Justice and Retribution

0:37 Welcome to the Stone Choir Podcast. I am Corey J. Mahler. And I'm still Woe. On today's Stone Choir, we're going to be discussing justice and retribution. A little bit of housekeeping before we begin. This will be the last episode of the current year. We're gonna take three weeks off for the rest of December as we're recording this. So we should be back the beginning of January. That's the plan right now. If you're a new listener, welcome. Uh we've seen from the traffic that we've about doubled our active audience size just as people are checking us out. You know, a lot of you heard people saying nasty, mean things about us and you came to see how terrible we are and turns out we're not really all that terrible, except for maybe a

1:18 few things that you probably strongly disagree with, and we make the case for those and that's fine. But we're not the monsters and the maniacs that uh people say. We don't do react episodes. One of the reasons that people do actually go back and listen to all of our episodes is that they don't get stale. We try very hard to make sure that you can pick up pretty much any episode at any time and it's not gonna be irrelevant So we're not going to say anything about the recent drama because frankly for us that stuff's been going on for years. Just new sets of people find out about it. So we're glad you discovered us. If you do enjoy the show, please leave a five-star review on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen You listen.

1:57 We're always getting brigaded by people who want us not to be discovered. Because again, when people listen, I guess that's pretty good. Some people really like it. And if you are a new listener and you pick up a couple episodes and think that's cool, I've said many times, you've probably heard this many times, you're a regular listener. We highly recommend you go back to the beginning and just listen to all of them. Not because we think that it's worth hanging on our every word, but because that's what most people do and they really like it. Like it's the reason that our bandwidth has skyrocketed. It's a good thing. It's not costing us money. It's just we're happy to see that people like, oh yeah, this

2:28 is worth listening to. Our job, our goal is to make content that people want to hear out and learn something from. On the subject of money, we very rarely talk about it, but we do accept donations and frankly, at least for my purposes, it really is the reason that I'm still able to do this. Enough people have donated over the last couple of years to make it possible for us to spend the time not only on the show but on talking to people online and so I really appreciate everyone who has donated anything, everyone who donates regularly, everyone who doesn't donate anything and just listens and tells friends there's no such thing as a freeloader here. This is a podcast, it's free. But you know, we occasionally want to acknowledge that people have given

3:09 us generously, some small, some great. Any gift to a stranger is generosity. So thank you very much. It means a great deal. I'd say with all sincerity that we would not be able to do what we're doing if it were not for the folks who are giving to us. So it means a lot. And if you don't feel like giving anything, that's fine too. It's a podcast. We've said that from the beginning. Like we are completely unmonetizable. No one could ever possibly sponsor us because people are always saying mean crap and people would be hurt. Like there are companies I would like to endorse, but I won't because it would hurt them. So maybe take that as a threat. You know, tell us that you don't want us to endorse or

3:46 we will. I'm joking, of course, but like it's that's the level of slander that goes on in what should be a Christian space. Yeah, on social media, a lot of Christians talking to each other about things. And for some reason, it's just okay to treat certain people in a way that's really if you just objectively look at it, it's insane and shocking. But we're not going anywhere. Glad you found us if you're new. We're glad you're hanging around if you're old. And the reason that we're doing justice and retribution today is that this is a fundamentally political episode. We'll be making the case today that worldly justice is exclusively in the left hand kingdom. It has nothing to do with God's righteousness in spiritual terms.

4:32 Has it to do with God's righteousness in terms of what is right and wrong and what the state enforces. But what it doesn't have anything to do with is the church. And one of the reasons the Stone Choir has been such a profound challenge to these establishment players is that we're not pastors and we don't pretend to be. These are not sermons. When we're talking about these subjects, we're just speaking as Christian men talking about whatever we think is relevant. And that permits us to have a purview that's far greater than a pastor. There's a lot of stuff that we talk about the pastors can't, not only because they're incompetent, but they're not suited to it. It's not their role to speak about certain things.

5:13 That's fine. That's how things work. There are lots of things that I wouldn't talk about because even if I find it interesting, it's not my place to talk about it. But the things, the subjects that we discuss often cross what we consider to be boundaries. And one of the purposes of us doing the subjects that we tackle is that a lot of those boundaries are synthetic and they were erected for specific purposes to actually harm Christendom, to harm our communities and our churches and everything. So when we specifically target stuff that causes problem, creates a crisis. We're talking a little about the etymology of crisis. The reason that it stirs up so much dissension and upset is that we're identifying places where there's not necessarily a clear delineation between,

6:00 well, this is political stuff and this is church stuff. And one of the most wicked things that's happened in Western society. Something else I just discovered recently, Western civilization was invented in like the eighteen fifties. If you look at the graph of Christendom and the graph of Western civilization, they're basically an X. Christendom petered out and Western civilization appeared out of nowhere in like the eighteen twenties or so and it just took a big jump in the eighteen fifties. Why would that be? Because they stopped being Christian. Even though you know we still think of those the olden times of the 1800s as being a Christian era, and kind of was, but it was fundamentally the de Christianization of America.

6:40 That was when that began. The problems that we have now were mostly born in that world in the 1800s. So a lot of times we'll tackle subjects that just leap right over these boundaries because when you look at the distinction between Western civilization and Christendom, which we consider to be the same thing, and I've certainly used them interchangeable. I'm gonna try to stop now, even though at the beginning of this paragraph thought I said Western Civ like it's not a thing. It's Christendom. And when Christ goes away from the domain of politics, everything falls apart. You can't have the West without Christianity. And you also can't have the West without white people. We're Europeans. Most people listening are.

7:23 If you're not, welcome. As we've said in like the race episodes, we don't hate people because of how God made you. We have a lot of people who are mixed race who listen. I've talked to half a dozen guys who are mixed race in the last week alone, either thanking us for the things we talk about or asking specific questions, not as like setups or to see if we were mean, but because they knew we're the guys who actually tell them the truth. Because there are some people are put in situations where they have a hard time. And when everyone is telling you one thing that's contrary to your lived experience, something I laughed about before because it's a leftist trope, but it's also true. I don't know what it's like to be, you know, half European

7:59 and half African. I know what it's like to be half Yankee and half you know Confederate, half Tarheel, but it's not remotely the same thing, 'cause you can't tell by looking at me. But at least we will speak honestly about those subjects. And we speak honestly in a way that is in opposition to what everyone in the world is saying in this century. So I'm gonna run through a few previous episodes that if you're new to the podcasts and you go back and listen through in order, you'll get to these if it's old hat. I want to refresh your memory because as we're talking about justice and retribution as a political subject, it's specifically not in view of overlap with some of these other things. So I'll explain it as I go through these.

8:42 The first highly relevant episode for today that we'll refer to a few times is perfect hatred. In the perfect hatred episode, we discussed the fact that for one, that's a term in scripture. Do I not hate them with perfect hatred is a pure Christian confession about evil men. And we discussed for you know an hour and a half or so in that episode what it means to have hatred of evil men. What does any of that mean? The gist of it is that we are called as Christians to hate anything that is contrary to God's will, because God hates anything that's contrary to his will. And so that delineation of good and evil, what does good actually mean? That which isn't God's will. What is evil? That which is opposed to God's will.

9:23 That's it. That's good and evil. If you do something that's opposed to God's will, you are evil. Your action is evil. Whatever's going on is evil. That's the definition. You know, we call that morality, but it's fundamentally about God's will. So in the perfect hatred episode, we establish the fact that when you look at all of these moral questions in those terms, it changes the equation because it's a lot simpler in some cases. We're like, oh, it's so ambiguous. No one could possibly know what God wants. Well, sometimes that's a case, but in a lot of cases, he makes it very clear. Either by how he created things or what he specifically said. In episode we did on all sins are not equal, we dealt

10:00 with the fact that there's some things that are actually worse than others. There's some sins that are more evil than other sins, even though all sins are evil, as I just said, but some are still worse, and that's an actual thing that has actual consequences both temporally and eternally. And today's episode about justice is entirely about temporal consequences, has nothing to do with the eternal. We're going to talk a bit about how they are related, but when we talk about earthly justice, it has nothing to do with the church. In the episode that we called Judge Not, we specifically dealt with the claim that, well, Christians can't ever judge anything. Like is, well, you're a sinner too. So you can't possibly know if anyone's right or wrong about anything.

10:42 Okay, Satan. Next. Like that's just nonsense. And yet it's something that's very common for Christians to say today. So again, as I go through this list of episodes, when we're talking about justice, we're setting the rest of those things aside in those episodes. Those are complete treatments. We're not going to touch them today. The left hand of Christ episode was specifically about the fact that the state does not bear the sword for nothing, whether it's a godly prince or it's the miserable democratic morass that we're stuck with today, it's still the government that God permits to be over us. It has duties and it has obligations that have nothing to do with what the church says or does. Doesn't mean that they can't act in anti Christian ways, but it

11:22 means that when we look at what it is Christian for a nation to do, in some cases, it's very different than what it's Christian for an individual to do. And we're going to be talking about that explicitly today. The episode on you are forgiven is important because forgiveness is the essence of the Christian faith. It's the one thing that guarantees to separate every Christian from everyone else is our sins are forgiven and we receive that forgiveness. And we are to extend God's forgiveness to everyone else. When we talk about justice today, has nothing to do with that. Why? Because forgiveness is entirely a right hand question and it's entirely a interpersonal question. When we talk about justice in this world, forgiveness is not in

12:03 the equation. So we're gonna make that case. On the episode on repentance, we talked about well, someone's sorry. Someone actually repents of their evil. They were doing bad things and they stopped. They genuinely had a Christian turn of repentance, they're living a better life now. Does that mean they're exempt from justice? Absolutely not. That's what we're doing today. Has nothing to do with whether or not someone's repentant because the repentance is both interpersonal. You know, if I sin against you and then I repent, I ask you for forgiveness, you are obligated by God to forgive me. And that's not self-serving. Frankly, that's serving yourself. Consult the Lord's Prayer for details. If you refuse to forgive someone for one thing that he's done

12:42 to you, when every sin you've ever committed has been against God, God promises that you will remember that. And the opposite is true. If you forgive the small things, God will forgive the great things. In fact, he already has on the cross. All you have to do is not reject it by refusing to forgive someone when he asks. But the fact that someone has repented does not mean that they're free from earthly justice. means are free from eternal justice. Two different things. So again, today's episode is about temporal, strictly temporal matters. And the last two were on violence and making peace. We're we specifically talked about the role of political violence and the role of choosing to make peace in this life.

13:23 And sometimes peace is made through cooperation and through discussion. And sometimes peace is made through eliminating the enemy. And while we dealt specifically with some of those mechanisms, we didn't discuss it in terms of justice. And so today as we discuss justice and retribution, it's again, it's entirely a political question. Historically there have been four ways that justice was dispensed. The first and the least significant was fines. If you do something wrong, you pay a fine and the matter is considered to be settled again, in the left-hand kingdom. We're not gonna be talking about what you owe to God or anything. We're specifically talking about how our men reconcile to each other

14:07 politically. You do a crime, you pay a fine, and it's over. The next level up, going back thousands of years, is corporal punishment, you know, beatings, canings, maybe amputations, something that God Himself commanded in Leviticus 20. You can read through that for a list of things that are potentially on the table. Doesn't mean that that's the list of things that we have to implement as laws, but one of the things that we say on Stone Choir all the time, and it's vital to understand, is that while we will point back to elements of the old testament where God was dealing directly with Israel politically, we're not saying we have to implement exactly these laws. What we are always saying is that God did not sin when

14:50 he said this is a just punishment for this type of crime. So when God says that someone's hand should be amputated for committing theft, that's just. And if you say today that is injust, that is evil, what you're doing is calling God evil. And there are a lot of people in the church who call God evil, and that is why we're here. Because that's not Christianity. You cannot call your creator evil and be a Christian. Means you're a Satan worshiper, whatever you call yourself. And the church is frankly full of those people. So tackling justice is about tackling that. We have men creeping in who will say, well, you you can't do that. That would be unjust to to do physical harm to someone. Well, God commanded physical harm to Israel in that time for certain

15:35 crimes. Doesn't mean that we have to reimplement those laws. That's not remotely what we're saying. The narrow case to be made is you cannot call that evil, and many do. So we have fines, we have corporal punishment, which continued up until recently in some countries, continues to this day. We now consider that to be barbaric. It's how civilization's been preserved for thousands of years. I think that there's a case that could be made. We're not really gonna make it today, but I think if you look at the fall off on punishments that are considered to be barbaric today, what we actually see is a rise in barbarism in civilization, the death of civilization, when there's a way of instituting justice

16:13 that's thrown out, all the wisdom and all the commands of God going back thousands of years, like we're not gonna do that anymore. We have evolved. We are more civilized than that now. The net result is that we have a less civilized world. We have more evil than ever. That's not a coincidence. The next punishment, the list of four punishments that are historical for almost all civilizations, is exile. It's short of taking someone's life, but you're saying you can't live here anymore. And this applies to citizens. You know, this is something that was happening up through the 19th century at least. People were politically exiled. They're sent away from their homeland. And things got complicated when basically you have the advent of the

16:56 UN and the advent of passports and global tracking of identity. It used to be that if you were out you're welcome in one place, you could just leave and you could show up somewhere else and be whoever you wanted to be. Honesty, dishonesty aside, you can go to some other land and just start fresh. You're starting from zero, beside whatever you bring along, but you've lost your homeland, but you didn't lose your life. And so exile is basically gone away as a punishment today. And I think that's a disaster because the last step on the continuum of punishments is death to take someone's life justly for crimes that they've committed. Again, you can look through Leviticus 20 and elsewhere to find a

17:34 long list of crimes that God says this is worthy of death. Again, things of today Christians, so called to run around and say, Oh that's barbaric. That's evil to take someone's life. Well, you know what doesn't exist in scripture and didn't exist until the last two centuries? Prisons. I know people think, oh well, Paul was put in prison. Prison was fundamentally different until relatively recently. These punishments that I've just described, fines, corporal punishment, exile, and death, were the only four ways that people in most Western civilizations, most Western societies were punished for crimes. Prisons existed, but almost without exception they were for pretrial confinement. It was very rare, it was exceptional.

18:21 The cases are notable when someone's locked in the Tower of London. To be put in a prison was something that was not a normal part of punishment ever. It was a particularly cruel and an unusual punishment in some ways for someone to be sentenced to that. And that was a relatively late thing. The prisons that you see in scripture and the UC until again, like the eighteenth, nineteenth century, really the nineteenth century. Before that, when there was a prison, prisoners were being held for pretrial confinement until they had been found guilty. And after they're found guilty, they don't go back to prison. They are are fined, they're beaten, they're exiled, or they're killed. The punishment after adjudication was not you go back to prison.

19:04 The prison was there to make sure that someone couldn't flee. Because again, before passports and all this stuff, it was pretty easy to get on a boat and just vanish. If it was important enough to punish someone for a crime, then they were kept, in some cases, in prison until the judge could see them. In other cases there are things like debtors' prisons. You know, again, that's a separate subject of should debt exist at all to such a degree that someone would be put in prison for it? But prison was not punishment after having been judged guilty of a crime. What we do today where we lock men in cages in some cases for the rest of their life, is completely barbaric. It is utterly evil and inhumane.

19:43 I find it despicable. I think there are probably some men who are listening who have spent time in jail or maybe even prison. I haven't talked to them, but I would imagine that most of 'em would probably have preferred taking a beating in public and then going home where there's humiliation and there's some pain for a while. But you don't spend years locked in a box in completely inhuman conditions. So when we're talking about justice today, we're explicitly talking about the political, and we're setting aside the modern so called justice system because it's anything but there's so little actual justice in what is done today that it's despicable that that name is even used. We're talking about actual godly justice.

20:26 And so as we go throughout this today, just keep in mind not talking about forgiveness has nothing to do with this because it's one thing for you to forgive whoever has committed a crime against you. As a Christian, you're obligated to do that. That does not mean that they're free from justice in this life. In the case that we're gonna make in today's episode is when someone inside a church, someone who is a pastor, comes to you and says, No, that person sinned, they committed a crime, but you have to forgive them and we have to just make this go away quietly. We don't embarrass anybody. That's profoundly wicked. That is a miscarriage of justice. That is contrary to God's will. And the reason for ending this year's episode, this year's series of

21:09 Stone Choir on this subject is that the chief battle in 2025, as we're ending December 2024 here, the chief battle of next year is going to be this type of question. Because if Trump delivers on any of his promises about physically removing aliens in this country, you're gonna see churches and pastors screaming their heads off saying that's unjust. You cannot do that. You can't remove people. Family separation, and whatever excuse they want to make, it's going to be saying you're not allowed to enforce the law. You can't do that because Jesus. So we'll talk about that more at the end, but just keep in mind that this is a live issue because this will be one of the very most divisive things that occurs inside the church

21:56 in the coming year. Before I get into some of the philosophy with regard to the subject matter of this episode, which you all inevitably knew that philosophy would be part of this particular episode, particularly if you've been listening for a long time, I want to expand on a few of the things that Woe mentioned in his opening there. One that may have come to mind for some of you is that there is a very clear connection here between the rise or the resurgence we should really call it, of Gnosticism in the modern world, in the modern era, and the decline of the use of physical punishment. It should be fairly obvious what the connection is there, because of course, if you believe in Gnosticism, whether it is consciously or subconsciously,

22:50 because you may have simply observed absorbed some of those beliefs from the surrounding culture. The outcome of holding those beliefs, of holding on to those priors, examined or unexamined, is that you will believe there is something other than the physical body that needs to be addressed when it comes to matters of so called in this case justice. That's part of what feeds into so many of the modern misconceptions of justice as restorative or whatever other thing it happens to be other than retributive, which we will be making that case in this episode, that the only thing that is justice is retribution. Those two terms are essentially interchangeable. There's some nuance there, but they are basically the same thing, just

23:47 looking at it in a different light or from a different angle. But if you deny the reality of the physical, then you're going to be very easily convinced of an argument that punishments should not be physical, because what does it matter what happens to the physical body? That's not the real you. Historically, we recognize that Gnosticism is of course a heinous heresy. You are your body, and so the punishment of the body is a punishment of the person. There's a reason we used to use physical punishment. It's not just, of course, this philosophical argument that I'm making here, theological argument, it's also that it's effective. It does work. We see that even today in societies that still use physical punishment.

24:35 It works. But in addition to that, and very much related to it, you will not be surprised to hear that the rise of the use of prisons and the underlying philosophy and the various arguments, political or otherwise, used to justify the use of prisons instead of physical punishment, or sometimes public shaming was also used. Instead of those, we see the rise of prisons at the same time as the Enlightenment is taking place, and in fact they are really one and the same. Because the Enlightenment is making these various arguments about what man actually is or what man should be and how society should treat men and we will eventually get to an episode or perhaps a series of episodes on the Enlightenment.

25:24 But this is happening at the same time. Prisons are a product of the Enlightenment. Perhaps add that into the scales when you assess whether the Enlightenment was a positive or not. We didn't use prisons before the Enlightenment brought forth its arguments that made them inevitable. So one of the fruits of the poisonous tree that is the Enlightenment is the modern penal system, is incarcerating men for rather long periods of time, which is quite frankly inhumane treatment. Neither one of us would ever advocate for the use of prisons. That's not to say that you can't confine someone, because you can certainly sentence someone to hard labor and you have to confine him, but locking someone in a concrete box for years on end or

26:17 decades is a is inhuman. It's a sort of torture that would have been unthinkable to most in the modern world, even in societies that actually practiced real torture. Because the psychological torture of prisons is on a different level. It is a true wickedness. It is something that is, of course, again, a product of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment was an undertaking of Lucifer himself. But to move on from that, and to go into the philosophy as I said I would, in this episode, as already mentioned, we are speaking of retribution. We are speaking of retributive justice. And the reason that we're speaking of retributive justice is that again, it is the only justice. Because justice demands retribution.

27:13 This is not something that is optional. You don't get to say, well, we're going to show mercy instead of punishing the crime. That's not how this works. You can have justice or you can have mercy. And for those who are Christian, which again is going to be most of our audience, you may be thinking, how does that square with the central beliefs, the central tenets of our religion, how is that consonant with Christianity? And the answer to that is that it's exactly the core of our faith. For eternity, you will receive mercy in paradise or justice in hell. Mercy and justice are incompatible. They are two things that cannot exist simultaneously. At least in the same case. Obviously, hell and paradise exist at the same time, temporally as it

28:12 were, insofar as that makes sense in eternity. If you are a Christian, you do not receive justice from God. Because justice from God would be hell. You deserve eternal punishment in hell for your sins, however many or even however few, because any one sin is an infinite transgression against an infinitely holy God. And so the punishment for that necessarily is infinite, we've gone into this before other episodes. And so hell is eternal. That's justice. That's what you deserve. What you receive is mercy, and the reason you receive mercy is that Christ received justice on your behalf. When it comes to the affairs of men here and now in this world, in the left hand kingdom, we cannot deal in mercy.

29:13 We have to deal in justice. And the reason we have to deal in justice is that we are not the infinite God. We don't have the option of Christ on the cross standing in the place of the person in the docket, of the person who is guilty of whatever crime. And the King isn't God. The King to some degree and in some ways stands in the place of God, but he does so to bear the sword. Scripture is very clear on this point. He does so to punish the wicked. That is what it means to be a just king, that is what it means to be a righteous king or a godly king. And so with regard to the left hand kingdom, it is a matter of the sword. That is what God has given to the prince, to the godly prince. And we can use king or prince interchangeably here.

30:05 It's not a rank, as it were, it's just a stand-in for the sovereign. The godly prince wields the sword. That is how he deals with things in his realm, in the domain assigned to him by God, and for which he is responsible to God. He will one day have to answer for what he did or did not do with regard to what he was given by God. He does not have the option of mercy with regard to justice. Because if you show mercy to the criminal, what you are actually doing doing is transgressing justice. Yes, you are also doing a sort of harm to the victim or victims, but that actually is not the paramount concern. This is another point that is often missed in these discussions. When a murderer receives mercy, so called, instead of justice, and of

31:04 course, justice is Genesis 9:6. He must be put to death. He must be executed. Capital punishment is justice for the murderer. But if he receives mercy, what you've actually done is transgressed, you've violated, you've perverted justice. Yes, you have not done what is due to the victim and to the victim's family, to all those who have been harmed by this murder, but the actual immediate and ultimate debt is owed to justice itself. It is not owed to the victim. We recognize this in our justice system. This is one of the things we actually get right in our system. You don't need, in this case obviously the victim cannot bring charges, but you don't need someone to bring charges on behalf of the victim.

31:58 The state has an interest in executing justice against the criminal regardless of what the affected parties want. If you are the spouse of a murder victim and you go to the prosecutor, you go to the state and say, I do not want this prosecuted, I forgive him, I want mercy, the state can tell you, that's great, we're still charging him, we're still convicting him, we're still executing him. Because the state has a different interest. That interest is again on behalf of justice. There is a debt that is owed, which is a fundamental point here. When we speak of sin as a debt, we all recognize what that means. Crime is also a debt. When a criminal commits a criminal act, and that's what makes him

32:51 a criminal, that incurs a debt to justice. That debt must be paid. The only way in which that debt can be paid is punishment of the criminal. God requires that of the godly prince, of the sovereign. And so there is a duty with regard to the authorities in the left hand kingdom to see that justice is done, and that is done by inflicting punishment. And so these other conceptions of well, so-called conceptions of justice, which I'll run through some of them quickly so that you have them in mind for those who have heard of these before or familiar with the topic. They are not justice. That is not what we're talking about here. It's not what Scripture means by justice. You can have mercy with regard to certain things.

33:49 So for instance, if you have a contract with someone, And he owes you a great sum of money, but you know that he can't pay you because he suffered some misfortune. You can show mercy and forgive some or all of that. That is something you can do. The state cannot do that with regard to matters of justice. These are separate things. To some degree, it's the division historically that you would have in English speaking countries, particularly those whose systems have derived from the old English system, the distinction between courts of law and courts of equity. There's a little bit of that. There's some nuance there. Not the point of the episode. We're not going to go into that in any depth. But to return to the so-called types of justice, you have just

34:37 to give some examples of them, these are the main ones. Retributive, distributive, procedural, restorative, commutative, and social. Only one of those is justice. That's that first one. Retributive. Retribution is justice. But you may be familiar with some of the philosophy here, and for those who are familiar with that, we're essentially agreeing with, but not absolutely, of course, Cicero, Augustine, and Kant on this. A little bit of Aristotle, but obviously not perfect agreement, since he talks about distributive justice and we would not call that justice justice. But some will conceive of justice as being a matter of distribution, of resource allocation, so fairness and equity, things like that Like that.

35:24 That's not justice. It's not what we're talking about here. These are important concerns for the godly prince. Because fairness matters. Equity matters. Not in the Marxist sense, but in the proper sense of the term, as it would have been used historically, say in our courts of equity. But these are not matters of justice. Just because it is something about which the godly prince should be concerned, even if it is something that could come before the courts of law, because of course today our courts are unified, we don't have separate courts for these things typically Even if that is the case, it does not mean that it is a matter of justice. Because when we are speaking of justice, again, we are speaking of

36:12 something that has incurred a debt to justice. It is a transgression that must be repaid. And of course it can be repaid only with punishment. When someone speaks of procedural justice, we're not denigrating that. We're not saying it's wrong. We're saying it's not justice in the sense we are using it. Because procedural justice, so called, is really procedural fairness. That is transparency in how these matters are conducted, which is a good thing. Consistency in how the rules are applied, which is something that should be done, that is a goal. All of these things are valid concerns, but they are not justice. Another one that we see very commonly today, and this is one that you will see anytime you go on social media, anytime you

37:08 turn on the news, you will see it a lot in the coming years. Restorative justice or rehabilitative. Really, you have a little bit of both of those here kind of under an umbrella. The focus of this is healing, is what they'll often say. Repair of relationships or a restoration of either the injured party to the previous state, insofar as that is possible, obviously does not work with murder, or the restoration of the criminal to being part of society. His rehabilitation and then reintroduction to society. That is not justice. In fact, this one, more so than the others, is almost always a perversion or a subversion of justice. It is a transgression. In fact it is a new crime. To grant mercy where mercy is not due, and where granting mercy

38:09 would be a transgression of justice, is itself a crime. And so this happens all the time in our current system. Every time a murderer is sentenced to anything other than execution, unless it's a suspended sentence for some reason, so I would not say that it is necessarily morally wrongful to sentence him to some sort of hard labor for a period of time. Not that he gets released at the end, but that you are having him pay back something to society. It is still ultimately a sentence of death, just in a different form. A discussion perhaps in detail for another time, but any time a murderer is not sentenced to something that is tantamount to death, or literally execution, that is a perversion of justice.

39:03 That is itself an additional crime by the system that is tasked with executing justice. So, in fact, it is a particularly egregious crime, but this happens all the time in our current system, and it happens all over the world. This is something that is very widespread because obviously there's an animating intelligence behind it. Commutative justice is not really a particularly interesting subject for this topic and for most of you listening, but this is dealing with sort of fair exchange equivalence, honest dealing. It's kind of a contract law matter. So it's a tangential matter, but you'll see it come up sometimes in discussions of so called justice. And then of course the final one for this short list is

39:49 social justice. This is one that bears Not necessarily a slightly longer commentary, but a recognition of the fact that in some ways the left gets this one more right than the right, or perhaps more correct than the right, not to use the same term twice. This is not to say that the critiques that come from the left, which are usually Marxist in nature, are correct or are accurate because they're not. They're wrong and they're wicked and they seek evil ends. But it is to say that the concerns themselves are morally appropriate. The concern with regard to so-called social justice is that you don't have wrongful inequality or wrongful inequity in society.

40:54 Insofar as that is a moral assessment with regard to wrongful, that is an appropriate concern for Christians. It's not only appropriate, it's commanded by God. Because every time you see God say that He is concerned for the sojourner and the Widow and the Fatherless and the Poor. That's social justice. Using the term justice in a separate sense we're employing it in this episode, of course, that's more of the sense of righteousness, comporting yourself correctly with regard to the moral law, with regard to morality and ethics. But those concerns are concerns that are throughout scripture. They are concerns that God has for his people. They are things that he commands Christians to do. And that's one of the reasons that Marxism and other things like

41:48 it are so dangerous. Because they say things at the start that sound completely Christian in some ways, and in fact sometimes are Christian. But they use them to subvert, they use them to build up a wicked and an evil argument, and attempt to get you to do evil. That is when Satan is at his most dangerous, when he presents you as something that sounds Christian or very well may be Christian, because of course Satan quotes scripture. He just perverts it when he interprets it. But he'll start off, or his minions will start off, using Scripture. They'll say, Well look, God has concern for the fatherless and the widow, and the sojourner and the poor. And so you should do X, Y, and Z. The beginning of that is correct.

42:38 It is their conclusions that are wicked. But Christians cannot abandon this space. We can't say, well, social justice is a major concern of the left, and so obviously we have to oppose social justice. No, we have to oppose the wicked things they want to do in the name of this of this fairness in society in a certain sense. Because of course fairness is something that exists and doesn't exist and should and shouldn't. It's a complicated matter. It's not a simple yes or no. But this is something with which Christians should concern themselves. Again, we can't abandon the field in this place. It's not a matter of justice in the sense we're employing it today, of legal justice, but it is a Christian concern.

43:27 And so when someone brings it up, you can't just say, oh, I oppose that entirely. No, you have to look at what is being advocated in the name of this thing. Because if it's Christian, you have to support it as a Christian. We should attempt to alleviate the suffering of the poor. We should attempt to help those who have suffered some mishap or some loss, widows and the fatherless. God has concern for these people and so should we as God's people. But we should not permit Marxists and other evil men to occupy this field and say, This is how you do this thing that God commands. That is ceding territory to Satan, and we are never permitted to do that. So that essentially gives you an overview of the so-called kinds of

44:19 justice that you will hear discussed typically. And again, those are retributive, distributive, procedural, restorative, or rehabilitative, commutative and social. We are speaking of retributive justice, because when we speak of justice in the sense we are employing it in this episode, the only thing that is justice is retribution. It is punishment for wrongdoing. It is punishment for transgression of the moral law. That's sort of a short definition of justice as we are using it in this episode. And so if anyone ever uses the term justice and then makes some argument that's completely unrelated to punishment, you need to be very careful. That person may be trying to mislead you. There's a very good chance in modern discourse the person may just

45:15 not know how to use the term. Don't immediately assume the person has nefarious intent, but be on guard, listen carefully, figure out what is being said, and what they are trying to get you to believe and do as a result of what is being said. Because if you are speaking about justice in its core and most appropriate sense, it means the punishment of criminals, the punishment of wrongdoing, and nothing else. And what we're saying here about retribution is not remotely controversial in history. In fact, one of the most noted legal scholars that you've all heard of, the thief on the cross, perfectly well understood the exact thing that we're saying here. From Luke twenty three. One of the criminals who were hanged railed at him, saying, Are

46:06 you not the Christ? Save yourself and us. But the other rebuked him, saying, Do you not fear God? Since you are under the same sentence of condemnation, and we indeed justly, for we are receiving the due reward for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong. And he said, Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom, and he said to him, Truly I say to you, to day you will be with me in paradise. So the thief on the cross understood exactly what we're saying. This is not some fancy legal theory. This is not how out of left field, and it's not remotely immoral. Even someone who all he probably knew of Jesus was that it was clear that he was the Son of God and based on the things that had happened, he understood enough to say, Lord,

46:49 remember me when you come into our kingdom. And what did Jesus say? He said, You'll be with me today in paradise. He effectively said your sins are forgiven. But what didn't he say? He didn't say, Well, this is injustice. You should become down from the cross. We should get out of here. This is not fair. Like you just said, I didn't do anything wrong. You did something wrong, but I forgave your sins. So let's beat it. Let's get out of here. Let's come down off these crosses. No. The thief on the cross was exactly right. We are receiving the due reward for our deeds. That's justice. That's retribution. That's it. The etymological definition of retribution goes back through old French until you

47:31 get directly Latin, unsurprisingly. And the original term meant recompense or payment to hand back or to repay. So retribution literally means just repayment. And as Corey said and as scripture makes it clear, what is being paid is the debt. And this is where the divergence from the left hand kingdom of the political and the right hand kingdom of justification before God are separated. You all know what Paul wrote in Colossians two. And you who were dead in your trespasses and the uncircumcision of your flesh God made alive together with him, having forgiven us all our trespasses, by canceling the record of debt that stood against us with its legal demands, this he set aside, nailing to the cross.

48:20 What God makes very clear in Colossians too is that the debt that that that thief owed to God was nailed to the next cross over. The thief was paying the temporal price for his crimes, and Jesus was paying the eternal price at the same time. This is a crucial part of understanding justice as it occurs temporally and eternally. Any attack on temporal justice, any attack that says it's unfair to punish the wicked is fundamentally and invariably an attack on God Himself. It is to say it is injustice for someone to be punished for their wickedness. That is despising the cross itself. Because as God makes clear, the punishment that every single one of us owes to God, you know, when we talk about salvation, when

49:10 we talk about being saved, we leave off what we're being saved from. We're being saved from God. God is saving us from God. And where that occurred was on the cross. In this moment where for three hours Jesus suffered and died, he paid the eternal price for your sins and my sins and the sins of every man who's ever lived, saved and unsaved alike. This is one of the most dire Calvinist errors. The concept of limited atonement that Jesus didn't pay for everyone's sins kills the gospel. Because it means I can't go up to anyone and say Jesus died for you. I can say, well, I I hope he did. I know he died for me because I'm elect, but you, I don't know. Yeah, we'll we'll see. Let's check your fruits and see if you're Christian or not.

49:52 Nonsense. Every man, the most wicked man you can imagine, Jesus died for his sins. Jesus died for the sins of the men on both crosses on either side of him, the one who reviled him and died and went immediately to hell, and the one who confessed him as his Lord, and joined him that day in paradise. Jesus paid the eternal price for both of those men. The difference between them was repentance. The one who confessed him as Lord said, Lord, remember me in your kingdom, the payment that Jesus delivered on the cross was charged to that man's account. That man was declared free of sin for everything that he did, for the what put him on the cross and all the other things that he didn't get punished for in this life, it was

50:36 all nailed to the cross. That is justice. That is eternal justice. And as Corey said, eternal justice is also hell for everyone who rejects what Christ did on the cross. So the concept of justice occurs in both kingdoms. It is both temporal and eternal, it is both political and religious. The difference is that one has nothing to do with the treatment of the other. The fact that Jesus died for every man, the fact that everyone's sins are forgiven if they ask God for them to be forgiven has nothing to do with temporal consequences. As Corey laid out the case, it is in fact injustice and wickedness not to punish sins temporally. One of the hard parts about this discussion is that one, we don't have a remote remotely godly government, like we have so many

51:26 problems to solve that it almost seems like these conversations are hypothetical, but they can't be. If we don't know what godly governance looks like, how can we ever possibly hope to even grovel towards achieving it? There's no hope of achieving something remotely godly in this life in the political sphere if we just reject out of hand what God says about it. So what we're talking about is what godly justice looks like. And that involves actual punishment for sin. It involves the state, not just forgiving people, because that's not the state's job. What does Paul say in Romans? He makes very clear let every person be subject to the governing authorities, for there's no authority except from God, and those that exist have been instituted by

52:12 God. Therefore whoever resists the authorities resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. For rulers are not a terror to good conduct but to bad. Would you have no fear of the one who is an authority? Then do it is good and you will receive his approval approval, for he is God's servant for your good. But if you do wrong, be afraid, for he does not bear the sword in vain, for he is the servant of God, an avenger who carries out God's wrath on the wrongdoer. Therefore one must be in subjection, not only to avoid God's wrath, but also for the sake of conscience. Now if you go back and listen to the Left Hand Kingdom episode, we link three podcasts that from Godestines that deal very directly

52:55 with Romans thirteen and what it means, particularly in American context where we have a democracy and B wicked rulers, which incidentally go hand in hand. When is it rebellion? When is it just we're not gonna get into that today? We'll probably get into that in a future episode. The vital part of this, the foundational philosophical part of this, the Christian part of this, is that the state is an avenger of evil. The prince, the democratically elected leader, they have the job to God to avenge wrongdoing. They don't have the job to forgive sins. They do not have that job. That is a separate job that is in the right hand kingdom. The man who confesses his sins to his priest or his pastor for the things he's going to be executed for, his pastor must

53:45 announce God's forgiveness, and then the state must execute him the next day. That is proper, that is just, and has been the norm for all of Christian history until recently. And now it's so controversial when we put people to death. Why today? Because they're mostly black. Well, racial crime statistics we did a whole episode about that. We don't need to dig back into that. The fact that people say, well, because of their race they can't be held account is despicable. That's absolutely wicked. It is injustice. And yet, as Corey said, they're doing it in a name of justice. It's like you can't hold this man to a just standard because he's African. Excuse me, as Corey said, that's not doing them any favors.

54:26 To not hold a man accountable temporally for his sins just makes hell worse. Makes hell worse for him. And if he does repent, he still has to live with the guilt of not having been punished. It's very common for someone who has committed a crime and still has an intact conscience for it to weigh on them for their entire life, to continuously eat away with. It's often the case where someone's been on the run for decades and they finally get caught, they express a sense of relief. A criminal who was getting away with their heinous crimes, who, you know, there's no statute limitations for whatever they did. They were fleeing, they were living under another name somewhere else. When they get caught, they're relieved.

55:07 They're not terrorized by being caught, they're relieved that it finally happened. To face justice is actually a relief for the criminal. It's it seems backwards, but it's true. And they will say it themselves. Now, you don't want to face consequences because you know you want to get off scot-free. But knowing that the retribution is there, hanging over you, it is far better for it to be delivered than to evade it. And unless a man has a seared conscience, unless he's just really ceased to be human altogether, he's going to feel that. Even if he's not Christian, even if he's still a wicked man, these guys are generally wicked people when they're on the run for decades. Sometime, you know, they keep their noses clean for the most

55:50 part, but you know, they didn't get right with God. They didn't come to face consequences for their sins. The left hand kingdom of Christ involves punishing sins in this life. The right hand kingdom is announcing God's forgiveness in eternity. It's two separate jobs, two separate realms, and for our purposes, it's two separate conversations. And again, as I said at the beginning, the reason that it's so crucial for us is we're going into the coming year as Christians to understand the fact that someone can be forgiven, or that Jesus died for them, or even in fact that they have been forgiven, is totally irrelevant to whether or not justice is delivered to that man. Justice has nothing to do with God's forgiveness.

56:37 That's a hard thing for Christians to hear because all we ever talk about is God's forgiveness. It's the reason that I began with that litany of episodes, including the one about forgiveness. We are not in any way denigrating or belittling how crucial that is. That's the most important thing because that's eternity. That's the rest of forever for all of us, for good or ill, when we don't accept the fact that this life actually matters. We're talking about delving into Gnosticism. Well, the first episodes we did this year was about the Gnostic heresy. As Corey said, it's come roaring back in this subject to say that a man, no, you you can't do anything to his body, he God forgave him, so he's off the hook.

57:19 There's a strong vein of Gnosticism underlying that to say, well, you know, it's just the spirit is fine, so we don't deal with the rest. That doesn't actually do anyone any favors. As Corey said, that's actually evil. It is evil not to visit justice on a man who deserves it. The difficult part for us to understand in a democratic society, God help us, is that in the case where you have a godly prince, even the case where you just have a present, a president, a governor has the authority to commute a sentence or to pardon a man, to say That crime is wiped away. It is as though it didn't happen. The reason that the executive is given that authority is godly. And it's not that it is necessarily injustice for that to happen,

58:05 is that a ruler, a governor, a king, a president, someone who in effect doesn't have anyone over him to whom he answers for his judgment is called upon in his role, in that very narrow role, at the very top, at the pinnacle of these decision-making processes to exemplify wisdom. And there are times when it is wise for a man in particular circumstances circumstances to extend mercy to someone who's guilty of a crime. That is not anti Christian. So the premise of a pardon is entirely reasonable, and yet the reason that we put it in the hands of the executive is it's not subject to review. He answers to God for what he does. You see what's going on here? You don't put the stuff up for a vote. You don't let a jury decide way later, it comes down to

58:58 the fact is in this particular set of circumstances, one case, one defendant, one man who's been found guilty by the system of justice, if the executive says, I pardon this crime, I'm wiping it away, that's the end of it. It cannot be undone in our system because that is godly. And it's not up for us to argue with it. Even if you look at an example, say, well, that was clearly a miscarriage of justice. The reason that that authority is unilateral is that the premise, the underlying premise of what is going on there is good. So when we talk about justice needing to be enforced, it is not that mercy is never in the picture. It is that mercy is a matter of wisdom. In politics, mercy is a tactic.

59:42 It is not a rule. Something I tweeted a while ago and I said yesterday, I said today as we're recording this. That's one of the summaries of this episode. In politics, mercy is a tactic, it is not a rule. There is no obligation for any governor, president, or king to pardon anyone for any crime. Perhaps in his wisdom he chooses to do so for good reasons, for bad reasons, it doesn't matter. It's not subject to review. But it is permissible for that to happen. And all we can do is say that God's justice is going to be served in eternity. And what happens in this life in these matters at some point it's over our pay grade. That's why the democratic aspect of this is such a disaster. Because we have this notion that everything has to be continuously subject

1:00:26 to review and to approval by the masses. The man who's actually going to answer to God in terms of dispensing wisdom and justice is given the absolute authority to pardon, to extend mercy, but he is not obligated to do so. And incidentally, this is one of the reasons why girls are utterly unfit to be participants in politics, because the girl's natural inclination to be merciful, as she would as a mother, you know, every woman on a jury, every woman who's a judge or a medical examiner, when they see a criminal, they see someone's son. Because you know, most violent crimes at least are committed by men. That's a function of testosterone largely. But it's usually a man. So usually a woman is going to see some little boy that

1:01:14 some mother loved. Said before Jeffrey Dahmer had a mother. I don't know his backs where I would assume that he was loved as a child at some point. Whatever went wrong with him, somebody loved him as a child. Doesn't make him not guilty. Doesn't mean that he doesn't get held to justice. Men can extend this principle and see past the fact that oh, there's someone who's going to be sad. Women almost invariably can't. And frankly, it's terrible when they can. When a woman becomes hardened to the point that she will be bloodthirsty, as a man in some cases must be. Not do you want to be bloodthirsty, but you can't be bloodless. You have to look at a situation and say, this calls for violence, this calls for death.

1:01:58 Dispassionately. You know, that's not a matter of hatred. It's not a matter for individuals. This is a matter of judgment in the realm of the government. To look dispassionately at a situation and say, justice demands that this man die. Justice demands that this man be beaten. Maybe his hand be amputated as a thief. If that were the law, that would be just. If it's not the law, that's also just. Like I don't care how that's implemented. But men have to say, yeah, this guy is gonna get punished for what he did. And mercy is not a factor. The reason we're talking about it as a Christian podcast is that it doesn't sound Christian. And the point is that it is. It is universally Christian. And it is in fact a denial of God's mercy to try

1:02:41 to take things off the table. If you say that justice cannot be enforced and you can only have so called mercy in this life, all you're doing is making hell worse for these people. And incidentally, you're also making civilization worse. The more liberal we have gone become in terms of just letting this stuff slide, not punishing actual wickedness and punishing things that aren't wicked at all. When good Samaritans are on trial for their life for protecting people, and wicked men go free, it's the pinnacle of injustice. And mostly that's what we see in the news. That is the tail end of us getting all these things wrong. It's a tail end of Christians not being a participant in these conversations and saying, you know what?

1:03:25 Shut up about forgiveness and mercy here See here. These people are wicked and they need to be punished. And once they're sentenced justly for their temporal punishment, we need to make sure that they get right with God if they want to hear it. You take every opportunity to extend God's mercy to them in the eternal. But just as the thief on the cross, the punishment and the forgiveness is either temporal or eternal. And when you confuse the two, you can only produce wickedness in this life. I recently posted that the king is above the laws. This is something that I've said a number of times, and admittedly deliberately to get people to act. actually think about what the statement means, what it says.

1:04:13 Incidentally, in the Lutheran case, this is actually something by which we are bound because it is in our confession, it is in the apology of the Augsburg Confession. It is said seemingly in passing, but it is stated in a way that it is assumed to be categorically true. I want to expand on that because it's relevant here and there's a related matter that is worth reiterating. We've said it before, but I'll say it again. When I say the king is above the laws, and note the plural and the lowercase l. That means that the king stands above the positive law. The positive law is simply the term we use for the enacted laws of a given country, of a political entity. The king is not above the law, upper case L, in that

1:05:09 case meaning the moral law. And so the king is tasked primarily first and foremost with upholding the moral law. That's one of the things that is central to this subject, because justice to define it briefly is to punish appropriately, which is to say fully, any behavior that transgresses the moral law. That is one of the core, if not the highest duties of the king, because of course a competing duty for highest duty would be seeing that the Christian faith is taught rightly in his lands. The king does also have that duty, a topic for another time. But when it comes to the moral law, how things are typically supposed to be done is the moral law is transposed into the positive law, which is to say that we look at the moral

1:06:07 law, which says, Thou shalt not murder. The man who sheds the blood of man by man shall his blood be shed. Those are moral law. You look at those, and you transpose them into the positive law and you end up with our laws against murder. Our laws that punish various kinds of homicide, and it's perfectly reasonable to recognize there are different kinds of certain crimes, particularly homicide. Even Scripture has different treatment for different homicides. There's really a distinction between two kinds in Scripture, whereas we have more than two. Perfectly fine to do that. The king is above the positive law, because the way that this actually works, morally speaking, Ontologically speaking, is that the king is the

1:07:00 one who grants the authority to the positive law. Because the king is the one who has the duty from God to see that the moral law is transposed into the positive law, and so he is the one who is supposed to enact and uphold those laws. He is not beholden to the positive law in the way that all of his citizens and subjects are. That is what it means for the king to be above the laws. I know some will object to the formulation, but this is simply how these things work. The king is not above the moral law because the moral law flows from God's nature. It is why the king has certain duties. It is why certain things are a matter of justice, and so the king cannot grant mercy for certain things because they are part

1:07:53 of the moral law. And so the king cannot say, I'm not going to punish this murderer. The king can look at the case and look at the man and decide how he is going to punish the murderer, but it must be tantamount to the death penalty, because that is what is required by God under the moral law. Could he send him on a suicide mission if the country happens to be at war? Sure. The king has that discretion. That's still a death sentence. But he cannot grant mercy that violates the moral law. But he can pardon with regard to the positive law, because he is above the positive law. He answers to God alone. Now some will look at that or hear that language and think that's completely ridiculous. It's setting the king up as basically a god.

1:08:46 Think about what that language actually means. Anyone in that position, whether he is the highest in this pyramid or he is somewhere down the ranks, should be absolutely terrified that he answers to God alone. So in the case of the king, it's God alone. In the case of a lesser magistrate, it's the king and then God. That is a terrifying position in which to find yourself. Much better to answer to men in this life than to answer only to God in eternity. To be the king grants certain privileges, but it comes with far more duties and far more dangers, because the king is going to answer to God for everything he does or fails to do, and in many cases he is going to answer only to God. Those of us who aren't at the top of the hierarchy, have

1:09:44 others above us, or at least have peers, to whom we have to answer, who can call us to account. That is a blessing from God. The king does not have that. He may have advisors, but they are not his equals. Again that is a terrifying position in which to find oneself. That should not necessarily be something to which any man aspires. That is something for which God prepares you and to which God calls you, which is another fundamental problem with democracy. But that was the second point that I want to make. A president is a King. It doesn't matter what title you give the man who sits atop the hierarchy. If he is the sovereign he is the king. Call him the Prince, the King, the President, the Prime Minister, chancellor,

1:10:38 it does not matter. Because the title is not the point, the office is. He is going to receive a king's judgment because he held a king's office. The same thing is true of the men who exercise ecclesiastical authority and ecclesiastical power in any of the modern churches. Seldom do they call themselves bishops these days, perhaps ironically the ones who do are the ones who are the most apostate in many cases. But whether you call yourself a bishop or a district president or whatever else it happens to be, you are a bishop. By virtue of your office, and you will receive a bishop's judgment and a bishop's reward or punishment. It doesn't matter what title you have, it matters what office you hold. Again, this is one of the reasons that democracy is so

1:11:31 perverse. It calls men to the office who are unsuited to it. That is a terrible thing both for the nation and for the man. Because if you stick someone in an office who is unsuited to that office, he is still going to be judged according to where he sat. But you stuck someone there who did not have the abilities, who did not have the attributes, who had no right to sit in that chair. That is a horrible position in which to find oneself, and of course the same thing is true all over our society. When you are given authority, when you hold authority, when you have a certain place in the hierarchy, you are expected to and you will be judged according to whether or not you behaved in a certain way.

1:12:23 That should give every man pause, with regard to what he has been given in life or what he seeks in life. Because again it doesn't matter what title you have, it matters the office you hold. The king's duty, whether he is a king, or a president, or a prince, or a prime minister, or a chancellor, or a con, whatever he calls himself, his duty is to uphold truth. With regard to right teaching of the faith in his lands, that is the Christian religion, according to Scripture, how God set it down, what God says we must believe, and what we must not believe, and with regard to the courts, with regard to his civil society, that is a matter of upholding justice. And again upholding justice is seeing that retribution is done, seeing that

1:13:19 the wicked are punished, seeing that criminals are made to repay the debt they have incurred by their behavior. and the way that debt is repaid is with punishment. Sometimes it is a fine, but sometimes a fine is not enough. We all know this with murder. If a man commits murder, we don't tell him he owes five million dollars. At least we should not do that. There have been times where that has been done. We see that in some historical systems where you could simply pay a fine for having killed someone. were various historical considerations, sometimes it was because you couldn't tell if the death was accidental or intentional, But sometimes it was simply because that was how they handled matters.

1:14:08 You see this in the Weergeld system in some of the continental parts of Europe historically before essentially Roman law was adapted to those areas during Christianization. That system was certainly better than some of the things that came before it, and certainly better than not having any system of punishment, but it does not rise to the level of doing justice. Because intentional homicide requires the death penalty. That is what God requires, that is what justice demands. There is no alternative there And so when you see the Christianization of Europe or anywhere else, you see the establishment of the death penalty. Because the death penalty is required by God, and so Christians will always maintain it.

1:14:58 This is worth repeating a number of times because we see so many Christians, supposed Christians in quote marks this time, so many of them arguing that the death penalty is morally wrongful. And you know that person's apostate as soon as he says that. Because he is directly contradicting what God says explicitly in his word. There are some things in Scripture where perhaps you can debate, perhaps you can speak of nuance or interpretation, exegesis, although often it veers into isegesis, but there are places where that's possible, and there are places where it is not. When it comes to the punishment for certain crimes, there is no gray. It is black and white, it is abundantly clear. And God doesn't just say that the punishment for intentional homicide is

1:15:55 the death penalty in one place. It's not just Genesis 9:6, it's all throughout Scripture. It is said in many places, it is said repeatedly, rules are laid out for how these things are conducted. To give the comparison there, because I spoke about Wehrgeld in the European context, the equivalent of that in the Old Testament essentially was the system of the Avenger of Blood. This is something that may have come to mind for some of you when we're speaking about justice and capital punishment and how And how these things are to be conducted and mercy and all of those matters. The Avenger of Blood was a duty that fell to the closest or the next of kin, the male next of kin, because that's what is meant in legal context virtually always.

1:16:43 When a man was killed. So, for instance, if your brother is killed, and you are in the Old Testament Israel context, you have a duty to avenge his blood. This is a duty that God affirms, because God actually states unequivocally the avenger of Blood will not be guilty of blood, if he kills the man who killed his kin, who killed his brother, his father, whomever it happens to be. This is not something that is condemned by God. And so, for instance, this tells us we cannot always condemn what we call today vigilante justice. It is not always wrongful. It is not per se wrongful. A Christian cannot say that it is, because God permits it. That's what this is. The avenger of blood is vigilante justice.

1:17:33 Now God sets up a system here of refuge. He does not set it up so that you can avoid punishment if you are guilty, because how the system worked was that if you killed someone at this point it doesn't matter if it's intentional or unintentional, that comes into play later, but if you kill someone, you can flee to one of these cities of refuge, and then the Avenger of Blood is not permitted to pursue you into the city. If you leave the city, he can kill you, and he's not guilty of blood. But as long as you're in the city, you're safe. However, you are to be brought before the community and judged. If it is ascertained that you are guilty of intentional homicide, then you are to be executed. If it is ascertained that you are

1:18:24 guilty only of unintentional homicide, then you remain in the city of refuge until the death of the high priest, and you are free to return home, and the avenger of blood may not kill you, because then if he does it, he's guilty of murder. It's worth noting here sort of as a tangent, but an interesting one. Here we have some symbolism. We have typology here. The high priest is a type of Christ. Because what is the death of the high priest here? Effectively, the death of the high priest acts as a sort of atonement. I'm of course not saying that he actually atones because there's one atonement. But the death of the high priest typologically is the atonement for the sin of homicide. Of course, this is the unintentional homicide.

1:19:13 But when he dies, the man who would be subject to being killed by the Avenger of Blood is free to go, because you have this typological atonement for that sin. But that's sort of the comparison between those two systems, the Avenger of Blood and the Wehrgeld system. This occurs in many cultures because the underlying concept there is a blood feud. When one party kills another, it creates a blood feud between those clans. And incidentally, this is something we used to recognize. There is such a thing as honor for a clan or a tribe. There is family honor. It's not just something that is individual. And that is why you wind up with these blood feuds. In the Old Testament Israel context, God addressed this by setting up

1:20:01 this system of cities of refuge. In the European context, typically you had to have the local magistrate sovereign intervene and broker peace between the warring parties. But ultimately speaking, again, the punishment for the crime falls to the godly prince, because he is the one to whom God has entrusted the sword. And so he has a duty to see that justice is done. And again, At risk of repeating it ad nauseum, the only justice is retributive justice. Everything else is a perversion or a denial of justice. We are not permitted by God to set up our own moral law. We must transpose his moral law into our civil law, into our positive law. And so, no, as a society, we do not get to decide

1:21:02 we are going to punish murderers with ten years in prison and a fine, or hit you with a stick, whatever it happens to be. We are not permitted to do that. The godly prince may not do that, and he will answer to God if he does. And so every nation that has abolished the death penalty will answer to God for having done that, because that is a transgression of the moral law. In fact, it is worse than that because it is effectively blasphemy. It is lying about God. When you say that it is immoral to execute someone, when you say that it is immoral to enact any penalty that is in Scripture for a crime, what you are actually saying is that God is wrong. God lied. God God did something sinful. That's blasphemy.

1:21:55 And individuals and nations and kings all will answer to God on the day of judgment for doing that. As Christians, we should want our laws to be consonant with God's law, with God's laws. It does not mean, and we have never said that you have to take Old Testament Israel's civil law and simply drop it into your covenant. There are different kinds of law. Some of them are binding on Christians, some of them are not. Scripture is abundantly clear on this point. So for instance, the ceremonial law is not binding on Christians. We don't have to sacrifice goats, in fact it would be sinful to do that. We don't have to burn incense. It's not sinful to do that notably, but we don't have to do that.

1:22:42 These things that were part of the ceremonial law for Old Testament Israel are not binding on us. The civil law is not binding on us, even if it is persuasive. We can look at what God set down and take it as persuasive because if he said it, we should certainly consider it. But he handed it down to Old Testament Israel as a nation. It is not something that we have to follow word for word. However, this is with the caveat that we cannot call any part of it morally wrongful. This is the same sort of reason that we can't say that slavery is per se sinful, because God permits it, God even commands it, and so we cannot say it is sin. Similarly, we cannot say any provision of the Old Testament civil law

1:23:28 for Old Testament Israel is sinful, but we are not bound to follow it to the letter. The moral law we are bound to follow absolutely. Because again, the moral law flows from the nature of God. It is unchanging, it is his eternal, unchanging will. We are not entitled, whether we are a commoner or a king, to change anything in the moral law. Justice demands that we follow the moral law to the letter. The ultimate penalty under the moral law is not actually the death penalty. That's the ultimate penalty in this life. The ultimate penalty under the moral law is hell. God is able to grant us mercy because Christ suffered the ultimate penalty for us. He fulfilled the demands of justice. Here in time, and with regard to earthly kings, that is not

1:24:29 available. For earthly kings, crime, which is to say transgressions of the moral law, must be punished according to the moral law. The king must wield the sword. It's not just that the king does wield the sword. It's not just that the king was entrusted with the sword by God. It is It is that part of being a king is wielding the sword. Just as if in a marriage you do not do certain things you are not actually married, so a king who does not actually use the sword is no king. The bad news for him is that he will still receive a king's judgment, because he holds the office. The worst thing, at least one of the worst things that you can do, is hold the office, but not execute the duties of it. That is what we see running rampant in our societies across

1:25:27 the world today. We see men who have the office, who have the power, who have the authority, and are not fulfilling their duties. Rest assured they will be judged. But in the meantime, it creates chaos in our societies and allows wickedness not only to fester but to increase. The king who does not do his duty, the king who does not fulfill the demands of justice destroys his nation, because he permits wickedness to run rampant, and he permits wickedness to cede more wickedness, because that is always what happens when it is not punished. When one wicked man sees another wicked man get away with his wickedness, he is inclined to do more wickedness himself. That is one of the reasons it is so important for the

1:26:19 godly king, for the Christian prince, to enact justice swiftly, consistently, and to the letter with regard to the moral law. It is one of the uses of the law. It is the curb. The curb with regard to the law is that it tamps down on wickedness. This is one of the places where we would certainly agree with Augustine. You are never going to have a perfect system with regard to the law in this life. Because we are fallen human beings, we live in a fallen world. But one of the uses of the law is to curb that wickedness, is to tamp down on it as much as possible. And so we can aspire to perfect compliance, even if we cannot reach it. It is the same thing that we do in our own lives with regard to the law.

1:27:14 We aspire to be sinless. We will never reach that state in this life, regardless of what certain supposed theologians have said. You cannot become perfect in this life. Over time, through the process of sanctification, you become better. The same thing can be true of a country, the same thing can be true of a nation. Generations of effort toward behaving in compliance with the moral law, and kings bringing up their sons as new godly rulers to replace them when they retire. Through that process, you can have an upward progress with regard to the morality of a people, with regard to the justice of a society. And that is a good thing, and it is something to which Christians should absolutely aspire And so when you see in the

1:28:08 coming year, and in the coming years, supposed Christians, particularly clerics, screeching about this miscarriage of justice with regard to a sovereign actually enacting what is required under the law. Recognize that what you are seeing is them declaring their apostasy. You are not seeing an argument for Christianity, because Christianity requires that justice be done, not that mercy be granted with regard to transgressions of the moral law. Because that is the division here. With regard to the left hand kingdom, it is a matter of justice. With regard to the right hand kingdom, it is a matter of mercy. And so we forgive those who have transgressed. We forgive those who have sinned against us.

1:29:02 But the prince must still wield the sword. He must still punish the wrongdoer. He must be a terror to the wicked. He does not get to neglect that duty, because with regard to the right hand kingdom he too must forgive. But he has a different office, and it has different requirements, and that requirement is justice, it is to punish the wicked. And although we often refer to princes and kings and things that are basically hypothetical to us, none of this discussion is hypothetical. We have a government today. We have criminals in our midst today. We have victims of those crimes today. We don't have to wait to get everything sorted out politically the way God would desire it to fix these problems.

1:29:50 As Corey said, and as I said at the beginning, that's the reason we're doing this episode at the end of the year. You're going to see a flurry of clerics and entire denominations and church bodies screaming at the top of their lungs, no, no, we have to have mercy. We can't do this. And it's gonna be a two step. First they're gonna say, No, you don't have the authority. You can't separate families by sending some aliens home and not others, to which the nominee for DHS said, sure, we're gonna send them all home together. We're not gonna separate families, we're deporting everyone. That's entirely just. That is not amoral. That has nothing to do with sojourners. What you're gonna find is people in the church lie about these

1:30:35 situations. They just throw as much Jesus dust as they can on that situation till you can't even see the alien underneath it and they try to say, No, you you can't get rid of those people. You don't have the authority And then when they lose that argument, as they're already losing, they're going to cry mercy. They're gonna cry clemency, say it's it's not forget justice, forget not having the authority. Jesus says that we should be merciful. So I'm going to address that head on here at the end of what I have to say. In the Beatitudes, Jesus expressly says, Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy. So case closed, right? Everything we just said is a lie. Jesus said, You won't be blessed if you don't show mercy.

1:31:18 To whom was he speaking? What was the purpose of that sermon? When Jesus delivered the Beatitudes, when he delivered the sermon on the mount, what was going on? Was he talking to a conclave of men who are forming a new government? No. There are people from all around who had heard about the miracles. They were coming to see this teacher, and what they heard was a man speaking wisdom, God speaking wisdom, not trying to pigeonhole him as some wise man, but they didn't know. You know, it was basically the new hot podcast and they heard stories about it. They came to see for themselves. When they showed up and Jesus told them, Blessed are the merciful for they shall receive mercy, he was not speaking to them in

1:32:00 a political context. What problem was he not trying to solve? Jesus was not solving the problem in the crowd that they didn't have enough punishment for crime. First century Judea, they had crime pretty well nipped in the butt. Criminals were killed left and right for all sorts of things. Smaller crimes than we would remotely consider that penalty today. That was well in hand. What they didn't have was the proper teaching of the law that had been with them for thousands of years. And so when Jesus was explaining things like, you have heard it said, don't commit adultery, I say don't lust. You've heard it said don't commit murder, I say unto you, don't commit hatred, because all sin begins in the heart.

1:32:46 Jesus in his teaching to these individuals was talking to them personally about interpersonal relationships. And every word of that is true. And nothing that we've said here has anything to do with interpersonal relationships. The example of the Avenger of Blood, that was a system that was in place. And in fact, it was a system that to some degree was preserved in Western civilizations and varying embodiments until the last century or so. You know, there were duels and they were recognized as legal that it was legal to duel someone to the death for slights. It was it was legal to do that. We're not advocating for that. We're simply saying that that is something that is not beyond the law. If a society wants to behave that way, they're up are

1:33:31 upsides. There are downsides. There are upsides and downsides to every approach. Everything that we do in this life in terms of political justice is going to be imperfect. Doesn't matter. You still have to do the best you can, which is why it doesn't matter whether we don't have a godly prince or king or any of that crap. You don't need to be a monarchist or sympathetic to think that we need to have men in office doing the right things today, enforcing the law today. And what we cannot permit is for clerics in these so-called church denominations coming along and screaming about Jesus when justice has nothing to do with that. What they're doing is they're destroying Christianity and they're destroying civilization at

1:34:13 the same time. We as Christians cannot participate in that. We cannot permit it. We cannot permit it in God's name. We cannot permit it in our name. It is wicked. And we are responsible for the teachings of the men in our pulpits and our denominations that go around doing this stuff. When there is ongoing abuse in a congregation that's covered up by the pastors and elders because they don't want the bad press. And so men who are committing heinous crimes have those crimes covered up for the sake of reputation. That is profound wickedness and injustice. That sort of behavior is rampant. Number of people can probably guess an example I have in mind. I have half a dozen examples in mind. This stuff happens all the time.

1:34:58 In the church, men who call themselves Christians conceal and cover up wicked heinous crimes, subverting justice for the sake of people not looking bad in the church. They don't want to get a bad reputation. They don't care about the victims. They don't care about justice. The one thing that they care about is not looking bad. These are the men who are acting in ways politically today that are interfering with the sovereign right of the government to execute justice. And so that's my immediate concern here. It's not that people aren't being merciful enough in their personal lives, although there should always be more of that. You know, whenever someone personally apologizes to me for anything.

1:35:42 I I want to say I panic, but like the most important thing for me, as soon as I learn that, I'm talking seconds, not hours or days, the very next thing that needs to come out of my mouth and my heart is I forgive you. And whatever else was going on, until the moment that someone says I apologize, forgive me. Whatever I was doing before, I drop it all and I address that situation and I forgive them. Why? Because I take the parable seriously about the wicked servant who was greedy and selfish when he had a small debt owed to him, and he disregarded the massive debt that was forgiven to him by his master. That's talking about us. It's talking about our sins. We owe an infinite debt to God for all the crap that

1:36:24 we do in our lives. The people who slight us, who sin against us, have very small debts by comparison. Even these heinous crimes that we've been talking about are small debts compared to an accumulated lifetime of wickedness. The reason that hell is eternal is that is how big the penalty is. It is a real penalty. The forgiveness that was delivered to every man on the cross, that was paid for every man on the cross, it's only delivered through justification and receiving it. But the act of those sins being paid for was paid by Jesus. His death and his suffering on the cross paid for all of it. What stupider more malevolent thing could we possibly do than despise that, not take that seriously?

1:37:11 And that's why it's so important for us to forgive each other when we sin against each other and ask forgiveness. And that's why it's so dire when we sin against each other and we don't ask forgiveness. We don't even think we did anything wrong. And that guy had it coming. He deserved that. I'm not gonna ask for forgiveness. He got half of what he deserved. I'd do more if I could. That's a typical attitude that people have. It's wicked. When Jesus talks about extending mercy, he's talking about that. He's not talking about the political. One of the problems that we've also had and we're going to continue to have, especially like as we're recording this right now, we're month or two before Trump's nominees for his cabinet are going to

1:37:49 be up for a lot of public debate. The men aren't perfect. Some of them are adulterers, some of them are Zionists. Thousand things you could say are wrong about those men. The one question that matters for guys like Robert F. Kennedy, in the role that he's gonna have an HHS, is he gonna do the best possible job? And I think given all the possibilities, the answer's probably yes. Would I commend the guy for a thousand other things? No. That one thing, I think he can do pretty well. Same is true of the Secretary of Defense. The guy has a reputation that I don't know if it's true or not, but people say that there are things about him that are morally undesirable, publicly so. The question is will the Secretary of Defense, which until incidentally nineteen

1:38:33 forty seven was a Secretary of War. That's what it was from the beginning of this nation. The Secretary of War is a cabinet position. Why? Because it's important to have men who have mastered the art of violence. And whatever else that man is, I truly believe that he is a man who has mastered the art of violence. And therefore, in the political realm, to me, it does not matter if he is the most morally upright man in the world. What matters to me is as the secretary of war, is he going to be equipped to reorient our military so that it can fight a war against China. Because in the next eight years, that is what we're looking at. I think in the next four years that's what we're looking at. That is what the Secretary of Defense, the Secretary of War has

1:39:17 to do. You don't want the nicest guy in the world. You want a man who will do violent things to bad people. That's the man who needs to be in that position. Those men aren't always going to have clean hands. And as much as I long for a world and a country, a nation A nation where we have such a preponderance of good morally upright men who have also mastered the art of violence, which in the past was the case. Guys like Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, there were good men who were valiant warriors, who were violent men when they needed to be, and were also morally upright. The fact that we have a dearth of men who were morally upright doesn't mean we have a dearth of men who are good at violence.

1:39:58 That's what we need. That's what we need in the position. And this is something that Christians are so bad at. We're not looking at church positions where you have to have the perfect man who has a complete squeaky clean record or he's disqualified. I would love it if we had a thousand men as competent as the current guy for Secretary of War who didn't have the moral problems. But if he's the best guy for getting this particular job done, all the pastors need to shut up. They have no business talking about that. Because you know what? Eternal repentance if forgiveness has nothing to do with prosecuting the political question. We're looking at political questions that are matters of survival for

1:40:37 our for our very nation. Their decisions are going to be made in the next couple years that will decide whether or not America sees its 275th anniversary. I don't think it's going to make it that long, but the only way it possibly can is for the right men to be in those positions. And those are probably not going to be men that I'd be happy about in every other possible scenario. Doesn't matter. Are they right for this particular job? Someday, if and when we win, we will have cleaned house to the point that we'll have a thousand guys to choose from and you don't have to compromise. You don't have to make political compromises where a guy who has some dirt, but he's good at the one thing you need done,

1:41:16 you can pick from someone who is good at the thing and he doesn't have dirt. We don't have those options today. All we have are dirty men who are competent at the thing that's in front of them. If that's the best we can do, then that's what we have to do. Politics is about expediency. It's not always about the absolute perfect moral choice. It's about doing the thing that is going to provide the optimal political outcome. And this is why to some extent it is important for politics and religion to be divided because the very rules that have to be enforced in the church, which incidentally are not, but they must be enforced for Christians, to apply them in the political context is suicidal as a nation.

1:41:56 It's national suicide. We don't have the men to choose from, or we can get like Trump's not the best candidate for president if you talk about morally upright and all these other things, but he's the best we got. On one hand, Christians want to say, oh, well, you know, we're all guilty of sin, so I can't judge anybody. On the other hand, as soon as someone in the political realm has some actual problem that we want to clutch our pearls at. Like, oh no, I don't care what he's good for. He did this one thing. that's really bad morally. I'm not poo-pooing the idea that we have to have high standards for these men. We should be able to have a man that's completely trustworthy in everything. But at the end of the day, the most important thing

1:42:41 politically is can I trust that this guy will get the job done? And when we look at these situations, we as men who are involved in the political process have to make wise choices. And the wise choice is sometimes not the one that seems like it's the most morally upright. There will be guys like RFK who have no problem with abortion. Trump doesn't have as much, nearly as much of a problem with infanticide as he should. But the bottom line is that the alternative is so much worse that politically, that's all we have to choose from. So the purpose of doing an episode on justice, you know, we talked a lot about executions for murders. You go you go down to the least significant thing, to shoplifting.

1:43:27 Look what happened in California when they said, you know what? If they shoplist something below $950, we're not even gonna do anything. You saw mass chaos. You saw stores being cleaned out continuously in San Francisco. Because, like, you know what? If it's under 950, we don't care. That caused horrors for the smallest crime. Shoplifting is not a big deal compared to murder. It is a less serious sin. Nevertheless, that's destroying someone's livelihood. That's driving prices up for everyone. That's a disaster. It's a civilizational disaster to be unjust by not enforcing the law. What we're faced with right now in both kingdoms, in the left and the right, is men who are effectively crying Barabbas, Barabbas.

1:44:11 They want to free the man who's a murderer, and they want to condemn those who are not guilty of anything. We must enforce the laws justly. We must have men who will enforce the laws justly. And that is going to mean that people are punished for their crimes. There's actually going to be consequences again. That's the only way to clean house is for there to be real material consequences. And it's up to the president and the Congress and the court system to sort out what those penalties are. And they're going to make a mess of it. They're not going to do nearly as good a job as they should. But it's their job to try to get those things right and God will hold them to account. We cannot get in their way as Christians by saying, no, no,

1:44:53 you have to have mercy. No, absolutely not. The mercy that is necessary is baked into the system to make sure that the just are found innocent, found not guilty, and the unjust are found guilty. That's the extent of the mercy in the justice system when it's functioning properly. As Christians, in the coming year and in the coming decade, we're gonna have to understand that the beatitudes are interpersonal and they're about our relationship with God. They're not about how you run a country. They're just not. There's wisdom there that applies. But to proof text and say, Blessed are the merciful, therefore you have to show mercy to everyone who commits a crime Satan is talking that way. That's what Satan wants.

1:45:39 That is Satan quoting scripture to burn down civilization. We're not going to make it if we act like that. And the point of this episode, the point of creating this sort of crisis, I mentioned at the beginning that I noticed the etymology of crisis has to do with judgment. Going back far enough, it's related to judgment result of trial. It basically has to do with it was a medical context. The moment of crisis where, you know, a fever is about to break, where someone is so sick they're basically a rock bottom and they've reached the point medically where in the medical crisis were either they're going to die or they're gonna recover. That is related to judgment. That's what we have with these situations that have to be judged.

1:46:21 It's the moment of truth, basically. A crisis is a moment of truth. These questions that are arising, in some cases a stone choir is forcing, are moments of truth. Which direction are we gonna go? Are we gonna say that God was sinning and we've evolved to some new species that has transcended the moral law? That's what the pastors are saying, that's what the churches are saying overwhelmingly. We are not wicked like the Bible, we are new and more moral. It sounds silly when I say it that way or in Corey says it that way, but when you look at their actual pronouncements, that's how it works. When you write down what's in the Bible and you write down the things that they're condemning, one of them is wrong.

1:47:00 That's a crisis. That's a moment of judgment for us as Christians, for us as a church. Are we going to make it or not? And there's no promise to any individual or to any individual congregation or to any denomination that God will preserve us through our apostasy. The only way that we as Christians make it through this, as Christians in the faith, is to stick to what God says. And the only way that our nation makes it through this crisis is if we make sure that the churches and the clerics do not interfere with the political process when they are implementing justice. We have had years and decades, and in some cases centuries now, of injustice in the political realm. If we're going to survive as a polity, those things are going

1:47:45 to have to change. And it's going to make some people sad. And some people are going to get hurt. When there's retribution, that means that someone gets hurt. And the hard part about understanding justice is that it is a case where two wrongs are actually making a right. That's what that passage in Colossians is about in Colossians two. All of our sins were nailed to the cross on Jesus, on his body, in his flesh, he suffered bodily. That was our wrongs in the injustice that was done to him balance each other out. It's neutralized. Two wrongs in this case are actually making a right. Justice is about saying you did something evil, evil is going to be visited upon you. That's why it's crucial that this isn't an individual matter.

1:48:33 This is strictly a political matter. That's why the interference of clerics is so dire. They're used to dealing with individual men and individual sins. When we're dealing with the political, it's a completely different matter. Not that wisdom's out the window, not that God's law is out the window. It's that when you actually look at God's requirements, we're not going nearly far enough. We're gonna have to get back there if we're gonna make it. Christians, if we're going to be participants in the political realm, are going to have to say what God says. That's gonna mean getting harder about this stuff than we have in the past. It's gonna be about making political compromises that we find distasteful and

1:49:13 that our goal should be ten years, twenty years down the road, we can do do a whole lot better than we are right now. But until we get there, we still have to do something. We can't just throw up our hands and say, well, this is all disgusting. I'm I'm above all this. No. Our country's being burned down by wicked men. They want us as Christians to check out. They want us to hold our noses and just walk away in disgust. We have to show up because of the moral voices who actually care about God either snipe from the sidelines or say what Satan says about just no show mercy. Don't no one's guilty. don't punish any sins. Don't punish any crimes. If we do that, we will lose everything. We will lose our nation.

1:49:53 We will lose Christianity, we will lose our lives, and we will lose our souls. Stone choirs here is the small part that we can play in making sure that doesn't happen. So thank you for listening to us because this is hard stuff to hear. There's a heavy episode to end the year on. But if these things are not kept in mind as these discussions unfold, everyone's going to be tricked. Because everyone's going to be shouting about Jesus and what Jesus wants. And as Christians, that should be the most important thing to us. And in fact, this episode is about what Jesus wants. Jesus who caused the flood and killed everyone but eight people, Jesus who's returning on the last day to kill everyone who's not the

1:50:34 elect, to wipe away everything in fire, that's God. That's justice. That's God's justice. That's not sin. If we can't look at that and praise God, we have spiritual problems. And if we can't understand this in the political context, we're gonna have lives that are bad until the end. So please keep these things in mind as you hear other people talking about completely different things. They're going to go in a whole nother direction, but they're always going to cry barabbas, barabbas. At the end of the day, that's what it's going to be. Don't hold the guilty to account and punish people who haven't actually done anything wrong at all. That's where we are spiritually. That's Satan versus God in a nutshell.

1:51:18 It's been that way since the garden. It was that way in the courtyard when the brain crowd called for Christ's blood and when he was crucified. And it's that way today in our courts and on TV and everywhere we look. And as Christians, we should know better. We should recognize all of this and have a voice that speaks and says, This is what God wants from us. If our churches, if our pastors fail, Christian men still have a duty to obey God, and the consequences are up to God. We belong to Him. Good or ill, we have to do what is right, and God will take care of the rest. And so here at the end of the year, I want to leave you with four short readings from Scripture and one thing to think about as you're reading Scripture, and I do recommend that you go

1:52:06 and look up these sections of scripture and read the context, read the entire chapter, read the entire book if you happen to have the time. Some of them are not very long. I'm going to read from Zechariah, Isaiah, Deuteronomy, and Micah. You can go and find the sections for yourself. It'll be a good exercise in reading through scripture. But what I want you to think about when you listen to what I'm about to read, and when you read scripture on your own, is that righteousness and justice are two closely related concepts, but they are also distinct. We cannot conflate them. When we conflate them we wind up with the same sort of problems that we see when justice and mercy are conflated, or used

1:52:54 inappropriately where they should not be used. Incidentally, in the Greek, these are very closely related terms, which you can certainly look up if you are so inclined. But the first two readings, and I will actually be reading the third reading in two different versions because I want you to note something about the language that is used in I will be reading from the ESV for the first and then a more literal translation of the Septuagint for the second. But the first reading And the word of the Lord came to Zechariah saying, Thus says the Lord of hosts, render true judgments, show kindness and mercy to one another, do not oppress the widow, the fatherless, the sojourner or the poor, and let none of you devise

1:53:40 evil against another in your heart. The second reading You shall not pervert justice, you shall not show partiality, and you shall not accept a bribe, for a bribe blinds the eyes of the wise, and subverts the cause of the righteous. Justice and only justice you shall follow, that you may live and inherit the land that the Lord your God is giving you. The third reading. Learn to do good, seek justice, correct oppression, bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause. The same reading, in a more literal translation of the Septuagint. Learn to do good, seek out fair judgment, resign Rescue one who has been wronged, give a fair judgment to the orphan, and vindicate the widow. And the fourth and final reading, and this is one that I

1:54:37 actually recommend, go read the entire book and memorize at least this specific portion. He has told you, O man what is good, and what does the Lord require of you, but to do justice and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God. Amen.