Our modern American justice system is a rank offense to God.
I’ve been privileged to see variations of justice up close and personal. On the one hand, I’ve had a fair selection of relatives who passed through the system. On the other hand, I and others in my family have worked in the enforcement industry. There is a vast substantial disconnect between God’s Covenant of Social Order (AKA Noah) and the fundamental assumptions of what we do today, particularly in America.
The purpose of God in the Law of Noah was redemptive. It was His provision for making the most of a bad situation. We are fallen; nothing we do can fix that. But we can salvage from this situation an opportunity to reach for a better place, an escape of sorts, by striving for another level of existence. You can’t actually have it without leaving this one, but you can surely be made aware of it, and initiate the process of making your home there in God’s good favor. Embracing the final revelation of His Son includes embracing the basic message of Noah — there is a thing called “sin” and you have to embrace God’s revealed judgment against it. Only then can you comprehend the mission of the Son.
The path to that reaching and striving is for us today through Noah. The fundamental statement of Noah in Scripture is symbolic; the Hebrew literary tradition which includes the Covenant of Noah presumes a wealth of information no longer easily accessed. It also assumes an intellectual climate our Western Civilization rejects, parodies and generally derides as primitive and dangerous. No surprise, then, to note the whole of Western Civilization stands condemned by God, because to be Western is to reject God’s revelation.
A particularly Western flaw is the way in which public order and the system of justice so utterly misses the point. Frankly, the whole thing is punitive, hateful and arrogant, versus the system God designed to be redemptive. God intended we should reclaim from the wreck and wrack of the Fall what He deemed salvageable. He remains the ultimate expert in the matter as Creator of all things. His limits were most thoroughly rooted in the reality of things on this plane of existence. That we complain He was too vindictive and assessed the capital penalty for too many things is merely our excuse for making certain groups of people as miserable as possible. We are the barbarians.
It is known for a certainty to those who wish to review the vast pile of literature on studies in human behavior: There is a limited window of opportunity for any system involving humans to reclaim what can be salvaged of fallen humanity. In broad terms, punitive confinement works only for a time frame up to, at most, one year. For the vast majority of humanity, half that is about it, but we can permit some room for those who are a little slow to respond. If we add conditions which are physically challenging, most folks capable of responding do so in a matter of weeks. If our purpose is to correct human behavior, longer sentences are an unreasonable waste of resources.
Our silly attempt at matching longer penalties based on some cultural assumptions about how much this or that action threatens society is pure fantasy. The entire political process of setting sentences reflects a perverse notion of putting a price on crimes assessed by how shocking they are to some artificial value system. It arises from the utterly evil materialism of the middle or merchant class which dominates Western political processes. Yes, the sum total of Western Civilization is little more than prissy middle-class values writ large. It’s the pretense of noble privilege without the actual nobility of character. Because it lacks that nobility, what we have as Western Civilization simply proclaims itself “noble” and all else as dangerous.
As such, most “crimes” are simply violations of that prissy idiocy, an unacceptable challenge to the materialistic orthodoxy. So long as you aren’t born and raised in such an atmosphere, it’s patently obvious to anyone with elementary intelligence the entire concept of civil policing is merely class warfare and oppression. The only reason anyone bears a scintilla of class consciousness is as a reaction to the excesses of the middle classes intent on enforcing a separation between themselves and everyone else. Their socio-economic existence is entirely due to materialism and greed, the demon-god of hedonistic comfort. It’s a rejection of those intellectual assumptions necessary to understand God’s provision for a decent life in this fallen realm.
Indeed, it should present no great challenge to discover civilian police forces as we know them today arose entirely from the urban middle class trying to force their social habits onto the working classes which made their prosperity possible. The first arrest powers were purely a matter of keeping the rowdy workers from blowing off a little steam. That’s it; the whole thing was preventing workers from acting like workers. Workers were supposed to be miserable. If you did not aspire to prissy middle class society, you were wrong already; no room for debate.
Contrast this with the history of rural policing, centered on the sheriff and simply keeping property losses to a minimum. There was no pretense of demanding a culture shift, since the difference between a poor peasant and rich peasant was a combination of personal aspirations mixed with the vagaries of circumstance. The presumption that the less fortunate were somehow inherently evil did not come from the rural folks themselves, but the urban middle class who had some fantasy of bucolic life they didn’t understand. What we call “suburbs” is the mass middle class version of rural life.
It would be easy to get lost in the differences in social history. The point is our modern American “justice system” is entirely the result of materialistic, anti-Christian middle class ogres who run things. It’s not about making things better for all, but making everyone miserable who dares to think differently. On paper it all looks okay, but in actual execution it turns the concept of justice on its head.
God’s idea was to decide as reasonably as possible what it takes to contain the natural threat arising from human fallen nature. Put them through the corrective process a few times; see if it helps. Not years upon years — that simply creates a stable counter-society of evil. Make it of short duration, so that a high turnover prevents anyone establishing an artificial world. Is there someone who, on the balance of actual record of behavior, shows themselves unwilling to value human life and what goes with it? Are they truly harmful, not just annoying? You can’t fix that; get rid of them. Is there a place you can send them away from threatening you? Do so. Can you keep them from coming back? Do so. Otherwise, there isn’t much you can do except execute them. They have shown themselves incorrigible predators.
I’ll leave for another day what sort of behavior constitutes a genuine threat to society as God sees it. The point is, our modern American way of doing things is the moral equivalent of poking God in the eye and laughing at His sorrow. We have so twisted and perverted the meaning of “justice,” we can’t even imagine it on God’s terms. America fully deserves to be destroyed, so don’t be surprised when God makes it happen.
