How many jokes have you heard about dropping the soap in the jailhouse shower? I’ve heard many, and often they’re told by people who are making the point that if someone breaks a law, they deserve whatever they get. If you don’t want to suffer homosexual rape in jail/prison, don’t commit the crime. However, being sodomized is not a just punishment for any crime.
This is so important that I don’t see how Christians are not all over it. Justice is an absolute. Absolutes come only from God. It’s impossible to speak of justice apart from the absolute standard of justice provided in God’s law. Anytime someone utters something about justice, they’re demonstrating that they’re created in God’s image.
Christians can know what justice is. How is this not a huge selling point for Christianity? How are we not proclaiming justice from the rooftops? But not only are most Christians not giving the life-giving solutions found in God’s laws to our dying society, we join in with non-Christians in misunderstanding and mocking Old Testament laws.
I don’t know Fremont County Sheriff Jim Beicker personally, though I believe he is a regular church-goer. He is accused of covering up the abuse and death of an inmate in his jail. Those who say that criminals get whatever they deserve, probably love Beicker all the more.
However, the punishment for whatever crime this inmate received was not the death penalty, or medical malpractice, or whatever. It is the job of the sheriff to keep inmates alive and safe while depriving them of their freedom.
Of course, it is possible that the just sentence for whatever crime this guy committed was the death penalty. The Bible gives the death penalty to murderers, adulterers, kidnappers, rapists, blasphemers, and those who revile their parents. If he wasn’t convicted of any of those crimes the proper course of action for the civil magistrate is to make him perform restitution.
Whatever crime he committed, he was treated as if he was subhuman, and a Christian like Beicker is supposed to treat everyone, even convicted criminals like they’re created in God’s image.
We all have God’s law written on our hearts, and this terrible situation is an opportunity for Christians to pluck those strings on their hearts to convict the local civil magistrates, and show them what they ought to be doing, and what God expects of them.
