Wake Up, Look Up

Hello everyone, and 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 asking the question, who can solve the problem of justice? Now, I take this from an article I read recently in The Atlantic by Charles Fain Layman called In Defense of Flock. Now, Flock is a company, Flock Safety, who creates, among other things, automatic license plate readers and cameras that cities can use to combat crime. Like, recently, San Francisco invested in around 500 flock automatic license plate readers and cameras to actually help the city bring down the crime rate. Flock works with over 5,000 agencies and, nationwide, recording billions of, license plate images. And the result of that really is a decrease in crime, sometimes up from down 10 to 25%. The idea is that it creates a greater certainty that criminals will be caught, which then takes them off the streets to create further crime. Another value, some people will say of the Flock cameras is it keeps people from being wrongly accused. It mitigates things like racial profiling and the temptation that police have to assume a certain kind of person did a certain kind of thing. By going to the Flock cameras, they get actual data. In this case, a license plate image that they can look up. And regardless of the gender or race or any identifier, of the person they know, this is the person that did that thing, because we have their license plate camera. Now, of course, the other side of this are people warning against privacy concerns, because Flock isn't only taking images when a crime is committed, it's taking images all the time. Images that could be used for any number of things. Data that could be sold, that could be hacked into, that could reveal where people are going, when they're going, how often they're going, all kinds of concerns. So it exposes a real conversation. Flock inescapably helps us pursue more justice and probably cleaner justice. but it does so at the expense of individual liberty. And when you hold those things in tension, which should win, is it more important that we're safe or more important that we're free? How do you choose? Well, when I read this article, my takeaway was a little less how I feel about Flock. That's an incredibly complex and nuanced thing, I guess. In general, I like the idea that I'm free and that images of my car don't exist everywhere. But if somebody hits my car and drives away, boy, I sure would like it if we could figure out who it was. And track them down for insurance purposes. In other words, I'm just as confused as everybody else. But when I read this, what I found myself longing for was an answer. There must be a way to. Of pursuing justice and valuing the individual rights of people. Valuing privacy, valuing, feeling free. We have to be able to do both of these things. I don't want to choose between justice and freedom, between safety and privacy. and there is someone who knows how to do that. In fact, when I read this article, I found myself longing for the perfect justice of God. Because God knows how to thread the needle. God knows what is ultimately best for us as a society. Sometimes big questions like this stump us because they're designed to stump us. They make us acquainted with our creatureliness. Even though we can create things like license plate cameras, we can't solve the ethical dilemmas they bring up. The psalmist says it this way. In Psalm 98. 9, it says, he will judge the world, listen in righteousness, and the peoples with equity. To hear that God will bring justice, but he'll bring it fairly. God will bring safety, but he'll bring it wisely. And look, I know that's picturing a world we don't yet live in. but sometimes when we butt up against the inadequacy of our world, the correct response is not to criticize or to shake our fist or even to get political. I mean, there's a day for all those things. Sometimes the right response is the long for the kingdom that's coming. A kingdom where we don't have to make these kinds of choices, not because we have somehow figured them out, but because there's a king who knows better than us. I'm so thankful for that. today we'll wrestle with justice and fairness, with safety and privacy. But there's a day coming where those wrestlings will be over because the king who's on the throne really will know the answer. Hey, thanks for checking out Wake Up, Look Up. For more content, be sure to visit the Christ Community Chapel app or website cccchapel.com.

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