Justice—God’s Way (Transcript)

Biblical jurisprudence was based upon the assumption that man is under obligation to carry out the revealed will of God in leading a holy life, respecting the rights of God and man, not simply upon a utilitarian basis of a pragmatic nature, but rather as a creature made in the likeness of God. This obligation was regarded as unchangeable and absolute, beyond the authority of man to amend or adapt to any general standard prevailing in current society. Today Bob Barney explains God’s take on criminality and the right way to punish the offender…

LISTEN TO BOB BARNEY’S 7:11 BROADCAST: JUSTICE-GOD’S WAY!

Good morning, it’s Bob Barney at 7: 11 a.m.

Did you know that the Bible talks about what the best justice system is?

Today in America and also all around the world there are prisons for everything. We had a story last week which is a common headline unfortunately, about a drunk driver who killed a bride on her wedding night. She was on a golf cart with her husband just after the ceremony and a young woman, who was maybe 18, 20 years old, was drunk; she ran off the road, hit the golf cart and killed the bride instantly…leaving the husband in critical condition. 

Now you have three families destroyed…the husband’s family, the bride’s family, and the family of the woman who hit them, because she’s going to probably spend many, many years in jail.

Now, if she was an illegal alien, maybe that wouldn’t be the case. You would just get deported and come back again later with no ramifications at all.

But is prison the way that God really thinks we should do things? Should we send people to prison? What is God’s way? 

By the way, God’s way is not just turning another cheek as people want to believe and speak about. A lot of people just do not want to read the Old Testament because they think that Jesus did away with the Old Testament. People actually believe that Jesus replaced that mean old God, you know, the father God in the Old Testament who actually is not the God of the Old Testament as I say all the time, it was Jesus Christ himself.

The God who wrote the 10 commandments with his own finger was Jesus Christ.

The God who talked to Adam and Eve was Jesus Christ.

The God who appeared to Moses, appeared to Abraham, appeared to David or talked to David, inspired David…was none other than the God who would become a human being and become who we know as Jesus Christ.

Yeshua as in the Hebrew or Joshua is how we would pronounce it. Jesus is the Greek rendition of the word Yeshua or Joshua. But God, and that’s Jesus in the Old Testament had a series of laws concerning about everything.

He had laws about dietary laws, you know, some of the things that I’m afraid that most people are not even aware of. They think it’s okay to break the dietary laws that you find in the Torah, in the book of Leviticus. It is not okay. The truth is the dietary laws that God gave to us to follow some 3000 years ago or more, we’re still supposed to be following. And a matter of fact, it wasn’t 3000 years. You can prove Adam and Eve followed the dietary laws and so did Noah.

Let me prove that the dietary laws were for every one of His children. How many animals did Noah bring on the Ark? Everyone will say two of each kind. No, scripture says that it was two of each kind of the unclean animals. Then, of all the clean animals, God took seven pair of because that’s what people were allowed to eat. God has always had a separation of what you can eat based on clean and unclean. That’s one of God’s laws. Christ did not do away with that law. We could talk a bit more about that at another time. But it’s just one of the misconceptions that people have about Christ doing away with the law of the Old Testament. He did nothing of the sort.

Jesus actually in many cases, and I explained this several weeks ago, actually made the law harder to follow, not easier to follow. He took the physical law which stated for example that you can’t have adultery with another man’s wife. That’s a physical law. Well, Christ said that you can’t even think about doing something with that woman because then you have committed adultery already in your heart; the same penalty applies. This even bothered the disciples because up until that point being under Mosaic law, you could think of all the harm you want to do to your neighbor’s wife and as long as you didn’t do it, you were okay. Christ took Mosaic law and actually made it spiritual and made it much harder for us as Christians to follow.

No law has been done away with. I get a laugh. You have Alabama, and now you have Texas talking about making schools get the Ten Commandments. They have to post the Ten Commandments in each school. Somebody had a response to that on Facebook I thought was funny. They probably were an atheist, but it still was funny. They said, “I don’t think we should post the Ten Commandments in any school that the kids can’t read or write, and they can’t even pass basic reading and writing scales, because if they can’t read or write, they can’t read the Ten Commandments anyway. So, before we worry about putting Ten Commandments in the schools, we ought to make sure the kids can actually read in school, and also we ought to maybe make the churches follow the Ten Commandments who think they’ve been done away with anyway. I mean, where’s the Sabbath day? Nobody’s following it for the most part in the Christian churches of today. They say Christ did away with Saturday, and he changed it to Sunday. He did nothing of the sort.

Well, let’s get back to the prisons and the idea of justice and reform. What was God’s answer to crime? Well, it’s an old well-worn statement, an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth. When people first hear that, they think that sounds barbaric. What is barbaric about it? If you punch out a person’s eye, then your eye was to be punched out as well. You shouldn’t die for that according to God; you should lose only what you’ve taken. So, if you cause someone to lose a finger, then you would lose your finger.

Let’s apply this to the woman who got drunk, had run off the road and killed this bride…the bride by the way who was a bride for less than three hours…so what should happen to the driver? According to the Bible she should not go to a prison, and she should not die for that because it was an accidental death. No matter how you want to look at it, that woman did not mean to kill anybody. I’m not saying that she did not show good judgment, because she didn’t. As a side note, the story was saying how they’re going to hold the bars now liable and who served her the drink. I think that is a foolish notion in itself. Unless she was falling down drunk, which is probably not the case and so obviously drunk, and they kept serving her liquor, then I would not hold any bar accountable for what a drunk driver does. But when she was drinking to excess, and she probably has some sort of a drinking problem and she took behind the wheel of a car and she ended up killing this woman, maiming her husband, she didn’t mean to do it.

Well, do you know the Bible has laws, the eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth law specifically about accidental deaths? And what do you think would happen? Well, they had places called cities of refuge and when somebody kills somebody by accident, they would run to those cities and be protected from the blood envy or the blood libel of the family of the victim…so that person would not die for an accidental death.

But the real point about the eye for an eye principle which I think is revolutionary and something that has never been equaled in all of the laws we’ve ever created. Example: If you stole a loaf of bread, you didn’t go to prison for 30 years however like what happened, for example, after the French Revolution in the 1800s. In that instance you would have to replace that loaf of bread that you stole, because a loaf of bread, let’s say it’s worth three bucks today, you shouldn’t go to jail for stealing three dollar’s worth of bread; you should have to do restitution.

That’s what I want to get to today, is that the Bible really calls for restitution. What should really nhappen to that drunk driver, because I don’t think she’s more than 20 by looking at her picture, what should happen to her for the death that she caused? Should it be that that she should go to jail for four or five years and become a hardened criminal, and when she gets out, her life is destroyed and everyone around her is destroyed…and as a result she will never ever have a very productive life? Is that the right way to have justice? Is that justice? Well, if you’re the family of the victim, you may think that’s justice, but it’s really not, because it could be you next that unintentionally takes somebody’s life which is called manslaughter, and you could end up in jail as well, and you can see the result of that. It’s not very nice.

 So, what would God have this young girl do? Well, let’s say that she is worth so much money. This is how the Bible does things. It breaks it down to how much are you really worth, and human life is worth a lot of money.

So, what would happen, and I know this is going to sound really bad for people who do not like the idea of involuntary servitude or slavery, but isn’t that what prison is? Prison is involuntary servitude and slavery, and it does no one any harm. If this girl goes to prison for 10, 15 years, and maybe she serves 7 or 8 of those years, does that help the family that she just killed? Does it help them at all? Absolutely not. They don’t get any money for it. Now, they’re going to sue, and if that woman has no assets of her own, which I doubt she does, they’re going to sue, and they’re going to get all kinds of money from bars, and then who’s going to pay for that in the long run? Insurances will go up, the prices of the food in the bars will go up, and everyone pays the penalty for a family losing a loved one and suing the wrong people, and that is the truth. They’re going to sue the wrong people, and you and I are the ones who pay for that.

Well, let’s do what God would do in the Old Testament and that would be involuntary servitude in restitution. If that woman was sentenced to, let’s say, 20 years of servitude to the family, meaning everything she does, she no longer does for her own welfare. She has to provide for that family all of her income and maybe become like a slave to that family. Maybe the family wants nothing to do with her, and I could see that, but if so, then you garnish her wages and you force her to work, even if she doesn’t want to work and she wants to stay home and try to collect welfare, you don’t allow it. You force her for a period of time to pay restitution…as much money as you want to put on her head that you think that that woman would have earned in her lifetime and given to her family. It’s probably innumerable, but the idea of restitution is what will make people reconsider when they get into a car drunk because they’re going to realize if they have an accident and they hurt somebody, they’re going to lose their freedom, not in prison but they are automatically going to be sentenced to have to take care of that person’s family for the rest of their life. 

You know, it’s the idea that I talk about in past broadcasts about the penalty for a man seducing a virgin. In the Bible, do you know what the penalty for a man who seduces a virgin is? Now, if he seduces another man’s wife or a married woman, the penalty is a death penalty. You die for that. Adultery penalty, you know, the top 10 commandments, the top 10 I call them, the penalty for breaking any of those commandments is death. And that is the first four and the last six. And that includes breaking the Sabbath day which also calls for the death penalty. That’s what the Bible says! Now, I know you don’t want to believe that but that is what the Bible says.

If you don’t honor your father and your mother in a godly way, then you also get the death penalty. That’s what the Bible says. Read the words for yourself. You will find out that there is the death penalty for breaking the 10 commandments. So, if you commit adultery with a married woman or a married man, the penalty is death. Now, you can get out of that penalty. David was able to get out of that death penalty and Bathsheba was able to get out of that death penalty. That’s the grace of God and going to God in prayer and in restitution of some sort. But we’ll take that subject up on a different time.

But the idea in the Bible, if you were to seduce a woman, let us say you’re Bill Clinton for example, and you’re going after a bunch of women…you’re going after all of these young girls that work around you, and you’re going after other people’s women out there. I’m not talking about rape because that would be the death penalty again for raping the married women that he was accused of doing. But, you know, you take Paula Jones, you take people like that. You know what the penalty would be in the Bible? Believe it or not. You know what the penalty would be? He would have to marry them. He dishonored them. He took away their virginity, if they were a virgin. He took away their chance to have a proper marriage according to God’s Word. So he would then have to marry them, even if he was married.

Do you know the Bible sometimes demands polygamy? It does. And I don’t think most people really want to be in a polygamous situation. So if you knew that one or two minutes of joy some night with some young girl was going to cost you to have to marry that girl and take care of her for the rest of her life…maybe you wouldn’t do it. And you want to know the caveat? Unlike your wife that you married, which Moses allowed you to divorce, you can’t divorce a woman that you seduced. You can never divorce her according to the law of God. She is your wife forever unless she commits adultery of course. Then you’re out of your vow with her. But when you seduce a young girl you’re married to her for the rest of your life.

So you have one of these people that maybe seduces 20, 30 girls in their married life, guess what? They have 20 or 30 marriages, 20, 30 women, who don’t necessarily have to ever sleep with them again, but they’re going to have to pay for them for the rest of their life as a wife and they cannot divorce themselves of that fact.

Do you think there would be that much adultery going on? do you think that they would be going around and having a lot of casual sex with people, knowing that when they’re caught, they’re going to have to take that person and marry that person, and they can never divorce that person, they can never rid their life of that person, and that person is going to be a financial burden? Can you imagine having 30 credit card bills from 30 wives coming in every month? Maxed out to the hilt and you’re working that much to be able to uphold and pay for all these debts caused by all your wives that you inherited through your promiscuous affairs? Well, I think you’ll find in most cases the idea of sex outside of marriage and fooling around with young girls and stuff like that, I think a lot of that would disappear, because again, God knows the human heart and God knows what does work and what doesn’t work in punishment. He knows the best restitution is the binding of people to the crime that they do against another person.

Throwing somebody in prison usually ends up making them a hardened criminal and when they get out, they’re twice the son of hell than when they went in. Why? Because when they go in they are kind of innocent in a way, if it’s their first time, and for most, everybody has a first time and if they go to prison they’re going to be around hardened criminals who are going to beat them up or abuse them, and little by little, they’re going to learn the way of how to be a prisoner and how to be a criminal. That’s why there’s so many that repeat the crimes again that never did a crime before, but the minute they come out of prison, they’re hooked, and they’re going back to prison for the rest of their life in many cases.

So much would change and that scenario I just shared would not happen if we were to follow God’s idea of restitution…and that is a very important concept. You pay an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a limb for a limb, and you pay dollar for dollar of lost revenue, so when you cause someone lost revenue, then you have to pay a restitution, and you don’t do that from jail. Jail does not help anybody pay for anything and it doesn’t help the victim’s family other than personal satisfaction of knowing that person is going to rot in jail for a few years, but that really doesn’t help anybody out.

It does not help society.

It does not help the victim’s family.

It does not help the perpetrator and their family.

All it does is create this vicious circle of criminality which could easily be solved with the idea of restitution, and that is the whole purpose that I think of today’s program that I wanted to talk to you about, is that we have to change our penal system in America. We have to treat criminals that are violent criminals as an eye for an eye idea.

If some illegal alien or some American citizen murders somebody intentionally, rapes and murders this woman like what happened with that mother of five in Maryland, that person has to be killed. It needs a trial and maybe one or two appeals on the trial, but if the facts are obvious that the person did the crime and you can prove it, and it can usually be proven, and if you can’t prove it, then you have to decide, in modern society anyway, they’re going to walk if you can’t prove it. But if you can prove it, then that type of violent crime deserves the death penalty. Now, the Bible has a pretty funny thing about the girl who is raped, and she’s married and she cries out that she’s raped. If the woman does not make it obvious at the time of the rape what happened to her, then the person who did the crime is not convicted because the woman has to be, how do I say this, she has to be unwilling. There are cases that women are willing and then after the act, then they are sorry for what they did and so maybe they’re a young girl, they go back to tell their parents, oh he took advantage of me, he raped me, and there’s a lot of false rape accusations, there’s all kinds of made-up crimes as well. And the Bible does know that and that’s why there’s got to be two witnesses to every crime, there has to be, the woman has to scream and if it’s a silent place, then you have to find other evidence, and today with DNA it’s easy to find the evidence, and then you can find out from character and from other things how willing or non-willing the woman was, how she reported it right away or not.

You know this case with Trump, with this woman who cannot remember when he assaulted her, the year, the month, the time, or the date, you know she’s a liar, especially when she gets on CNN and says she thinks rape’s a sexy thing, you know that’s what she said, right? So, but the Bible does show that when you do a violent crime, that you take someone’s life or you do other things that the Bible calls for the death penalty and remember when you rape a married woman and you know she was not willing, then there is the death penalty involved.

 I remember telling my family, and this was about five years ago now, that you have to be very careful today, even in public of what you do and you have to be conscious of your actions at all times. There was a case a few years ago, and by the way you can find these cases about every month if you read some of the magazines or the newspapers like the Daily Mail, they seem to have these stories ad nauseum, but there was a case of a woman who was raped in broad daylight in Central Park. There were at least 15 or 20 witnesses who saw the violent crime, they saw her being punched, they saw her being raped, they did nothing to stop it. She was screaming, that’s the Bible definition of rape by the way, and what happened was the man was arrested, when he went to court his lawyer was actually able to convince a jury and a judge that the girl was willing, was a willing participant, and that she was screaming, and all of this was a part of play acting. Even though there was no evidence at all, the woman never knew the man, and actually the evidence was that she didn’t know the man.

I remember telling my daughters and my wife, you have to be very, very careful what you do in public. You have to make sure that you are aware of your surroundings and you’re aware of who’s watching you, and you have to be aware about who you interact with, because it sounds terrible to say this, but in today’s society, if someone gets the opportunity to do a woman harm, they can because of the liberalness of our court system and our terrible prosecutors. These people can get away with a lot of very serious crimes against you, and you will be surprised when you try to prosecute them in court that you get no justice. The Bible says there’s no justice in the land, and by gosh there is no justice in America today.

We saw this with the Donald Trump trial, and we see this long before Donald Trump with many other people, maybe you know some of them out there, who have been tried and convicted of crimes they never committed. And that is why God requires the testimony of two credible witnesses, the two witnesses that are coming to talk against the people of this earth during the tribulation. That’s why God has two witnesses and not just one, because by the testimony of two witnesses are what get you convicted.

And so if, like I said, if it’s a violent crime, then if a person intentionally cuts off your arm or your ear, then you intentionally cut off their arm and their ear. That is what the Bible says. If you intentionally murder somebody, that’s first-degree murder by the way, and you wanted to murder that person, then the death penalty is the result. There is not life in prison. There is no such thing as life in prison in the Bible. It is either you’re found guilty of murder, and you die.

If, for example, somehow God finds a way to forgive you of that murder for other circumstances, like what happened to David, and I won’t try to explain that one because it really is kind of unexplainable, but God is in control and God can do what He wants. This was a case that God took care of and not man. But for the most part, you’re going to do a violent crime, you’re going to die, or you’re going to suffer a loss of a tooth, a loss of an eye, a loss of a finger, a loss of an arm, a loss of a leg. If you do an unintentional crime, you get drunk and you kill somebody in the street, or you see a fight and you try to break it up and in doing so, you kill the person by accident trying to break up a fight. In that case, you don’t even do restitution. What happens when you’re trying to stop a fight and you by mistake kill one of the two people? You would have to go to a place of what they would call a city of refuge where you are protected from any criminal penalty, but you have to leave where you’re at to do so.

I know a lot of this sounds, what’s the right word? A lot of this sounds inane, a lot of this sounds antiquated, a lot of this sounds like it’s harsh laws, but these are laws that God gave Moses to give to us. My contention is that God knows what God is doing. God knows the best way to punish people and the best way to forgive the people who does not deserve punishment. And so what may sound archaic to us, what may sound cruel to us, what may sound impossible for us maybe we should look at us and not the God who gave these laws that we do not want to follow, and we don’t want to follow the penalty of the crimes that God gives certain penalties. I would suggest that people, and you can do this very cursorily, you can just go to the first five books of the Bible and mainly the book of Leviticus, but you can find in Exodus, Leviticus, and Deuteronomy more than you’ll find it in like Genesis or Numbers, but Leviticus especially, and read the various Mosaic laws and see if you can find problems with them. See if you really can find problems with what God says to do for each crime or law is broken.

For the most part, you’re going to find problems with about 50% of them because what you are doing is you’re judging God by your terrible standards. You’re judging God by your evil ways because human beings are evil. They’re bent on evil. God says so, and God doesn’t lie.

So, when you start understanding God and God’s love for us and God’s idea of what our future is going to be, and I’ve already told you, our future is that we are the children of God, meaning we will become God’s ourselves. Therefore, when you understand that and you start rereading those laws, they will start making more and more sense to you as you get your mind more and more in line with the mind of God. And you will find out that God’s punishment in the Old Testament is very modern and that God had placed laws for the first time in human history that actually made sense because God makes sense. You will find out they are what you should do. 

So my idea for following the law is start reading Leviticus. Start right there. Just quickly go through Leviticus. Just get a good Bible that gives you headings and say the law for this, and the law for that and read what God says you should do. And like I said, I will tell you right up front, you will have a problem with most of the laws when you first read them in your state of mind you’re in today. As you become more and more aware of who God is and what God stands for and what God has planned for you and all of mankind, little by little, you’re going to start reading those laws again and say, hmm, that makes sense because it does.

So this girl who took the life of another young girl probably around her age who had a great life ahead of her being married and whatnot, she would have to pay restitution for the rest of her life maybe. But that would make her think about what she did for the rest of her life. And that family is actually financially better off and eventually spiritually better off when that kind of justice is meted out, the justice that is given to us from God Almighty in our Bible. 

Well, that’s what I had to say about the penal system and how I think it should be changed. And you find that in the Bible. And if you follow the Bible, you will be blessed.

And I do want to thank everybody for listening to the Plain Truth Today broadcast and going to the Plain Truth dot com and going to our Message Board and also for going to Your Health Today.

I really appreciate those people who listen. I do appreciate when people have problems with what I say. Do not listen to what I say and take it as the gospel. I’m giving you most of the time my opinions. When I give you a fact of the Bible I will say so as I gave you a few just now that are facts. Then you’re going to have to sit down and you’re going to have to wrestle with your notion about the facts that are in the Bible. ut my opinions are my opinions and I think I have some good opinions. And if you don’t think they’re all good, that’s fine. You have every right to think so. We are still America. I don’t know how long we’ll have freedom here, but we do for now. So until tomorrow, this is Bob Barney for the Plain Truth Today saying thank you for listening and goodbye.

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