The Bible Has a Better Answer Than Prison.

[00:00:00] Speaker A: What's up, guys? Welcome to another episode of the Parish Circuit. Today we're going to be talking about biblical justice. Well, so actually, we're going to be talking about providing some commentary about a recent arrest that happened. So one of the articles that we ran. October. No, October. My goodness. August. Excuse me. Whoa. That is wrong. August 5th. Former Arnaville woman gets nearly two years for embezzling half a million dollars from medical clinics. Brooke Miller. Duck. She was living in Texas. I think it's duck, right? I don't know. [00:00:33] Speaker B: Maybe it's spelled duck. It has to be duck, right? [00:00:36] Speaker A: Yeah, it has to be duck. I don't know. Maybe this is one of those French names that we just don't know because we're not from here. But Brooke got arrested. She had been siphoning some money out of some clinics that she worked for in the Lafayette, Baton Rouge area over the last several years. She got picked up. I think she wound up pleading guilty to a charge. She was sentenced to two years in prison, and she has to pay back. They mark it as restitution. $539,000 in restitution, which in a biblical sense, restitution is you're paying it back to the people that you took it from, right? [00:01:05] Speaker B: Yes. [00:01:06] Speaker A: Okay. So I assume that that's what they mean is happening here. It's not necessarily just being given back to the state. If it was being paid back to the state, we'd have a problem because it's been stolen from people, not the state. But one of the things, we wanted to take this as an opportunity to kind of talk about what the Bible has to say about justice. And I think that what we're seeing here is close to a biblical justice model short of the prison sentence. The prison sentence is a punitive justice move. Okay. It's like a punishment. It's not a restorative justice move. And we would argue that we want to operate in the space of restorative justice, where the Bible prescribes restorative justice to be an option and then punishment consequences. Punitive justice doesn't operate in a world where now we put somebody in a box for however many years and the taxpayer has to fund it. Okay. That's not punitive. Instead, we should probably err more on the side of execution if and when it's applicable. And the Bible gives us categories for all those things. Yes. Death sentence is a thing. Comes from the Bible, is a holy move. God has ordained it, and we should not shy away from it. I think the death sentence scares People because it makes them think about their own personal guilt. I think that's what's actually preventing people from bringing the death sentence forward as an option. They see that somebody else could die for their transgressions and they say, oh, gosh, but I've done wrong things. I think it has more to do with that than it does with anything else. [00:02:47] Speaker B: That's part of it. Yeah. I think from some Christians, I've also seen some difficulty handling, I guess, the difference in the forms of violence that exist and that there are some forms of violence that are justified biblically and others that are not. [00:03:04] Speaker A: Yeah, like a just war theory and all that kind of stuff, right? [00:03:07] Speaker B: Exactly. So I think I've heard people throw out things like, well, if you're, if [00:03:11] Speaker A: you're pro life, you can't be pro death penalty. [00:03:14] Speaker B: If you're against abortion, then you have to be against the death penalty. [00:03:18] Speaker A: If we should not kill innocent people, therefore we can't kill guilty ones. [00:03:22] Speaker B: Right. And that's the gist of it. And we don't look to our own opinions in deciding which is which. [00:03:29] Speaker A: We're looking at the text, Scripture. Right? [00:03:31] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:03:32] Speaker A: So in this particular instance, it seems like in the Bible it talks about paying back up to four times the amount that's stolen. I think it's four, isn't it? Four? Yeah, I think it's four. So. Well, that's. [00:03:46] Speaker B: Let's let me Zacchaeus promise. Yeah, Zacchaeus Payback 4. And it was shown as a good thing. [00:03:51] Speaker A: Right. [00:03:51] Speaker B: Basically he's, you know, because he was a thief, it was a form of real confession and repentance that he's willing to, you know, basically put himself into destitution in order to make. Make it right what he did. But in the Old Testament, in God's law, it's paying back and then some. I don't know if it's four times, but it's kind of paying back and then some. Typically when there's an instance of theft, and I dug a little bit more here in this case, and it looks like she will have to pay back the full amount that she defrauded these entities of, minus anything that maybe they've already recovered or whatever. But after she gets out of her 22 month stint in prison, she will be required to basically pay back what she owes, which is pretty crazy. I couldn't imagine owing somebody half a million dollars and ever thinking that I'm [00:04:52] Speaker A: gonna pay it back. Well, it sounds like student loans today, honestly, a bit. Hey. [00:04:57] Speaker B: Oh, and you're like, no, student loans aren't that much. But you're like, well, but they're like $100,000. I mean, they're getting up there. [00:05:03] Speaker A: They're definitely getting up there. Doctors, if you're going to like your. It was $200,000 to become a doctor 15 years ago. [00:05:10] Speaker B: Sure. [00:05:10] Speaker A: I wonder what it costs now. Yeah. So I just did a quick summary search. Restitution scale varies 120% in some applications, so total amount plus a fifth. It can go up to seven times, though, depending on what was stolen and the circumstances around it. Zacchaeus offers to pay 4. [00:05:26] Speaker B: Yeah. [00:05:28] Speaker A: So we have the situation here where she's like, being forced to pay things back. We think that's good. I would deal with the punitive side and say, I don't know about that. I don't know. I don't know about that particular aspect because that's only going to cost taxpayers more and delay the people who have been stolen from the time that they need to get their money back, you know, they're going to have to sit for at least around two years before something happens. She go into federal prison where it's day for day. Like, she's not going to get a. Sometimes you go to state or county facilities and commuted sentence like that, but that's not going to happen. No, it's day for day. That's what she's serving. [00:06:01] Speaker B: And people are wondering maybe at this point in the episode, wait, why have you guys talked about, like, the death penalty and stuff like that in an episode? [00:06:08] Speaker A: Because we're talking about biblical justice. [00:06:09] Speaker B: We're laying a framework, we're laying a foundation for biblical justice. And so in this case, basically. Well, maybe we'll start from a biblical perspective. We wouldn't argue that in general, having lengthy prison sentences is proper justice. [00:06:27] Speaker A: That's a problem. [00:06:28] Speaker B: Yeah. We don't see that model in Scripture. [00:06:32] Speaker A: No. [00:06:32] Speaker B: And if you think about what's actually going on, there is if someone, let's say, steals, and in many cases, probably most cases in our country, when there's theft, the people who are stolen from don't get anything back. [00:06:43] Speaker A: Correct. And that's a problem. [00:06:45] Speaker B: Right. So there's no restoration to the people that have been harmed. And instead those same people that have been stolen from now have to pay via taxes for you to go to jail. The care, medical care, housing, food, infrastructure of all the, you know, prisons and all that stuff. Right through their. Through their tax dollars. So it's an extra tax on the people that have been stolen from, basically. Our. That's what our prison sentence sentences function as. And very few people actually receive restorative justice. [00:07:15] Speaker A: Right. And this is why the Bible has categories for things like bond servants. Bond servants. Slavery in the Old Testament predominantly was people operating inside of the context of bond servants. And they would enter into a state of poverty where they actually, in most instances, are willfully submitting themselves to the subjection of someone else in exchange for money. And it was for a period of time, over the course of years. And then when your time was over, you would be freed. Unless you determined, no, I really love this guy. I want to stay with them. And then you could stay with them like it was. It was an every seven. [00:07:49] Speaker B: Every. Every seven years. Yeah, yeah. [00:07:52] Speaker A: There was an option for you. And so in the same instance, what we're saying is we need to get back to a return to crime actually costing you something. Right? [00:08:04] Speaker B: Yep. [00:08:05] Speaker A: Laws that revolve around violation of God's law and not just not wearing your seatbelt. Sure. Like, who's the party wronged and how can they be restored? What's happened to them and how can they be restored? [00:08:23] Speaker B: Yep. [00:08:23] Speaker A: That's an important thing to think about. [00:08:24] Speaker B: Yeah. And there's a story that I've used before, and I'm stealing this from somebody, but it's local and it happened to them. This is not just a hypothetical. This is local and something real. So, guys, lawnmower got stolen. And in fact, I think you and Pastor Brandon talked about this on a previous podcast. [00:08:43] Speaker A: It wasn't my lawnmower. We're not talking about this. [00:08:45] Speaker B: Yeah, no, no, different guy. Their lawnmower got stolen by a young man locally. The guy got picked up, but the lawnmower was gone. Right. Been sold off. It was. It was. No, it was not going to be restored to the person who it was stolen from. And the person who was stolen from had to go up here in court and all that stuff, and they realized that this young man had a record. And this stealing of a lawnmower was going to stick him in prison basically for an extended period of time. And the guy that had his lawnmower stolen is like, I don't want. I actually don't want that to happen to this kid. I'd rather like, look, I just lost a lawnmower. He can come and work, work for me for a little while until it's paid off. Right. Couple, I don't know, a couple hundred bucks probably at the time. He can come do some work, work around my yard. He can do whatever until it's paid off. And. And we're good. He doesn't have to go to prison. Right. Well, what do you think the judge's response was? [00:09:42] Speaker A: They sent him to jail. [00:09:43] Speaker B: They were like, they. I mean, yeah, because our justice system is set up in a way that you do not commit crimes against other people. You commit crimes against the state. And so the judge responded in this case with, ultimately, this person did not commit this crime against you. That's not how we view this. They committed a crime against the state. And he must basically pay. [00:10:06] Speaker A: He must pay for the state. [00:10:08] Speaker B: He must pay by you paying for his prison time in prison. Right. And so. So the guy that got stolen from, [00:10:15] Speaker A: you know, now he's just out of lawnmower. [00:10:17] Speaker B: He's just out of lawnmower. And his time that he had to go up here in court for no reason in this case because nothing was restored to him. [00:10:23] Speaker A: Right. [00:10:24] Speaker B: And. And now he has to pay for this young man's dehumanizing life in prison. [00:10:33] Speaker A: Yeah, it's such a unfortunate. Like the Bible gives us great categories for law. In fact, for a long time, English common law was based on Old Testament case law. Now it's starting to wander, obviously a bit today. But the foundation of the American legal system, predominantly, except for the state of Louisiana, was on English common law. Now Louisiana was Justinian Napoleonic law, just to summarize the distinction between those two things. So English common law was more of what I would articulate as the spirit of the law, a common sense application. Justinian law is more of the. Well, technically, sure, in common law is [00:11:19] Speaker B: also based on precedent. Right. You have previous cases that you can kind of look to as examples of the application of law and things like that, right? [00:11:28] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. But the. Well, technically, I didn't technically break that law because it says curfew is at 8 o', clock, but it was 7:59, so things were fine. You know, there's this odd approach to law, and this happens a lot today in our very legalistic approach to it. But if you're looking for examples of those things, you can often see, especially if you read old English literature, they're trying to apply the spirit of the law more than they're trying to apply the technicality of the law. But if you look at that, spirit [00:12:09] Speaker B: versus letter is a distinction there. [00:12:11] Speaker A: Yeah. But an American case law, especially today, we're doing the technicals, we're doing the. We want the detail of the law. Well, they can't really go to jail, even though they were obviously doing something wicked but technically, they didn't break the law. [00:12:25] Speaker B: Yep. [00:12:25] Speaker A: So we'll dismiss the case. It's like, oh, wait, we have a problem. This legal system's broken. You know what I'm saying? [00:12:31] Speaker B: Yeah. And was part of that, like, I always think of all the time in our Constitution, in the Bill of Rights, we have the right to a speedy trial. [00:12:40] Speaker A: Oh, yeah. [00:12:40] Speaker B: For example. So do you think the reason that we've wandered so far from maybe a more restorative system of justice with more clear biblical roots, is it because, you know, we've maybe willfully gone against it, or is it just because things have become so inefficient and, like, we don't give people speedy trials, for example, because the courts are all so backed up and. [00:13:07] Speaker A: Well, I know in St. Landry parish, at one point, the backlog docket was in the thousands, like, thousands of backlogged cases. That was one of the first things that the new da, Chad Pete, was supposed to take care of whenever he came in. I have no idea what the case count is now, but one of the things that he was doing whenever he came in was to try to purge this epic backlog of cases. [00:13:26] Speaker B: That could be another fun future episode. Possibly. [00:13:28] Speaker A: Yeah, we should follow up on that and see what that's got going on. But I know of people, like, we used to do ministry inside of the jail here in St. Landry parish, and I know of people who have been in the Saint Landry Parish jail for years. [00:13:39] Speaker B: Years. [00:13:40] Speaker A: That's not what that facility is built for. And they're waiting for their trial to come up. It's terrible, man. It's not a fair and equitable justice system. [00:13:48] Speaker B: No. And would it be safe to say that as a culture we need to repent? Like, fewer people should be breaking laws that are just laws. [00:14:00] Speaker A: Amen. [00:14:00] Speaker B: But also, maybe there should also be fewer laws on the books than we have now, where the government is trying to regulate every aspect of our lives. [00:14:10] Speaker A: I can't remember who said this originally, but there's a great quote in that lane. You either have the 10 commandments or you have the 10,000, but as soon as you leave one, you've landed on the other. [00:14:21] Speaker B: And we've talked about this a bit with the education episodes we've done. But when a society ceases to function well and safely and ceases to flourish when we aren't self governed. Right. When the individual doesn't have self control, but also when families break down, and that's just kind of an outplaying of people not having Self control, and then the families break down and then you end up with societal kind of chaos. And we are, I would say, living in the at least early phases of that type of system where we have ultimately left God's law behind. The way that we live our lives, the way that we run our families, the way that we take responsibility for our families, our communities, our churches, and we are seeing the fruits of that in our prison systems, in our justice system. [00:15:10] Speaker A: Real reformation is recovery of that real reformation goes back and recovers the proper application of God's law in the world today in which we live. Whenever we say things like all of Christ and all of life, which is one of the things that we set up on our church website, all of Christ for all of Opelousis, one of the things that we're saying is, hey, let's return to a good and right justice system, a good and right law code based on the Bible, and build from there. [00:15:35] Speaker B: Yeah. So. And what's beautiful about a restorative justice system, let's. I know some people are probably skeptical of our approach here, which is maybe a more biblical approach. The beauty of a restorative justice system is that you don't get. You don't have a record forever because you stole a lawnmower once. When you have made the crime right, when you have paid the quick and painful price of sinning against a human, a fellow human being, then you are restored. Does that make sense? So in the case of the stolen lawnmower, once, once you've worked off the price of the lawnmower, and then some, because you have caused a lot of inconvenience to the person that you've sold from, it's over. So once you've worked it off and then some, it's done. You're restored. You're not sitting, you're not rotting in prison, you're not living on more taxpayer money. You are restored. [00:16:39] Speaker A: This is why in places like death row, this is why pastors would go visit death row for so long. Because even execution was viewed as just. And because we understand that there is an eternity, we want to give everyone the opportunities that they can believe in Jesus and be saved and ultimately be reconciled with God and restored. A biblical justice system is a restorative system. It actually loves people. [00:17:13] Speaker B: Well, restored to God and restored to one another. [00:17:16] Speaker A: Yes. [00:17:17] Speaker B: So that reminds me of another kind of pushing against this that I've heard from Christians. Even against something like, say, the death penalty versus being given a sentence of life in jail or life in prison, they Say, well, terrible. They apply a very pragmatic approach to it, a pragmatic ethic with some Christian mixed in. And they say, well, look, if they have life in prison, that gives them more opportunity to repent and become a Christian as opposed to receiving. And we're talking about cases of like murder or rape. Those would be like the biblical categories for or man stealing, right? That'd be another case that would receive the death penalty. Enslaving someone unlawfully. Those would all receive the death penalty. We would say that putting someone behind bars for the next 50 years is in some ways a fate worse than death. It's terrible, it's dehumanizing, turning them into cattle. It allows for no fulfillment of the creation mandate of flourishing as a human being in community, in right relationship with community. I mean, it's all bad. It's all bad. And those who are on death row, like you were talking about, getting back to what you were saying, gave people a face to face confrontation with their sin and the consequence of it, and often led to repentance. [00:18:46] Speaker A: Look at Jeffrey Dahmer. [00:18:47] Speaker B: Yeah, golly, you want to talk about that? [00:18:50] Speaker A: Dude became a Christian before he died. That'll test whether or not you really believe the gospel. If you can hear about guys like Jeffrey Dahmer who supposedly made a profession of faith and died believing in Jesus, right? That'll make you wonder if you really want this Christianity thing to be true or not. That'll offend people. But what we're chasing is that grace [00:19:14] Speaker B: offends people for sure. [00:19:15] Speaker A: We're chasing a restorative, deep Christian ethic for justice. That's what we're actually going after giving people. Like, we believe in eternity and you should too. And we believe that eternity is according to the way that God has set it up to be, which is there is blessings and there are curses and there is eternal damnation and there is eternal blessing. And God allows us to be a part of his covenant people and receive that eternal blessing based on whether or not we believe in Jesus. That's the hot gospel right there. It doesn't matter what you've done. It doesn't matter the things that you've wronged, the people that you've stolen from, you can be forgiven and restored. The pathway of the gospel is forward, up and to the right. You can be cleansed. Jesus died so that you don't have to. All of that stuff is true. That's hot gospel. And if we can't get our heads around that concept, then what are we even doing? This is the truth that we need to hold on to. That Christian ethic for the world is one of restoration. And locking people in a box for the rest of their life is not restorative. It is deeply, deeply damaging. Yep. [00:20:39] Speaker B: So in the case of Duck. [00:20:40] Speaker A: In the case of duck, we are [00:20:41] Speaker B: bringing it back home here. All right. In the case of duck, we would say, actually, it's a good thing that she has to pay back what she stole. [00:20:49] Speaker A: Yeah, she should probably pay back a little more. [00:20:50] Speaker B: She probably pay back a little bit more, but also not sit in prison for two years. [00:20:54] Speaker A: Probably shouldn't go to jail. Meantime, just needs to get to work. Get to work and start hustling it [00:20:58] Speaker B: back, start restoring and be restored to her society and her people. [00:21:02] Speaker A: Amen, guys. Thank you all so much for listening to another episode of the Parish Circuit. 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