WEDNESDAY THOUGHTS: JUSTICE

Yesterday, I watched the documentary "Elusive Justice" on PBS. 

It was riveting. 

People have spent the greater part of their lives searching for perpetrators of the Holocaust. 

I've seen a few excellent Good vs. Evil/Fight for Justice-type films lately, including "Man In The Dark", "The Train" and "Time Limit". 

In the latter, a line by one of the characters struck me. While arguing with a superior officer, accused officer Major Harry Cargill shouted, "His life? Do you think that's the most a man can lose?"

Our systems and missions to see people experiencing our choice of punishment or suffering, are what often fail, and make it seem as if justice is elusive. 

We think people deserve a certain penalty for what they have done, and if they don't pay, sometimes our own lives are spent in anger, bitterness and frustration. 

We desperately crave grace, when we are the wrongdoers, but demand the most strict, and highest price from others, with no hope of redemption for them.

 

We can get a certain satisfaction in knowing that our mothers were right when they taught us that our actions have consequences. We can't make exceptions when it applies to our own misdeeds. 

When harsh consequences skip over the lives of certain people, we feel betrayed. 

Some things don't seem right or fair but we have to know, as believers in a righteous God, that justice NEVER fails. 

While we assign degrees to sin, He sees it all as unrighteousness. 

He declares that "the wages of sin is death", but for many people, when it comes to bringing criminals to justice for what they've done, even death isn't good enough.
What kind of life is it, when one is constantly looking over one's shoulder; ducking, hiding, lying, relocating, and deceiving everyone with whom they come in contact? 

That doesn't seem like getting away with murder, to me. 

A person living every day, hoping they'll die before their secrets are revealed, can't be healthy in mind nor body. 

Praying that the people who DO know the truth will give up hunting, threatening, intending to expose, or die first, is an awfully stressful way to live. 

No one ever truly gets away with anything.