Hey, I need your help with something. I need to get your opinion. I'm taking a break this week from the current podcast series, the season on self-control. We'll pick it up next week and finish it out. But for the rest of this week, I'm going to take a break from that and I'm going to air a pilot. I'm thinking about a new format for the next season. This is gonna be just a test to see, and if you like it, great. If you'd rather go back to just sermon excerpts, then we can do that. But this is something that I think will be helpful for me, and I hope it'll be helpful for you. And what it is, is a podcast about current events, news headlines, that examines what does scripture say about the topic of this headline? Whatever's big in the news, what's the biblical way to think about it and to feel about it? Like I said, I think that's something I need since I've been immersed in politics lately and I need to make sure my focus stays on scripture. So we'll do one and this will be a trial and we'll see what you think. So please let me know. The big headlines this past week were Trump's picks for AG and the trial and sentencing of Lakin Riley's killer. Both of those have to do with a very important and very emotional issue, justice. So, let's talk about justice. Lake and Riley's murder received life in prison. What's the biblical way to think about that? Psalm 33 5 says, the Lord loves righteousness and justice. He loves it. He loves justice. Justice is a crucial attribute of God to understand for lots of reasons, but especially when you listen to the news. Without confidence in God's justice, you'll go out of your mind listening to the news headlines and the things that are going on. So let's think about this Lake and Riley thing first. You might have heard the letter that she wrote, or the entry she wrote in her diary shortly before she died to her future husband. Somebody at her church encouraged her to do this, and so she wrote this. To my future husband, I want you to know I'm thinking about you. I'm working every day to become the best wife that I can by working through my current relationships to best prepare me for ours and our kids one day. I'm focusing on God and what He defines as a faithful Christian wife so that I can best embody those characteristics. I pray that you know that it is my full faith and trust in God and I know this relationship has been handcrafted by Him. I pray that we continue to glorify the Lord, prioritize Him in every aspect of our lives, and raise our family, our future family, to be God-fearing Christians as well. I pray God is the center of our relationship, as it is a gift from Him. I thank Him for you before I even know you, and can't wait to love you in the best way I know for the rest of our lives. No matter what challenges we face, I pray that our trust in God and love for one another overrules the obstacle. May our relationship last forever. Your future wife, Laken." It's a beautiful letter. On February 22nd of this year, she went out, this 22-year-old nursing student, went out for her daily jog with no idea she was about to encounter an illegal alien who would take her life. And it was not a quick death. She fought for her life for 18 minutes. 18 minutes. And you know, if you don't think that sounds like very long, think of a boxing match, a professional boxing match. When the most highly trained world-class boxers in the world have a match, each round is three minutes. Three minutes. These are the most physically fit specimens in the world. Their training is unbelievable. They go three minutes and then they sit down and rest. And the reason they have the rules like that is because if they went more than three minutes, both boxes would get so tired that it wouldn't really be worth watching. Laken Riley didn't get a rest every three minutes. She went 18 minutes straight, fighting with every ounce of strength that she had. You can just imagine how much energy she put into that. Finally, after 18 minutes, when her attacker realized she wasn't gonna let him rape her, he just started smashing her skull with a rock, and he kept repeatedly doing that until he crushed her skull and killed her. And then, because Lakin had a smartwatch and her parents knew she was missing, they saw the very moment when her heart stopped beating. There's no question this guy did it. His DNA was under her fingernails. Her scratches are still on his face. Definitely, he was the murderer, no question about it. So what's the biblical perspective on this headline, this bit of news? First, let's think about the concept of justice, biblical justice. That's so important to understand because the world is so confused about the topic of justice. Proverbs 17, 15 says, acquitting the guilty and condemning the innocent, the Lord detests them both. Both are evil. Letting guilty people go and punishing innocent people are both Injustices, and God hates them because he loves justice. Injustice is when people who deserve punishment don't get it, and people who are innocent get punished. Why is Lady Justice blindfolded? You know, the classic picture, she's holding the scales, she has a blindfold. Why? That comes from the Bible. That comes from the Bible, because favoritism is injustice. Over and over, scripture condemns favoritism, especially for government officials and judges. You don't give special treatment to anyone, and so justice should be blind. You just don't look. You just go by the law and not consider the person's station in life. Our society is so confused about that because of the influence of Marxism. The Marxist strategy for breaking down culture. For Marxism to get their utopia, they first have to break down the current culture. And the way they do that is by dividing people up into classes instead of considering individuals. So in philosophy, this goes back to critical theory. In our day, it's called wokeism or being woke. But it's the idea that it doesn't matter what you do as an individual or what you believe as an individual. It only matters what class you're in. So if you're in an oppressed class, then regardless, you're oppressed, regardless of whether you've actually experienced any actual oppression in your life, that doesn't matter. That's why someone like Oprah thinks she's oppressed, or Michelle Obama thinks she's oppressed, even though they're billionaires, millionaire, billionaire. because they're in that oppressed class. If you are in the oppressor class, then you're automatically guilty, even if you've never mistreated anyone your whole life, doesn't matter. It only matters what class you're in. And so people in those oppressed classes, when they commit crimes, the woke DAs or the Marxist DAs will let them go because they're trying to right past wrongs. this person's in an oppressed class so we're just going to let him off the hook even though he committed this crime. The Bible calls that favoritism. You're giving favorable treatment to a certain person because of that who that person is. That is injustice according to scripture and God hates it. One way to spot this kind of attitude is when people start putting modifiers in front of the word justice, like social justice, or economic justice, or racial justice, or something like that. Anytime you hear that, you know what you're listening to is a Marxist and what they're talking about is actually injustice, not justice. Justice is the same for everyone, doesn't need a modifier. The only modifier that belongs in the word justice is the word blind, blind justice. Now, you might hear that and say, wait a minute, wait a minute. When you talk about these DAs going soft on criminals, isn't that mercy? Doesn't the Bible speak well of showing mercy and love and kindness and forgiveness? Why does the Bible say acquitting the guilty is an evil thing to do? But at the same time, it says forgiveness is a good thing. How can those both be true? Or to ask it another way, how is it that in the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus spoke of a law, an Old Testament law that's in God's Word that says, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. God commanded that. And then Jesus said, you've heard eye for eye, tooth for tooth, I say to you, and then he goes on and talks about forgiveness and mercy. Was there a change? How do we explain this? Well, the answer is this. Forgiveness and mercy are appropriate in interpersonal relationships. Justice is required for governmental action. The government's responsibility is different than that of the individual. You have no right to be magnanimous on someone else's behalf, and a judge is speaking for the whole society. A judge can forgive an offense that was committed against him personally, but a judge has no right to forgive someone who committed a sin against the society. Because you can't be magnanimous on someone else's behalf. If you need a lawnmower and I say, oh wow, you need a lawnmower, I'll go to my neighbor's garage and take his lawnmower and give it to you. I'm being really generous. No, that's not generosity, that's stealing. That's wrong. And it's wrong whether I do it or whether the government does it. It's not generosity. That's why the role of Attorney General is so important. The first pick for AG, Trump's first pick, was Matt Gaetz, and that was, the good thing about that pick was that Gaetz is known for calling out corruption in government, whether it be Republicans or Democrats, he doesn't care, and he names names, and he talks about all this. And so the idea was Gates was going to go in there and he's going to go after the crooked politicians and bureaucrats within the DOJ, the Department of Justice. He was going to clean up the Department of Justice, which is incredibly corrupt and unjust. And so that would have been a good thing, but Gates had too many enemies in the Senate. It was clear he wasn't going to be confirmed, and so he dropped out. And within hours, Trump nominated Pam Bondi, who she's regarded as much more qualified than Gates, which is good. But they're saying that all the politicians breathed a sigh of relief when they heard that, which is not good. It doesn't sound good to me, probably not good. They should be scared, not relieved. I've heard that she's definitely not going to go after the corruption in the DOJ. If that's the case, that's terrible, but we'll see. But at least she believes in blind justice and doesn't buy into the Marxist idea of class justice and social justice and all the rest. So that's going to be very good. One other thought about justice, this whole social justice idea. That social justice idea teaches that It's automatically unjust for someone to be poor. If there are poor people and rich people, that's just automatically injustice. There shouldn't be poor people and rich people. There shouldn't be income inequality. So poverty is, on its face, unjust. And so they believe, for that reason, it's moral to forcibly take money from rich people and give it to the poor people. It's moral for the government to do that. That is not biblical at all. The Bible never indicates there's anything unjust about poverty or income inequality. That idea of income inequality, of course there's going to be income inequality. Everyone's not going to... Barack Obama is worth $70 million. Joe Biden is worth $10 million. Is that unjust? I mean, that's a $60 million income inequality. Is it unjust? Of course not. Of course it's not. No, and even if it were unjust for there to be some rich and some poor, the solution would not be to steal from the rich and give it to the poor. If you did that, it wouldn't solve anything. If you gave everyone in the world a million dollars today, a month from now, many people would be broke. That's the fact, that's just the way it is. There's no way you can get everybody to have the same amount of money. And if you vote, for a politician, because you hope that politician will take money from other people that belongs to other people, give it to you, then that's stealing. That's immoral. I mean, to vote that way is immoral. It's not illegal. It's a perfectly legal way to steal. But biblically, it's the exact same sin. If you say, oh, my neighbor, you know, I want my neighbor's lawnmower for me. I'm going to go into his garage and steal it. That would be illegal. But if you vote for a politician to go into his garage and take that mower and give it to you, that's not illegal, but it's the exact same sin in the heart. It's stealing. It's wrong. And besides, money isn't the only thing that determines how well people are doing anyway. You can't just assume all these people are poor and so they would be better off if they had more money. Maybe they wouldn't be better off. Rich people aren't always better off. There's a lot of people who are making less money and are way better off in life than certain rich people. Because there's a whole lot more to how well you're doing than how much money you have. So anytime you hear the word justice in connection with poverty, You're probably listening to a Marxist, not somebody with a biblical worldview. So, back to the Lake and Riley verdict. What is the biblical way of thinking about that? First of all, the guy that killed her got life in prison. That is a mockery of justice. That is terrible injustice. He should be put to death, and it should be done quickly, very quickly. Genesis 9, 6 says, whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for in the image of God, God made man. You kill a human being, you deserve to die. And that's not part of the Mosaic Law. That's way before the Mosaic Law. This is part of the creation order. It's part of the fact that mankind is in the image of God. And if you take God seriously, you have to believe in the death penalty. You have to put murderers to death. If someone kills your dog, you don't put that person to death. You punish them in some way, but you don't put them to death because the dog is not in God's image. But if someone destroys the image of God and society doesn't put that person to death, then we're treating that murder victim like a dog. We're saying, ah, that person that got killed, their life, that's not the image of God, that's not worthy of executing the criminal, it's just, it's not that big a deal. And we're diminishing the very image of God, very serious thing. So the monster that murdered Lake and Riley should be executed. The way he did it, what he did, if he doesn't deserve execution, who does? I mean, what in the world would we even use that death penalty for? So I believe that the government officials who failed to call for the death penalty in that case will have to answer to God for that. Okay, number two, the second thing that I had, thought I had about this is that this whole incident with Lake and Riley and the other people who have been assaulted and robbed and raped and murdered, and there are many of them, by illegal aliens, And I'm not saying all illegal aliens are rapists and murderers, that's not even the point. The point is that if you let millions of men, there's going to be a fair number of criminals in the bunch. Those incidents, the fact that they happen, are graphic examples of why immigration is not just a political issue, it's a moral issue. And by the way, both sides agree on that. Both sides say it's a moral issue. The pro-open borders side, they say this is a moral issue because letting, it's humane to let millions of people come into the country illegally because those people are coming from poverty and hard circumstances and they're trying to find a better life and the Christian thing to do, Christian kindness calls us to just help these people with what they're doing. The other side argues that no, helping people break the law is not Christian kindness. Christian kindness does not call you to assist criminals in breaking the law. And it's against the law to enter the country illegally, obviously. You're not being kind to, when you do that, when you help a criminal, because you're being unkind to the future victims of that criminal and the current victims of that criminal. You're being unkind to the people that they hurt. The reason we have laws, and this isn't just about murders and rapists either. It's just about the law of immigration in general. The reason we have laws, all laws, including the immigration laws, is to protect the masses of innocent people in the society. And it's not loving to participate in the removal of those protections. If the law is wrong, then you change the law. But if the law exists, then you should not assist people in breaking that law. So it's not just about rape and murder. There are all kinds of harmful effects of illegal, unregulated immigration, just letting everybody come, which is why every country in the whole world has laws about immigration until the Biden administration. Both Democrats and Republicans have always agreed on this. When the Biden administration used executive orders right from the start to stop the, I think there was 91 executive orders that Trump had in place for limiting immigration, which is why there was something like a 50 year low in illegal immigration. Right off the bat, Joe Biden canceled all those executive orders, and two of them in particular that were crucial. He stopped the remain in Mexico policy, and he instituted catch and release, so that they would catch these illegals, and then they say, okay, here's your court date, and then just let them go, and say, hopefully you'll show up a couple years for your court date. And that was designed to have maximum illegal immigration. They wanted as many future Democrat voters as possible. And many Democrat strategists have admitted this. And right now, in the closing days of Biden's administration, he's even just the other day, just a couple of days ago, started a new app to make it easier for illegals to come. They can check an option on there that they don't want to be tracked, their location to be tracked. So he's just making it as easy as possible. Anyway, Riley, Lakin's killer, was apprehended three times. Three times he was in custody and three times they let him go. First when he crossed over into Texas, the Texas authorities apprehended him and then following Biden's policies, let him go. If they wouldn't have done that, Lake and Riley would still be alive. Then he goes to New York, he's arrested for endangering a child, and the Marxist prosecutors there let him go again. Then they put him up in hotels with taxpayer money, and then he requests a flight to Georgia, and they use taxpayer money to give him a free airline flight to Georgia, just because he wanted to go there. American citizens can't do that, but they'll do it for illegals. And since he was an illegal alien, he got that free flight, and they flew him right to the place where he killed Lincoln Reilly. I believe all the people who participated in that share the blame for what happened. Some moral issue. And then number three. It's important to understand that Laken Riley is currently being comforted in heaven, and she will have justice. Assuming she was a believer, and it certainly sounds from her letter like she was, when you think about how unspeakably horrible her death was, the last 18 minutes of her life, and you just hear the heartbreak in her parents in the courtroom talking about what her final moments were like. You just think about your child going through that as they die. So horrible it seems like such an injustice such an impossible thing to remedy like there's no solution to it. She's gone That's not the case. It's not the case at all. Don't let yourself think that way you remember the rich man and Lazarus in Luke 16 where they both died the rich man mistreated the poor man and they both died and the rich man was in a place of torment because he was an unbeliever and and he begged for just a little bit of relief. You remember what he was told? He was told this, Luke 16, 25, remember that during your life, you received good things and likewise, Lazarus, bad things, but now he's being comforted here and you are in agony. Isn't that interesting? It doesn't say just that he's in a place, a comfortable place, or he's in a place of pleasure. It says he's being comforted. It sounds to me like what's happening is God is reversing the things that happened to him in his lifetime before he died. He's comforting him with regard to those things. When Lake and Riley died, that death didn't just end her suffering. God, it put her in a place where God is right now making up for what she went through. He's comforting her with regard to what she went through. We never have to fret about ultimate injustice because there's no such thing. It's impossible. There's no ultimate injustice. God won't let that happen. All injustice is temporary. Just temporary. God will make all of it right. Now, I'd like to give you kind of a devotional thing to contemplate with regard to this as you go through the day. This is an unspeakable loss for Lake and Riley's parents. To lose a child, I can't even imagine. But I read a story in a book about contentment by Nancy Lee DeMoss. I think it's just called Contentment. And she, oh no, it's about gratitude. The title of the book is Gratitude, sorry. In that book, she tells the story of a man who was with his family. He gets called out into the front yard by police and they tell him, we're sorry to inform you, your 17-year-old daughter was killed in a car accident. And he goes in to tell the heartbreaking news to his family. And the very first thing this father did was gather his whole family together and says, we need to, before we even start grieving, we need to thank God for the 17 years that we had her. And that attitude of thanking God at the moment you suffer a loss, it feels so unfair, so unjust, you've lost, this thing's been taken from you. And yet, that's the best moment for gratitude, to express gratitude, because that's the moment when you have the greatest appreciation of the value of what was taken from you, of what you lost. I'm sure he was thankful for his daughter before she died, but there are probably some things he took for granted. He's probably used to having her around. Maybe he didn't feel super thankful when she gave him a smart aleck response or rolled her eyes at one of his rules or whatever, did something irresponsible. There was never a moment when he was more capable of appreciating what a precious gift she was, than at this moment when he finds out she's gone. That's when he appreciates her value the most. And so isn't that the best time to be grateful? Is when the moment when you appreciate, you have the greatest ability to appreciate the value of one of God's gifts? The fact that it's lost just tells you, okay, all of God's gifts in this life are temporary. We don't know how long they're gonna last. God decides how long they're gonna last. We're not in a position to tell God, oh, it should have lasted longer. You should have, you know, not this many years, it should have been that many years. You know, you don't say that to the giver. He graciously gives you a wonderful gift. He decides how long. And when you find out, okay, it was a 17 year gift, then you praise God for those 17 years. You thank him. just like this man did. That is a beautiful response. And it's a wise response. And it's a response that we can learn from not just with huge losses like that, but with small losses. Okay, God, like we had in our house, we bought this house, one of the reasons we bought it is it has this beautiful view of the mountains, because there's open space behind the house, and we got to sit at our dinner table and look at that view, and we loved it, until a couple years ago, they decided to build a whole track of homes, and completely blocked our view. Now we can't see the mountains at all, we have no view, and normally my natural response to that would be to grumble, Ah, man, they said we'd always had this view, now it's gone, our property value is less now and all that. But I had just, when that happened, I had just read this book and I thought of that principle. I thought, okay, now is the time to thank God. So every time I go and I see those houses out there, I think, ah, God gave us seven years, seven years of that view, and I think about all the moments of sitting around the table and enjoying that view, and my heart swells up with gratitude. I think, God, okay, I'm not in a position to tell God, oh God, shouldn't have been seven, should have been 17, should have been 10, should have been 14. No. God decided seven, seven is great. I trust him about that. And he's given me different gifts now, so that's fine. He can give me whatever gifts he wants, whenever he wants, but the fact that he gave me that one for seven years, the best time. Now, it was good to be thankful during those seven years, but during the seven years, I didn't know how long of a gift it was. If I wait, a long time after, then I won't have it fresh in my memory. But the moment when I could most appreciate the value of that gift was when I lost it. And so that was the ideal time to think through those seven years and bless God for them. So try to use that principle today. As you go through your day today, think about losses that you suffer, big or small. And each time you suffer a loss, take that moment to appreciate the value of the gift and to express gratitude to God. Now, what I'll do, so that's a sample of the sort of thing I wanna do with the political headlines. That's a biblical way to think about justice. Now, to reinforce this whole concept, because there's a whole lot more to say about the biblical concept of justice, I'm going to put up some sermon excerpts from sermons about justice to just fill out your thinking. And you can apply these principles in these sermon excerpts the next few days to your thinking about what's in the headlines regarding justice. Again, please let me know what you think.