Wake Up, Look Up

Hello, everyone.
Thanks for listening to Wake Up, Look Up, a podcast where we connect events happening in real time to the gospel of Jesus Christ.
I'm Zach Weihrauch.
And in today's episode, we're talking about unsolved murders, and we're asking the question, is hell a good thing?
This is prompted by an article I read recently in the New York Times, which was pointing out that in America, nearly half of the people who kill someone get away with it.

Now let me explain.
The article focused on the police department of Louisville, Kentucky.
That was interesting to me.
That's the city actually where I was born and even the city where I got married.
And in Louisville, Kentucky, there's a growing problem with murders going unsolved.

The article focused on particular families and their stories.
That's because in Louisville, they are seeing a rapid rise of unsolved murders.
And if you know the stats, you know that the longer a murder goes unsolved, the less likely it is to be solved at all.
But then the article zooms out outside of the Louisville, Kentucky police department and looks at the country as a whole.
Fifty-eight percent of murders were solved in 2023 in America.

Now that number is a little misleading because, actually, if the police catch a murderer from a previous year, say, you killed someone in 2019 and the case is solved in 2023, that actually goes into that statistic.
So that fifty-eight percent, if you meant just the murders that were committed last year, drops to right around fifty percent.
So you have a one in two chance in killing someone in America and getting away with it.
Now you might think, well, catching killers might be hard.
That's probably how it is in most other countries, but you'd be wrong.

Actually, in most countries of a similar kind of socioeconomic technology status as America, the clearance rate is usually somewhere between seventy and ninety percent, so dramatically higher than what we're seeing in The States.
There are a lot of reasons for that.
I mean, law enforcement officials will point to understaffed offices, gun prevalence, gang violence, public distrust.
There are a lot of factors that go into that.
There's a lot of debate over whether or not we should pursue technology, like license plate readers or facial recognition, pitting privacy against safety.

But that's not really the angle that I want to look at.
Instead, I want to talk about eschatology, which is a fancy theological word that means how we think about the end of all things.
Because actually, there's a doctrine in the Bible that I think is good news in a country where half the people who get killed go, their murders go unsolved.
And that is, believe it or not, the doctrine of hell.
Let me start with this.

Human justice has always been and will always be imperfect.
We are flawed people.
We have limited ability, limited knowledge.
There are always going to be crimes, those reported and those not reported, that go unknown and unsolved, and as a result, do not receive justice.
The Bible acknowledges that and tells us that the ultimate hope we have of justice is not ourselves, but God himself.

In Ecclesiastes 12:14, Solomon says that God will bring every deed into judgment.
That is our fundamental hope.
And how does he do that?
Well, the Bible tells us after death comes judgment.
There's a reckoning coming.

And the Bible also tells us for all those who have not turned to Jesus, that day of reckoning is a day of accounting.
Everything you've said, everything you've done, everything you've thought, everything you think you got away with is laid bare before God and you receive the judgment.
And as a result, those who are without Jesus are cast into hell.
Revelation 20:13 says that the dead were judged according to what they had done.
That's a long way of me saying in the end, the doctrine of hell reminds us no one gets away with anything ever, including the people who have committed murder in The United States and are never going to be caught.

One day, they will stand before God.
You see, I think we get uncomfortable with the doctrine of hell, and there are tough questions around that doctrine.
But the truth is, for most of us, in our normal, average, middle class, affluent life, hell doesn't make a lot of sense.
But when you experience trauma, again, trauma that is reported or not, trauma that receives earthly justice or does not, all of a sudden, you find yourself longing for a God who is keeping account.
And the doctrine of hell reminds us there is a God who's doing that and a reckoning is coming.

Now I know you might be asking, well, hold on a second.
What about those who do turn to Jesus?
Because after all, the Bible tells us that all sins can be forgiven in Jesus, including the murder you think you got away with.
Well, I will say this, that first, a truly repentant person who's committed a crime in their past and meets Jesus will take earthly ownership of that crime.
That will be an immediate consequence of following Jesus.

But remember, the night Jesus was arrested, he was praying in the garden and he said to God, if there's any other way, let's do it that way.
But not what I want, but what you want.
And he was told essentially, no.
That's because all the sin that is committed on this earth will either be paid by the sinners in hell or by the Son of God on the cross.
Every unsolved murder in America will be answered by the suffering of someone, either the murderer for eternity in hell at the hands of a righteous God who loved the person they murdered or the Son of God himself who will on the cross become the murderer and take the judgment of God.

Maybe it's time to dust off a doctrine we thought wasn't super helpful.
In a world where so many people are being hurt and so little justice is being done, isn't it comforting to know one day justice is certain?
Hey.
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