Western Punitive Vindictiveness

Every day I talk to people who struggle with false guilt. This is the weapon Satan uses to keep us from seizing our divine heritage.

Let me remind you that a part of our western heritage is the odd mixture of Roman and Germanic cultures, their social mythologies in particular. There were a number of areas where Roman and Germanic mythologies were very similar, mirrors of each other. A particularly evil thing they shared was the ugly punitive view of justice. It is not biblical.

In the West, justice is punitive and vindictive. It is bitter and hateful, morally perverse, a direct reflection of the Devil’s spite for humanity. It represents a desire to see someone suffer, to spend their lives in misery.

In the Bible, justice is corrective. It seeks to restore whatever can be restored. The whole assumption is that people are the treasure until they forfeit their lives. Instead of making them suffer the rest of their lives, the ultimate penalty for refusing correction is death. This is why the Old Testament is loaded with death penalties.

There is a perverse claim of moral superiority in western justice because we don’t so quickly and decisively remove threats to the community. The insane “necessity” of making the bad guys suffer keeps them alive long after the damage to their souls has already gone too far.

I’m not suggesting that God cannot redeem people. He can turn around the soul of the worst people, but that hope is muted when the underlying ethos is punitive and spiteful. Western minds are unable to see when God’s hand is at work. Furthermore, people who truly turn around in His mercy are the first to submit to capital execution. They are the ones who know beyond all doubt they deserve to die.

Do you understand Paul’s longing for the Lord to take him home? It was not mental illness, like depression of something, but a clear moral understanding that we were not made for this life.

I’ve noted several times on this blog that the Bible teaches a distinction between one’s flesh and one’s soul. The conscious awareness within a fleshly body is the soul. It’s a manifestation of life in the flesh. However, the flesh alone is a package of moral disabilities. Just having a mortal form is the problem. The flesh is not you; it’s just the package that carries you around this world.

Getting a sense of separation from your flesh is critical to serving Christ. The West denies this distinction. In the West, your flesh is you. More to the point, punitive justice attacks the fleshly nature specifically because it rejects the idea that there is any soul above the flesh. The mere presence of a fleshly lust means you must be punished for having it. The West denies the Fall; it insists that the flesh can be perfected. The only reason it isn’t perfect is because of some moral truculence inside your head.

It’s a very bitter hatred for people who didn’t get the right conditioning in their youth — or whatever. It’s a class warfare kind of spite.

The whole thing is an ugly lie and a stupid mess. Once you opt out of this false mythology, you begin to see how God can save you. He grants us the clarity of moral purpose to bring our flesh into subjection, to make it obey. You must rise above, migrate your conscious awareness to a vantage point above the flesh. The whole point of biblical discipline is to awaken the soul to a higher purpose. God regards you as a treasure to be recovered from the dirt.

Once you embrace that higher purpose, you are at peace with God. Meanwhile, you are now at war with your flesh. It’s the existence of a conflict, wherein you have denounced your flesh as not you, as an incurable ill, that makes you at peace with God. When you stand in agreement with His judgment, then you are on His side in a dispute far bigger than any of us can comprehend.