Penitence and Restitution

Welcome to Halting Toward Zion, the podcast where we limp like Jacob to the Promised Land and talk about life, the universe, and everything along the way. I’m Emily Maxson, here with Greg Uttinger and Bryan Broome.

Today we’re talking about penitence and restitution, but before we get to that we have mailbag. We were talking about having a mailbag jingle, so David went and found one and, because our other bumper music is bluegrass-y kind of stuff, he found this piece that was just so Western and I was like, “What? People walk into our saloon to hand us letters?” That was just the image that came to mind.

I don’t know if that jingle is going into the episode. I guess David will decide later, but we have a message. It reads as follows:

“A few months ago I started listening to Halting Toward Zion. Would you agree that the title of the podcast should get italicized?”

Yes. Actually, I looked this up. According to the correct style guide, which is Kate L. Turabian’s, the title of a podcast is italicized.

“Today I finished listening to the episode about Isaac and Kierkegaard. It reminded me of something that I thought you’d find interesting and might want to look up. Many, many years ago I watched a PBS special. It was a round table discussion about Christianity vs secular humanism as embodied by C.S. Lewis vs Sigmund Freud, or as they say where I come from, ‘Frude.’

“The participants in the discussion represented several different beliefs and worldviews. At one point the representative of scientism said that he thought all of the evidence brought him almost to the point of believing in Christianity and Jesus Christ, but that there was a small gap of faith between the evidence and full belief, and that his worldview would not allow for any faith, so he held to his scientism. I found it very honest and telling. Anyway, I thought you might find that interesting. Hope you’re doing well.”

There are some postscripts. I love postscripts. I especially appreciate when there are multiple postscripts and they’re abbreviated P.P.S. rather than P.S.S., so props to this person.

The first postscript is about our email address not being on our website. We fixed that. You can now find our email address on our website.

The second one is about personal finance. It says, “P.S. One of your early recommendations was Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover,” and this person loved the book and I’m very pleased about that. I will double down on my recommendation of Dave Ramsey’s The Total Money Makeover. That’s all I have to say about that.

Bryan, you had a quote that was relevant to our discussion of civil religion that was just too on-the-nose to pass up, so do you have that to read to us?

I do. This comes from the novel American Gods by Neil Gaiman. He’s a very talented writer, but he is, if I remember correctly, Irish? Maybe he just lives in Ireland. Anyway, he’s not American.

There’s American and there’s everyone else in the world.

No, no, it’s specifically relevant based on the quote. Despite not being American, he has sort of nailed America’s civil religion, and this is his quote:

“America has invested her religion, as well as her morality, in sound income-paying securities. She has adopted the unassailable position of a nation blessed because it deserves to be blessed. And her sons, whatever other theologies they may affect or disregard, subscribe unreservedly to this national creed.”

Yeah, that’s pretty much America. Unfortunately, it’s also a great many evangelicals who are better in their theology than they are in their political philosophies. “Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.”

Well, in a quirky sort of way, there’s got to be some kind of connection between that and what we’re talking about tonight. I’m not quite sure what it is, but I think if we look we’ll find it, because we’re looking at the idea of framing a penal code, and more specifically the penalties of said code in terms of some kind of standard.

We want to be kinder and gentler than our forebearers. We don’t seem to have a particular guiding light besides that, except maybe we can help people become better people if we punish them – no, no, not punish them – if we put them in situations where they have the possibility of changing their character by their own freewill choice.

Now I’m sounding like a modern evangelist or a very old evangelist. We can think of Finney in this context. We’re talking about penitentiaries for a starter. I grew up hearing penitentiary in all the old crime shows and lawyer shows and cop shows and all that, and it never occurred to me where the word ‘penitentiary’ would come from, let alone where the word ‘cell’ – as in jail cell or prison cell – would come from.

When I was writing the original article that’s behind what we’re doing, I had the opportunity to do a little bit of research. Let me read to you here for just a second:

Eastern State Penitentiary in Pennsylvania was the first-born child of the prison reform movement in early America. Like earlier prisons, the penitentiary was designed not to punish the inmate, but to move him towards spiritual reflection, conviction, and reformation. The key to this reformation was complete isolation from other prisoners [and pretty much everyone else].

The inmate would be left alone with a Bible and a little bit of manual labor, thus abandoned to his thoughts and the words of scripture. The prisoner would surely face his crimes and guilt and respond with revulsion and regret. He would become a true penitent.

So this new kind of prison was called a penitentiary, and its rooms were called cells. Until that time – the year was 1829 – a cell was a monk’s room in a monastery.

The theology behind this thing rose out of Quakers and some Enlightenment buffs who rightly agreed that the kind of prisons that England had, and that America was working with, were not nice places. You generally threw all your criminals together in one large room. Their friends and relatives came and brought them anything beyond bare subsistence, and there was no hope for reform. There was simply the recognition that, “You are bad people and need to be punished.” What the system lacked was any kind of biblical justification.

So along come the Quakers and people committed to Enlightenment first principles, who said, “This is not rational. This will not accomplish your goal. It is not loving. It is not kind.”

“Okay, but if we isolate people – that’s not hurting them, right? Just put them in this cell. Monks put themselves in cells, so it can’t be that bad.”

The isolation was complete. They were not to see or have any contact with any other prisoner. Even the pipes and such were designed to – you know the old prison movies, you bang on the pipe to send a message down the line – even that was designed out.

When it came time to eat, a hood was put over your head and you were moved down toward the common dining room, and you were allowed just enough space to put food in your mouth, and then you were taken back. Your little cell opened up on a plot of grass open to the sky, and you got to walk around there a little bit.

Mostly you sat in a room by yourself with a Bible there that you might read if you wanted to, and maybe something to do with your hands a little bit, and there was this big open window in the ceiling. Heaven looked down on you. It was called the Eye of God.

The thought was, with heaven glaring down, the Bible there, and nothing else to think about except why in the world you’re here, eventually you would be moved to some kind of true repentance and you would change. You would become a better person because, basically, we’ve tortured you psychologically and that’s kinder and better than what we were doing before.

So has quarantine made us all better people this year?

There you go and make it relevant.

The designer was a British architect named John Haviland and, to make this work, he made sure each cell was centrally heated, with running water, flush toilet, and the skylight. The prison throughout used 30’ barrel vaulted hallways, tall arched windows, the skylights, and on the outside the medieval façade in the Gothic style that made it look like some castle out of Frankenstein or Dracula.

The thought was, “People will be reformed by this but, if they’re not, they’re going to be so horrified by the total isolation and loneliness and just the frightening façade and the look of the thing, that they will never want to come back here again.” It didn’t work, but it sounded like a good idea at the time.

And as late as at least the 1960s – I don’t know when our liberal friends finally gave up and admitted that we’re not reforming anybody – anybody remember the TV series Batman back in the ‘60s with Adam West? They were thrown off as jokes, but there was still that talk of, “We have modern prisons that are thoroughly dedicated to the reform of the inmates, and even someone like the Joker or the Penguin has a chance at reform.” It was kind of a mock of the whole liberal take on prison reform, but the fact that it was a joke meant it was still percolating on.

I don’t think anybody anymore thinks that we send people to prison to reform them. It took us a long time to figure that out. It took 130-150 years or so. But had we read the Bible and believed it and applied it to our civil institutions, things might have been very different.

In passing, before we talk about what the Bible says, de Tocqueville saw this and thought it looked like a good deal, although it wouldn’t work in France because the people weren’t religious enough. Charles Dickens, on the other hand, had this to say about this system:

I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body, and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh, because its wounds are not upon the surface and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear, therefore the more I denounce it as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

It’s bad. You’re torturing people’s souls. Apparently, no one really listened to him.

Well, you teased me for making it relevant, but the more I think about this and the more we look at the mental health trends over the past year as people have been largely isolated, it’s not good, and we’ve had a whole lot more on our side than people locked in dungeons, basically, by themselves. We’ve at least had Netflix.

Not to mention Instant Messaging.

Right. We have so much more opportunity for communication, and still we find that it’s not the same as in-person communication. It’s not the same as fellowship and the true communion of the saints together in person gathered together. The more I think about this, the more I’m kind of taken aback.

And by the way, I was not teasing you. I was teasing myself for missing the obvious, because you’re quite right. As a teacher, we were teaching online and I watched as some of my pretty good students and some of my best students sort of slid off into the dark.

Students who would never miss an assignment date were getting further and further behind. They were staying up to ridiculous hours, sleeping in ridiculous hours, and not getting their work done. I would send notes home to their parents, and the parents’ take was, “I don’t know how to help them. I don’t know what to do.”

“Being a parent would be a good start, I would think.”

But the terms were so different from anything we were used to that neither parents nor students, let alone teachers, knew how to handle this. Yes, there was communication after a fashion. I exchanged lots of emails with students and such, and at some points did the Zoom thing, which helped a little because you see people. You see their expressions and such, but you’re right, it’s not the same as being in-person.

Now, the church has gone through this whole thing, and either one of you can feel free to comment on this one. You already did a little bit. Does isolating God’s people from one another so that they can’t touch, they can’t look one another in the eye, they can’t smell one another’s scent or body odor – has that really been a healthy thing? A thing the Spirit has used? Or has it been distracting and, in some sense, almost tormenting?

I certainly don’t want to bind – or I don’t know what the right term would be – because I know there are churches whose leadership considered it most wise and most prudent to meet chiefly online, or even individuals who made the call not to attend worship in person, and I don’t want to pass judgment on that. That’s not what I’m here to do, but to look at the effects of isolating people. Merely the effects have not been good.

I saw a study that indicated that everyone through this year through the pandemic, their mental health has gone down unless you were going to weekly church services. The subset of people who were going to weekly church services actually improved in mental health, according to whatever metrics they were using in this study. I’ll try to look it up and post it in the show notes.

It all just goes back to the setting of distinct patterns. We’re given the pattern of 6 days of work and one day of rest, and we’re commanded by God to meet as his people each week and hear the words of pardon and hear the Word preached and sacraments administered.

These are things that are going to make you better adjusted mentally. They’re going to, at least cumulatively over time, have an effect. And I think we’re seeing it even more now because of what is going on in the world.

This is slightly off-track, so I apologize, but what really troubles me is seeing churches on both the right and left basically turning Sunday worship into, “Let’s talk about the pandemic some more and why we’re right about what we’re doing, and why our response is correct.”

And as Emily said, we don’t want to talk about that, but it is a constant temptation. “Let’s get together for fellowship and talk more about the pandemic.” I don’t think that’s what God has in mind here, but it is a sad thing, and it’s a telling thing that that’s what this whole confinement thing is moving us toward. It keeps us focused on a very few ideas.

Yes, they’re important, but they’re not the most important thing in God’s universe. It’s easy to get wrapped up in them and get all twisted up emotionally, mentally, spiritually.

There’s another thing I do want to add. At least for me – and I might be the odd one out on this podcast team, but I’ll say it anyway – I think that when it comes to these things that have been happening this year, particularly with the government response to the pandemic, that even though it’s not ideal and it’s annoying – like I don’t like putting on a mask, it is a bit annoying and I can smell my own bad breath all the time and it’s not great – but I think it’s a very clear signal to the non-believer that we’re actually concerned about them and their health.

Even if you don’t think that masks do anything, I’m not here to argue with you. For one, you’re not on the podcast and I can’t talk to you…

I don’t know, I kind of fall into that camp.

We’ll argue afterwards.

I’m going to stay out of this one.

But even if you fall in that camp, like our illustrious host, Emily….

I still put on the mask for church and when I go to the grocery store.

Exactly. I find that a lot of people who complain about it in this particular way where it’s, “I don’t care what you think. I’m not going to listen to this rule,” it’s not caring to the other person and it does not show the love of Christ for the lost if we’re literally doing what Paul said he would give up, if it meant that people would be saved and would even stay in the faith. “I would never eat meat again if it meant my brother does not stumble.”

Eating meat is a right, and eating unclean meat is a right for the New Testament believer as well, but he said he would forego all meat if it meant that.

Yeah. I think if you are going to decline to wear a mask in this day and age, if you are going to do that, your motive for doing so is important and also the manner in which you do it. I think it is possible to decline to wear a mask but not be obnoxious about it, and I support not being obnoxious.

I agree, yes. I did not mean to make it sound as if not wearing a mask automatically means you’re evil. I don’t think that at all.

I didn’t get that from you. This has been very cordial.

If you have any comments, address them to Emily and Bryan in the email.

Just be sure to address at the start of the email which person you’re mad at first, so we know who to direct it to.

But honestly, Bryan, I was expecting you to invoke your famous, “Wait, Gnosticism!” here.

I subverted the expectation.

Because we’re dealing in outward things. We’re punishing the body so that the soul can rise up and return to the kind of right relationship with God it ought to have. Surely this is as Gnostic as medieval monasticism ever was.

Whether it’s enforced by the individual going into seclusion or by outside authorities.

So we look at this and now we have to say, “Well, you got a better idea?”

As a matter of fact, God has a better idea. But because we don’t read the Old Testament very much, and particularly the legal codes, we often are simply plain ignorant.

Chuck Colson went before the legislature in the state of Texas and made a suggestion on how to clear the prisons of white-collar crime theft and such. It’s very simple. Have them make restitution to their victims.

Some people said, “Wow, that is a great idea! No one’s ever thought of that! Where did you get such a brilliant idea?”

And Chuck, bless his heart, said, “It’s in Exodus, chapters 21-23. You can read it for yourself.”

I had an aunt, a widow, a great businesswoman, grew up in Pentecostal circles but had abandoned the faith, and one day out of the blue someone sent her a little letter with some money in it. The writer of the letter confessed to having stolen from her at an earlier time some years back. He said, “By this I am making restitution to you,” and she got very curious. “What is this restitution thing? And why is he doing that? And what does that have to do with the Bible? I don’t get this at all.”

I was very young at the time and I tried to help her understand and probably didn’t do a very good job, but restitution does seem kind of strange to a lot of Christians, and yet it shouldn’t, because to make restitution is to put right what once went wrong, to borrow a line from an old TV show.

That’s what Jesus’ ministry and Jesus’ redemptive work is all about – restoring to proper condition his own world that he’s bought with his own blood, and putting it into the condition that his father wants it in, and thus giving us a beautiful, wonderful inheritance in the end of all things.

So it should not be a surprise that along the way in this fallen world, where we still do need to deal with sin and with crime, that he should have a prescription that involves restitution, giving back what you stole.

So as we turn to Exodus, I’m going to read just a little bit here. This is from Chapter 22:

If a man shall steal an ox, or a sheep, and kill it, or sell it; he shall restore five oxen for an ox, and four sheep for a sheep. If a thief be found breaking up, and be smitten that he die, there shall no blood be shed for him.

If the sun be risen upon him, there shall be blood shed for him; for he should make full restitution; if he have nothing, then he shall be sold for his theft. If the theft be certainly found in his hand alive, whether it be ox, or ass, or sheep; he shall restore double.

If a man shall cause a field or vineyard to be eaten, and shall put in his beast, and shall feed in another man's field; of the best of his own field, and of the best of his own vineyard, shall he make restitution. If fire break out, and catch in thorns, so that the stacks of corn, or the standing corn, or the field, be consumed therewith; he that kindled the fire shall surely make restitution.

There’s more but I’m going to stop there because it weaves its way through all this. I want to, in the end, deal with restitution where statutory rape and seduction are involved, but let’s save that for the end.

So here it is. If you process all that, it says this. A man steals something of yours – your horse. You find the horse and it’s in good condition. He has to give the horse back. On top of that, he has to give you another horse or the equivalent in money, which is to say that you’re a lot richer after having encountered the thief, and the thief is poorer.

Life is good because the thief at this point goes back to his job. He may have to tighten his belt and work harder or get an extra job and save some money to make up for the fact that he just had to buy a horse, and his wife will have something to say about that, I should think. But no one is putting him up in some kind of special institution, isolated from the rest of the world. He’s with his family. He can go worship God on the Lord’s Day, or he can sleep in late if he wants to, because there’s no civil constraint on that.

The problem comes in – and people who were listening carefully or who know the passage caught it – when what if he can’t pay it? Let’s come back to that in just a second. That was if the guy steals your stuff and you get it back.

What if you can’t get it back? He’s either destroyed it – he took your horse and ran it into a tree or off a cliff of something; I guess I’m thinking of a car now – or he sold it and it’s switched many hands and it’s out of the country. It’s gone. You’re never going to see your horse again.

At that point, the rate of restitution jumps to four-fold. He’s lost the horse altogether. He has to buy you four horses. Now, that’s going to be an economic problem, because four horses are really, really expensive.

See what the law is doing here? It’s encouraging you that, “You’re going to steal someone’s property? Don’t destroy it because that’s dumb and it’s going to get you in a lot of trouble. And you might want to think twice about what exactly you are stealing.”

It’s one thing to steal a loaf of bread, but stealing a horse – if they catch up with you, that’s going to be a real problem financially, especially if you break the horse’s neck along the way. That’s a real problem. The law is built-in with a sort of safety valve that says, “Small crimes are small crimes. Big crimes are big crimes.”

We can think here of Les Mis, where Jean Valjean steals a loaf of bread and goes to prison.

For 19 years.

In a biblical society, that’s not going to happen. You stole some bread and you eat it? Go buy four loaves of bread.

“I don’t have any.”

“All right, well, we’ll give you a job where you can work for a day, earn the money, and buy the bread, and then you’re back on your own. We don’t need to put you in a prison.”

And Les Mis would never have happened then and we wouldn’t have the movie…anyway.

No movie – that might be a good thing.

Well, see? There you go. The Bible solves lots of things all at once.

There is the possibility of five-fold restitution, and the Bible is not terribly clear on what that means, at least not to me. Others have hazarded opinions. My best shot – and I don’t stand by it as a life or death thing at all, but I’ll throw out a suggestion and someone can probably shoot it down.

The sheep is a four-fold restitution. What is the sheep doing? It’s just sitting there grazing, and someone simply moves it from your field to his field. Really, you haven’t lost anything because the sheep comes back. And even if you kill the sheep, well, you lost the sheep. But if you lose an ox, you not only lose the final product of ox-hood, but you also lose whatever work you could have been doing.

The economic reasoning there may not be sound enough to hold, but it’s at least a thought. If people have other ideas, they can shoot them toward us.

The four-fold restitution does come back to us in the New Testament, when Zacchaeus comes to Christ. He throws a dinner feast for the Lord and says, “Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor, and if I have taken anything from any man by false accusation, I restore to him four-fold.” It wasn’t a number he made up. He’s quoting the Mosaic law.

Jesus says, “This day salvation has come to this house, for he also is a son of Abraham.”

So Jesus thoroughly approved of this and thought it good evidence of sincere faith. He doesn’t blow it off and say, “Well, don’t you know that was the old law? I’ve come with something new. You don’t have to worry about that. Your victims can get along on their own. God will take care of them.” Jesus shows approval for this kind of thing.

The thing that probably people are going to have a problem with is what happens if you can’t afford to pay? Well, two things. What if you can’t afford to pay? And what about those who can?

First of all, you can’t afford to pay. There’s this thing called penal service, where you work off your debt. In Israel it took on a particular form that was tied in with the Sabbath laws, and we don’t have to do it exactly the way they did it for that reason, but the basic idea contains wisdom for us.

That is to say, “All right, you don’t have the money. Let’s put you in the service of someone who does have the money. They can pay your bill. Now you’re working for them X number of years until you pay off what they just paid for you. During this time you may live with them and be at their beck and call.”

You may be like the cowboy on the ranch. What do they call those places where all the hands hung out together? I used to watch westerns. There was a name for that. I don’t know.

I have no idea what you’re talking about.

That’s because you’re the wrong generation. You never watched of tons of westerns with cowboys.

I watched a few.

There was a word for the place where all the hands on the ranch spent the night together while they were working.

So you do that, and if you’re married you can still see your wife. You can arrange appointments. You’re not stuck with a bunch of males in perpetuity, where none of you ever see women, with all of the problems that that generates. You’re going to be going to worship God on the Lord’s Day, because the guy who bought you presumably is an upstanding citizen in a godly nation where you do that thing – you go to synagogue, you go to church.

It’s going to be in the context of a family. It’s not going to be a bunch of ranch hands. It’s going to be one or two other servants with you. You’re going to see how a successful businessman operates, how he works with his family, how he relates to God and the community, and you’re going to get some practical discipline. At the end of this time, maybe you will have grown up and matured a little – or not. But that’s the closest the Bible actually comes to trying to reform the criminal.

They put you in a fairly safe environment without depriving you of church or family, and allow you to work, insofar as work has a sort of remedial purpose of getting you used to doing the kind of stuff you ought to do good and well. But again, it doesn’t change your heart. You’re going to go to church or you’re going to go to synagogue, and the preaching of the Word may have that effect if God is gracious.

And when you’re done, you go back to your family, as opposed to being put in close quarters with 1,000 other guys who are also criminals and missing their female companions and open to homosexual rape, and learning nifty new criminal skills from everyone around you, and separated from your family and all the psychological tortures that went with that, especially back in the beginning of the system. We’ve seen what those things were like.

The Bible does not condone or encourage any kind of manipulation of the soul, the spirit, or the mind by the civil power. That’s not its job. Its job is to fix outward conditions as best as they can be fixed, with the full realization that some things can’t be fixed.

If somebody steals your prize horse who you’ve loved ever since you were a small little girl, and the horse is gone or dead, there’s nothing the law can do to give you back your best friend. They can give you four horses. “I don’t want four horses. I want Flicka back!” Well, you’re not getting your friend Flicka back, but at least four horses ain’t bad.

That’s something to remember though here, particularly when we look at the laws governing statutory rape. The law has limits. The law can’t fix everything. It certainly can’t fix the human soul, even when operating at its best, but it can adjust outward circumstances so that they are more livable than if the law had not stepped in, so that things are better than they were, so that some degree of order and sanity and trustworthiness and stability and peace is restored. Shalom is restored to society on an outward level.

But the Bible never for one moment thinks that outward legislation can create Utopia, introduce the Millennium, or change human hearts. It has very decided limitations.

We even see that in the New Testament’s treatment of the law, all the multiple times Paul speaks about it as only condemning, and how the introduction of the law actually begets sin apart from Christ. Even the holy law of God is not something that will change people who don’t have it within them, who don’t have the Spirit in their hearts.

“For what the law could not do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh.”

“So that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us, who walk not after the flesh, but after the Spirit.” Only as the Spirit of God energizes us and draws us to Christ and brings his life into ours is there any hope for the kind of good life, the kind of moral character that sustains a society over the long run.

But even there it’s going to be imperfect and, as we’ve said before, even our best works need to be forgiven. We need the ongoing preaching of the gospel. Biblical law is very modest in what it attempts.

I want to talk about two things. Since I mentioned one, let me go back and pick it up, and then I do want to talk about seduction because that’s a very touchy thing and it helps us I think to see these things more clearly.

The complaint that a lot of people have is, “All right, so the poor guy who can’t buy the four horses to pay off the guy he stole from, you’re going to put him in some kind of penal service. Granted, it’s not maybe as bad as the prison system, but still he has to do this. Here’s this rich guy over here. He owns the horses on 1,000 hills, or his daddy’s rich.”

“He can afford it.”

“He can afford it. That’s unfair!” To which I think there are a number of answers that are important.

What we’re dealing with is fallen human nature that doesn’t like God’s law, honestly. So the cry is, “That’s not fair.” Well, if by fair you mean these people are not receiving the same penalty, yeah, they are actually. They’re both having to restore four horses.

“But he can afford it and he can’t!”

You’re talking about equality of condition now, something that happened before the crime happened. Yes, they were unequal. They both performed the same act. They both receive the same punishment. But because before any of this happened they were unequal, there is an effect that creates a basic inequality here.

Our socialist friends will say, “That’s intolerable. There should have equality of condition. That’s the whole problem. The rich guy shouldn’t be rich in the first place. The poor guy shouldn’t be poor. If everybody had the same amount, you wouldn’t want anybody’s stuff because you already had just what they have.”

How many times do you give children the exact same amount of things, and they’re still upset?

“But his is blue and mine is purple; therefore, his is better.”

“Okay, you all get gray from here on out, the basic sludge color. No more of this.”

So acknowledge that these are God’s laws and God knows what he’s doing, and inequality of condition is a given in scripture because it’s ordained of God. God makes the rich and the poor. The rich and poor meet together. The Lord is the maker of both of them.

So since God is our ultimate environment in whom we live and move and have our being, God knows what this is going to accomplish. “Known unto God are all his works from the beginning of the world.” He knows what’s going to happen. Before he wrote the law, he knew every single incident where this would be put into effect. He knew the outcome. He knew the good it would do, how it would be better than other options.

He also knew how men would rebel against it and resent it, because they don’t like his holiness and his justice, and he gave it anyway.

And he gave it knowing that there would be people who could afford it, who get off ‘easy,’ as it were.

The one bone we can throw to people who still protest is this. The Bible does – and this is in Deuteronomy, I forget the chapter – allow the civil magistrate to inflict up to 40 lashes upon criminals. It does not say in the context for what. And people ask, “When would they do this?”

“When do parents spank their children?“

“When they need it.”

“Exactly.”

“Well, how many lashes should they get?”

“How do parents tell how many spanks to give their children?”

“Well, they look at the situation.”

“Yeah, exactly.”

A possibility here is that if some young rich punk looks at the situation – he’s just driven his Corvette into some little girl’s kitten and backed it over a few times, and then went off laughing at the whole thing – why are you both laughing right now?

[laughing] I was laughing because I was like, “I don’t know, are we going to get in trouble for talking about spanking on the internet? And is there going to be somebody from the UN who’s going to send us an angry email?”

And then Greg one-upped it by talking about running over cats.

And we get to running over kittens.

How many people can we offend?

The thought is this. The little girl and her family go before the judges with the young man and say, “He ran over my kitty!” Well, the kitty may be all the world to you, but honestly what the law requires is that he gives you back four cats, and it would be nice if he said he was sorry.

And he says, “Sorry? Ha! I’m not sorry. It was fun!” and he goes on about the sheer delight he had in running over the cats, backing over the cats again and again, and how he thinks it’s just hilarious that this little girl is in tears.

“Four cats? I can buy her four tigers if she wants. I can buy her all the cats there are, because my dad’s rich, so stick it up some orifice of your body and let me get on with my life.”

It is very possible at this point that the judges may say, “We’re not seeing anything that remotely resembles repentance. In fact, what we’re seeing is arrogance and pretty much a contempt of this victim and contempt of court.”

“You need to be caused pain.”

“Yes, pain needs to be factored into this, in order for you to understand that you should not do this again, just because you can afford the penalty.”

That is something the law leaves open as a possibility. It doesn’t discuss it at length.

But what if the punk kid’s dad is the magistrate?

There you have a problem, don’t you. You better make sure that you’re voting for godly magistrates.

There’s another aspect to this, too, just simply taking into account not this situation where the person is gleeful about his sadistic outbursts, but simply that he causes harm, and the rebuttal that, “Well, the rich person can just pay it back. They’re rich enough. They can do this.”

It’s like, “Yeah, they can. That’s a good thing.” If they kill your horse, and you use your horse for work, or let’s say ox, because they can pull plows or whatever, they can buy you four more oxen. You don’t have to wait. You can now do four times the work you were able to do before. That is a benefit.

And yeah, it may not be immediately helpful for the rich person who is gleeful about his outbursts against bovine animals, but then there is the option of the 40 lashes as well if he is clearly unrepentant, is even repeating the same offense over and over again because he can afford it. But at the base, the victim is getting more than he originally had.

There’s obviously things like emotional distress that is caused by this, which is part of what the 40 lashes is meant to cover as well in applicable cases, and repeat offenders who take glee in it, I think, are perfectly applicable to exactly that purpose for lashings.

And if this person is a career criminal – he goes around running over cats for fun, because he can pay for it – we have something along the lines of a 3 or 4 or 5 strikes law, depending on the nature of the thing. The judges can say, “Look, this is a criminal act and you keep doing it. That makes you a criminal. You know what we do to career criminals? We execute them. Don’t show up here again. We’re giving you a final warning. We’ve given you many warnings. Now we’re giving you one last warning.”

Again, this would be a matter for the judges to decide. It would be done in public, in open court with all the proper appeals available and so on, but it protects the victim. It reimburses the victim and lessens his suffering as much as it can, and it along the way does punish the criminal, but the primary focus is not punishing the criminal, let alone reforming him, but it’s making things right for the person who’s been wronged.

I do have one more point about the man who can afford it. Especially in American media today, there’s this conception of “rich people” who throw money out the window because it’s funny. If you’ve met an actual wealthy person, you know they care a lot more about their money than that. That’s how they got there, so can they afford to replace your ox with four oxen? Yeah, once, and then they don’t want to do it again.

So this punk kid is going to get in line, because his dad doesn’t want to foot that bill. That’s not something he wants to do, which ties into our financial stuff from earlier, which we had to cut because of length, but there we go with a tie-in.

The last case that the Bible addresses with regard to this, or at the last one we’ll talk about, is in Chapter 22 of Exodus again, verse 16:

And if a man entice a maid that is not betrothed, and lie with her, he shall surely endow her to be his wife. If her father utterly refuse to give her unto him, he shall pay money according to the dowry of virgins.

This assumes a lot that we’ve talked about in other contexts, and I’m not going to try to justify or explain it all at this point. The assumption here is this is a young woman living in her father’s house. It’s his duty to take care of her and protect her.

Here is some guy. This is not forceable rape. The guy is not a serial rapist. He’s not a professional criminal. Such would be executed. He may be the fiancé. He may be the guy next door. He may be the pastor’s son, some guy from youth group, or he may be some intriguing dark and handsome stranger who showed up at the well and asked for a drink or something. But he has seduced her and commits statutory rape.

It’s statutory rape because she is below the age of consent or, more biblically speaking, the father has not given her away with the proper vows and procedures. Marriage hasn’t happened, and we know it hasn’t happened because dad hasn’t been included. Dad is the one who gives her away, and that’s why that’s part of the traditional marriage ceremony – “Who gives this woman to be married to this man?”

The issue here is not whether or not the girl consented. They’re not married. She doesn’t have the right to give away her virginity, and the man does not have the right to take it, even if she offers it. This may be a surprise to feminists, but the Bible puts all the weight on the man and assigns him the guilt.

He now is responsible to this young woman, and the economic thing, the restitution element here, is he has to pay the full-blown dowry. That could be as much as three years’ salary so, depending on how much a person makes, $120,000 to $150,000 or more – on the spot right then. He’s going to be in economic straits, and the girl is going to have a lot of money.

The money goes to the father so that he can use it to take care of his daughter, and so that if he does require a marriage – and maybe again this is the fiancé – he says, “Look, you guys were sinful. It was stupid. It was wrong. But you’re sorry, you’re repentant, you want a life together, and my daughter may be pregnant, so you’re going to marry her. But I’m keeping the money so that you can’t touch it until you’ve convinced me that you’re responsible. We’re going to go on from here. Maybe you’ll have a happy life. Maybe God will prosper this now that you’ve learned a lesson the hard way.”

On the other hand, the guy may be a complete creep, a very wicked man, not quite to the level of career criminal but someone the father does not want anywhere near his daughter, and he sends him packing. He still gets the money.

This could be the first time. You have to have a career before you can be a career criminal, so maybe this was the start of it.

This could be the start of it. But his character is such, his repentance is so feeble that the father says, “No, you’re not staying with my daughter. I don’t care if she is pregnant. You’re not going to be the one she’s going to spend her life with,” but the man still gives the money to the father.

Now the girl is in the position of, yes, she is no longer a virgin, and that counted for a lot in Israel, but her character in terms of her repentance and her purity and her submission to her father and all of this, is going to be a testimony.

There’s going to be some young man at some point who most likely is going to come along, but he may be somebody who says, “You know, I love your daughter. Yes, I know about all that. I don’t care. I want to be with her. I want to marry her. I want to take care of her, but I don’t have the money for the dowry. I’m not wealthy, but I’ll work really hard. I’m good at saving.”

Then Dad can say, “I’ve gotcha covered. She’s already got the dowry.”

I said all that to say this. Does the money fix the emotional and spiritual hurt that has happened to the girl?

Heck no.

No way! No way. We know that. But does that mean that we should let the guy go free without any money, because we don’t care about money and nothing can possibly help? No. God says the money will help. It will not fix the problem. It will not heal the psychological and spiritual damage, but it’s better than nothing.

Yes, it is a sort of punishment to the man who did this, but it is also going to be a material blessing, if nothing else, to the young girl. It’s going to make her life better in that she will be more accessible to other suitors in the future, and that marriage will be a better possibility for her than it would otherwise have been.

“But that’s not enough!”

Exactly, that’s not enough! The law can’t fix this one, as the law can’t fix much of anything. It can, again, help restore stability to society, a degree of peace. It can help people work out their problems. Those who are career criminals, who are vicious and brutal, it can send them packing or execute them. But the law, even God’s law, has its limits, very decided limits.

To trust any kind of legal code to be the thing that will save us and that will fix us, or any kind of penal system – if we just use this kind of penal system, everybody who passes through it will be so much better – before too long we’re going to be talking about something that C.S. Lewis was concerned about, “the right to punishment” as opposed to psychological manipulation. Lewis saw this as a real threat.

“Oh wait. Your problem is not that you’re sinful. You’re just unhealthy. You’re mentally unbalanced. You’re sick. We will take care of you. We will heal you.”

“How long will it take?”

“Until you’re better, and we will decide when that is, because we love you and we won’t let you go until we’re sure you’re alright.”

We should be screaming at this point, “No, punish me! Please punish me.”

That reminds me of Shawshank Redemption, actually. I don’t know if you’ve seen that. Have you?

I know of it, but I’ve not seen it, so feel free to talk to us about it.

For the sake of all the people who have not seen this, there’s a scene towards the beginning. Morgan Freeman plays a prisoner, and basically the prison is awful. It’s run by a corrupt warden who hires prisoners with particular rap sheets to do things for him like launder money. Where else do you find people who are really good at different criminal stuff? A prison.

It goes to all sorts of lengths to keep the main character – I don’t remember the actor’s name, but it’s the other guy besides Morgan Freeman…

When you’re playing opposite Morgan Freeman…

I know, but basically Morgan Freeman gets I think three scenes where he’s basically going before the review board for parole. The first time he’s sitting there and he goes on this thing like, “Yes, I really feel like I’ve truly been rehabilitated here in this facility. It’s a wonderful place and I’m ready to re-enter into society. It’s marvelous,” and they go, “Okay, well, that’s interesting,” and they basically stamp a big “DENIED” on his parole application.

I think the same thing happens the second time, but eventually by the end of the movie he has been in prison probably 30-35 years, if I remember correctly, and he is just done with playing and trying to find the right words to appeal to the parole board sensibilities or whatever.

He basically gets to the end and he goes, “You know, I’ve been sitting here in this prison for 35 years. At this point, I just don’t give a @#&%,” and they’re sitting there and they go, “Approved.” They approve him after that. Apparently, all he needed to do was just be brought to the utter end of anything, and that’s what they would have accepted.

That makes me think of Catch-22.

So to avoid going from movie to book to movie to book to television episode, including Leverage, this is probably a good place to wrap it up.

Yeah, let’s wrap it up. Y’all have any recommendations?

I should look at my list.

I will start because I actually have two recommendations, if I’m allowed them. Actually, you know what? I’m going to scrap the first one because it is Christmas-related, and this episode will air right after Christmas, so we will skip the Muppet Christmas Carol returning to Belle’s song.

Oh, no!

Awwww!

Well, now I’ve brought it up. You know they’re re-releasing the Muppet Christmas Carol with Belle’s song put back in, after they took it out for the DVD release originally, and I’m very upset about this. This is the worst song. The Muppet Christmas Carol is the best Christmas Carol, except for this song, which should not be in it.

Anyway, my recommendation is your local independent radio station. This would be one that plays things other than the Top 40. The DJs actually know something about the music that they’re playing. The other day I went to the grocery store and had on my independent radio station, and they had a show on the weekend called Weasel’s Wild Weekend, which is a pretty stellar show.

They were playing a set of music inspired by English folklore or something, which is like on what other radio station do you hear a set of things that are so vaguely and yet so tangibly related? You had Simon and Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair. You had King Crimson and In the Court of the Crimson King. You had Steeleye Span. It was just a whole lot of good stuff and I appreciated it. So listen to your local radio station.

As I came to the broadcast, I was still beginning and/or finishing supper, and my wife made fried potatoes. You take the large baking potatoes and you slice them very thin. You don’t have to peel them, but you can if you want, and you get an iron skillet and put some oil in there and get it really hot. Canola oil works great.

You put these potatoes in in little round slices and you cook them on one side until you’re pretty sure you’re about to burn them, and then you flip them over and cook for a little while longer. Then you stir them around just to make sure. You poke at them and move them just to make sure that you’ve got all of the white things browning. Now they’re pretty close to the level of really crisp potato chips.

You salt and pepper them, of course. You can throw in some garlic and some onion powder. You can even throw in some onions halfway through, if they’re diced in little small pieces.

And unless you have some ethical objection from Sinai about oil and grease and all of that, you need to try this. It’s good Southern cooking and it is a wonderful thing. It goes great with a pot of pinto beans, which maybe I’ll recommend next time. Bryan?

I’m going to recommend the simple act of baking sugar cookies, which I have not done in approximately four years. I don’t know why I didn’t do them in the past four years, but I did them this past week and they are marvelous. They are just fun, and it’s just fun to ice them and then to eat them. That’s all. Just enjoy the simple pleasure of easy-to-mix and easy-to-bake cookies. There you go.

Amen to that.

Thank you guys so much for this conversation. It’s been a pleasure. Thank you to you, our listeners, for tuning in. We appreciate you. Thanks to our financial supporters. You help us pay for editing software, which if you go back and listen to our first few episodes you’ll realize how much we need that, so thank you. And thank you again for supporting our show. If you would like to join our financial supporters, you can visit our website at anchor.fm/haltingtowardzion.

If you want to tell us how angry you are, send us a message decrying our stance regarding chastisement of children, or running over cats, or stealing horses, send us an email at [email protected]. Thank you so much. See you next time.