone around you. What do you do?

 

My thanks to the talented oroy2041 at newgrounds.com for this stylish portrait of our mass-murdering protagonist.

Hopefully your response doesn’t correspond too closely to that of Light Yagami, the intriguing and, as time progresses, increasingly infuriating protagonist of Death Note.¹ It’s a great little series: compelling from the start, packed with unpredictable twists and turns, and spilling over with enough blog-post fodder to keep me busy for a long time (though you needn’t worry; I only plan on writing about it for three weeks including this one). To entice you further, there are only thirty-seven episodes of a little over twenty minutes apiece, so it’s not too vast a commitment; and it’s also very accessible for audiences generally unused to the weird and wacky world of anime (which I say as someone who by and large fits into that category). But if I still haven’t managed to persuade you to give it a watch before reading further, then count yourself warned that there are spoilers ahead.

Not that it’s much of a spoiler that Light decides to use the Death Note to execute his idea of justice by filling its pages with the names of vast numbers of people whom he deems unworthy of continuing to take up space and oxygen. The following chunk of his internal monologue (as per Netflix’s English subtitles, with a few changes to pronunciation for flow) outlines the thought process whereby he reaches this decision:

I – I killed them! Two men – I killed them! Human lives shouldn’t be taken so lightly. Do I have the right to judge people like that? No … I’m not wrong. I always thought about this: the world is rotten, and that rotten people should die. Someone – someone must do it, even if it means sacrificing one’s conscience and life. Things can’t stay like this. Even if someone else had picked up the Death Note, would they be able to erase unwanted people from this world? No way! But I can – I can do it. In fact, only I can do it. And I will, with the Death Note: I’ll change the world.

And so to a montage of Light scribbling name after name in the Death Note, soundtracked in dramatic choral fashion.² Mind you, he does have a point. The world is rotten. Things can’t stay like this. And rotten people do deserve to die. That much is clearly laid out in the scriptures; try Jeremiah 25:31, as one fairly randomly chosen instance: “The clamour will resound to the ends of the earth, for the LORD has an indictment against the nations; he is entering into judgement with all flesh, and the wicked he will put to the sword, declares the LORD.”³

Light’s not wrong, then, about the state of the world and its need for judgement. What he’s wrong about is whose job it is to fix it: the LORD’s, and not his. Light erroneously construes the fact that he has the capability to pass judgement on other people as proof that to do so is his responsibility. His initial pang of doubt on this matter is quickly overcome by a certainty that he is uniquely placed to serve the world at large in the role of judge, jury, and executioner.

Fast forward several episodes, and ‘Kira’ – the name that the general public uses for whoever it is that keeps killing all these criminals, Light having taken every precaution to prevent the deaths being traced back to him, even to the point of joining the team of detectives tasked with identifying and apprehending Kira – is so well established that even some national governments have pledged to cooperate with him. As the president of the United States is televised making such a pledge, Light’s colleagues erupt into uproar at his cowardice. One of them, Matsuda, has doubts, however. He remarks that the world is, after all, a much safer place to be these days, at least for law-abiding citizens, and so he can see why some people support Kira. “Honestly, I don’t think he’s completely evil,” he admits.

“Do you believe that Kira is justice?” retorts his colleague Aizawa.

And it’s a fair question, because those are really the only two options on the table. Either Kira really is enacting fair and right judgement on the guilty, or he’s just another mass murderer. Either he sets the ultimate standard for justice, or he majorly needs to be brought to justice himself. It’s got to be one or the other.

Light offers a pragmatic response to Matsuda’s doubts: “We shouldn’t argue over whether Kira is good or evil. We just have to catch Kira. If Kira is caught, he is evil. If Kira rules the world, he is justice.”

I suspect that Light’s words here may be designed to prepare his colleagues for the scenario he expects to play out: he is fully anticipating that he, as Kira, will soon rule the world, and if he can sow the seeds of the detectives’ transferral of allegiance to him when he does, so much the better. After all, if this isn’t about good and evil – if the only ultimate measure of justice is whichever one is acknowledged by the world at large – then the detectives’ zeal for justice, logically speaking, ought to be redirected into support for Kira’s policies upon his accession to the role of supreme judge. Still, Light doesn’t – can’t – really believe what he says here. If he really thought justice so arbitrary, he would never have started using the Death Note to bring about the justice he perceived to be lacking in the world. He would never have felt that dissatisfaction with the way things were, and that hunger to put them right. Light believes justice is a real, objective standard; he just also believes that he knows exactly where that standard sits.

Moreover, he understands precisely the role in which he’s casting himself by claiming to know what justice is and undertaking to enact it appropriately. Already at the end of that first episode, having described the world he intends to create – devoid of crime and filled only with kind and honest people – he declares, “And I will become the god of this new world.” Credit to him, in a way, for at least acknowledging the implications of what he’s trying to do. It turns out that he does get that dispensing justice is God’s job; he just plans on taking on the title as well as the workload.

Leaving aside the way he claims God’s judgement seat for himself, then, there’s quite a lot about divine justice that Light understands rather well. Justice is a real, objective standard, and it’s God who knows exactly where that standard sits and so has the right – and not merely the life-and-death power – to execute judgements over human beings according to it. Consider, if you will, the bit of Genesis where Abraham intercedes on behalf of Sodom and Gomorrah:

Then Abraham drew near and said, “Will you indeed sweep away the righteous with the wicked? Suppose there are fifty righteous within the city. Will you then sweep away the place and not spare it for the fifty righteous who are in it? Far be it from you to do such a thing, to put the righteous to death with the wicked so that the righteous fare as the wicked! Far be that from you! Shall not the Judge of all the earth do what is just?”⁴

Look at the grounds on which Abraham makes his intercession here. Justice isn’t arbitrary, “if Kira rules the world, then he’s justice” style, as if God were to simply decide whom to smite on a whim and then demand regardless that his actions be endorsed as just. Rather, justice is a real, objective standard, such that Abraham can tell God that it wouldn’t match up with that standard for him to destroy the city were there fifty righteous people in it. (Note, incidentally, that God has not, at this point, actually told Abraham he’s going to destroy Sodom and Gomorrah, only that he’s going to go and have a look at how sinful they really are.) Equally, though, it is by God that that standard is set, because he is Judge of all the earth. That means there is no higher authority to which one can take a case: he has the ultimate say on every sentence, and there is never any grounds for appeal.

Light merely plays at being judge of all the earth: he doesn’t really know what true justice looks like. God, on the other hand, is just in his very nature; to select another fairly random example from Deuteronomy 32:4, “his work is perfect, for all his ways are justice.” Because God is in essence just, every judgement he enacts – along with everything else he does – is perfect. That’s the basis of Abraham’s appeal: shall you not behave in accordance with your character?

In later years, many a prophet and psalmist would appeal to God on the same grounds in the face of injustice. Look at the first chapter of Habakkuk, for instance, or the ninety-fourth psalm.⁵ These people are on the same wavelength as Light in that they acknowledge that the world is rotten; rotten people should die; things can’t go on like this – but instead of claiming the role of judge of all the earth for themselves, they cry out to the true Judge of all the earth, to the effect of, shall you not do what is just?

Because we don’t have Death Notes, it’s sometimes hard to see when we’re attempting to usurp God in the same way Light did – thinking we know what justice is and even that actually, we’d do a better job of dispensing it ourselves than seems to be being done at the moment. Still, such attempts still amount to sin and idolatry. By contrast, the fitting response to the injustice in the world is to cry out to its Judge, knowing that he doesn’t tend to enact judgement in the way we would enact it ourselves, but that that’s because his understanding of justice is better than ours, not worse. Which of us, after all, would have dreamed up that God’s own Son, whose work is perfect and whose ways are justice, should bear the judgement that we, rotten as we are, deserve?

Footnotes

¹ You can get it on Netflix, either in the original Japanese or with English dubbing: https://www.netflix.com/title/70204970.

² If you’re into things of a dramatic and choral nature, might I recommend Puccini’s Gloria Mass, which the orchestra I play in tackled in our recent spring concert: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOfrCYPKb1Q.

³ It’s that chapter about the cup of God’s wrath that’s really important for understanding certain sayings of Jesus: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Jeremiah+25&version=ESVUK.

⁴ It’s from Chapter 18: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+18&version=ESVUK. By the way, the Hebrew in that last sentence I quoted works particularly neatly: the word translated ‘Judge’ in the ESV is an active participle from the root שפט (špṭ, ‘to judge’), and the word translated ‘what is just’ is a noun formed from the same root, so the question comes out as even more of a no-brainer than it does in the English – shall not the one who dispenses justice dispense justice, kind of thing.

⁵ Here’s the Habakkuk, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=hab+1&version=ESVUK, and the psalm, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=ps+94&version=ESVUK.