Prison

Welcome to Have You Not Read, a podcast seeking to answer questions from the text of Scripture for the honor of Christ and the edification of the Saints. Before we dig into our topic, we humbly ask you to rate, review, and share the podcast.

Thank you. I'm Andrew Hudson and joining me today are Michael Deere and Chris Kiesler. All right, so we had a brother send in a question. Let me read it. It's actually a two-parter, but we'll address the first part now.

Why Long-Term Incarceration Is Not Redemptive

I have long held the belief that long-term incarceration is not scriptural. God's Word seems to clearly indicate you make restitution for your crime, or if it's grievous enough, you forfeit your life.

I do believe long-term incarceration is inhumane and not according to God's law. Michael, please start us off. Okay, this is a good observation that the prison system that we have in both federal and state forms seems to be not humane, not workable.

There's something just totally broken. Like there's a flaw here. Yeah, pretty big flaw. It's interesting that it's called the penitentiary system. Yeah. I know you were thinking about that. Yeah, I was looking at that, and the prison reform movement actually started.

For what happened here in the United States, it actually started in England, but the first state to implement some of the same types of reforms that were happening in the UK was Pennsylvania, and so it became as known as like the Pennsylvania system.

It's the idea of a penitentiary, and it was designed to be a secluded house of repentance, thus the form of penitentiary coming from the Latin, where those who are incarcerated would be subject to bodily pain, labor, watchfulness, solitude, and silence, also joined with bodily cleanliness and simple food as a form of deprivation leading towards repentance.

Well, it works for the monks, right? Yeah, and it was a model that was adapted from that. Yeah, I mean it works for the monks in the monastery, so obviously it'll work for criminals in a prison. Turn it into a penitentiary, and then you can, by outward stimulus, change the inward man.

Mmm, yeah. I think there might be a.

Difference in motivation with the monks choosing that lifestyle, and others were.

Forced upon them. Yeah, there's certainly a difference in reasoning there, but it does ignore a very important biblical principle. Before we can talk about justice, we need to talk about the condition of man, so that we can understand what justice is about.

Is justice in itself redemptive? Is the justice dispensed by the state the instrument of redemption, and is the state a savior? Well, we know that man needs a savior. Indeed. And for the Lord in Genesis 6, 5, the Lord saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intent of the thought of his heart was only evil continually, and the Lord was sorry that he had made man on the earth, and he was grieved in his heart.

So God, as Creator, as the owner of mankind, He decides to destroy man. He says, I will destroy man whom I have created from the face of the earth, both man and beast, creeping thing and birds of the air, for I'm sorry that I have made them.

But Noah found grace in the eyes of the Lord. So God had grace, He had favor upon Noah and his family, but He killed all the rest of humanity. Now this was a massive act of justice and judgment. Mankind, being so evil before the face of God, deserved death.

And that's the righteous sentence, deserve death. Well, this outward stimulus came upon mankind, and we can only imagine the hardships and the fear and the tumult that went on in Noah's life, his wife's life, and his three sons and their wives.

What an amazing impact that flood must have had on them, that they are the only surviving humans, with just a relatively poultry collection of the animals there on the ark. So after this massive impact upon humanity, what was the result?

Well, God said, I will never again curse the ground for man's sake, although the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth, nor will I again destroy every living thing as I have done. So in other words, this flood, and even the year-long so-called prison sentence for Noah, with a bunch of animals on the ark, cut off from everything that they knew, cut off from society, cut off from the earth, cut off from from land.

Yeah. At the end of it, it didn't change the fundamental sinfulness of the heart of man. It did not. So it can't be, there's no answer, an outward stimulus is not the answer to change the heart of mankind.

So a prison system, number one, should not be used as an instrument of redemption, of regeneration, of sanctification, or however you want to put it. It's just not going to do the trick, is it? No. So that's the first thing.

Prison as Exile, Not Restitution

So the question that I think for the modern hearer is then, what good is a prison system? I think for most people, it's usually phrased like this, there are dangerous criminals that pose a threat to us and our children.

They threaten to destabilize the order and the peace and the commerce and the good of our society, and therefore they need to be moved out of the way, put out of the way to someplace else where we don't have to engage with them and they can't harm us.

All right, so we're going to, essentially, the modern-day prison system is a form of exile. Yeah, expulsion from the camp. Yeah. Okay, so it's a form of exile. And this will happen for, what, six months, 18 months, five years, 10 years, 20 years, 50 years, never come out.

Yeah, life. And I think the questioner is saying, these long-term prison sentences, these exiles, does not seem wise, does not seem just,.

Does not seem biblical. Yeah, if I'm remembering correctly, it doesn't even mention the reasons why they're there, because we could talk about some of the laws in the book and whether the laws themselves are just the reason why people are being put in prison.

Just the concept of holding people for a long period of time is kind of what's being called into question here. And so you talk about it being an exile, people being removed, and then under what condition do they re-enter society?

We talked about the prisons not rehabilitating them, you know, in their soul or in their minds or their thinkings. So if you know someone to be of that nature, if you're trying to reach for, like, that argument that they're not changed, then just locking them away, out of sight, out of mind.

I can't think of the verse that the mercies of the wicked are cruel. Yes. That's their solution. Not taking into consideration that these people are made in the image of God, even though they're criminals, they're made in the image of God.

And taking all that time away from them and then the burden it places on the society to hold large.

Numbers of people for long term. And that's where I think the prison system shows itself to be not only foolish, but fundamentally unjust. There is this expression that you have to, you do the crime, you do the time, and then once you've, quote-unquote, paid your debt to society, then you can be released.

And then criminals don't want their past incarcerations to be brought up and they'll perhaps thump their chest, I paid my debt to society. Right. But in actuality, you created a greater debt on society.

You are a burden to society. So if you embezzle from your business partner and destroy your small business because you embezzled, and you leave this man without a job and he loses his home, and maybe his whole life is thrown apart, perhaps his wife divorces him, his life is a complete misery, because you embezzled from it.

You go to jail, you go to prison, and you have to do your five to ten years for embezzlement. The whole time the taxpayers are paying for your time there, including the man's wife, and the man, and ultimately the debt passed on to the man's children whom you embezzled from.

How is that righteous? No restitution was made. So now you're left with the prison system does not rehabilitate, and it does not repay. Okay, so what good is it? Maybe, perhaps, the prison system is being used to bring some sort of greater good to society.

Maybe you can rehabilitate people, and maybe the problem was that they are, the maybe reason why they came to prison is because they didn't read well enough, they didn't learn a trade, and maybe if you could just educate them enough, but the return rate of prisoners back to the prisons, and so on, shows that this is not, that's not true, it's not true.

Yeah. You'd say, well, maybe you could get some use out of the prisoners while they're there, and put them to work. Okay, well, the prison system is a form of slavery, right? Yeah, it is. Yeah, that's another system, it's called slavery.

Yeah, so this, the, the war between the states did not outlaw slavery in the United States, it outlawed private slavery, private ownership of slaves in the United States. Federal ownership of slaves still is very much alive and well, and so you put these prisoners, they're there against their will, they're incarcerated, they're kept essentially not, if not in chains, they're behind bars, and they're made to work, so all sorts of laundry, laundry systems, you know, the old trope of making the license plates, and yeah, all that kind of thing.

Furniture, work details, sure. And so there's a whole bunch of industry going on where you can pay these prison workers, you know, perhaps less than a dollar an hour, maybe a dollar an hour, well beneath the minimum wage, slave wages, okay, and you're trying to get something out of them.

Now, the amount of money that goes in to keep, to keep them and house them and feed them far outweighs any profitability you get out of them, especially since the prison systems themselves are often run by private corporations, whose lobbyists make sure that the politicians keep up the prison sentences and keeps the justice system rolling, feeding low-wage workers into the prison system over and over and over again.

So we don't have a profitable system, it only causes more debt, we don't have a healing system, a restoring system, it's just more disease, and so the whole thing is a massive disaster. The only thing left is, is it a deterrent?

Do criminals fear such a.

Situation? Well, that four hots and a cot, you know, I know people personally who when they went into the system, when they were released, they said, I prefer that, everything's paid for, I don't have to worry about anything, my housing's paid for, my meals are paid for, I don't have to think, I do a little bit of work and then everything's taken care of, I don't know how to function in society.

And so far from being rehabilitating, it's debilitating. He was saying, I don't know how to do this. Now, he's been out for a while and he's got help and he's doing it and he knows he has to keep busy, idle hands and all of that, but the system hindered him in many ways, you know, going through that, and it wasn't a,.

That wasn't a deterrent. Yeah, that's a further breaking of the image, that's not.

A restoration. Right, yeah. You, you guys have both used the word restitution, I think of other words that are thrown around like reparations and things like this, what, how are we defining restitution?

That sounds restorative.

Biblical Justice: Eye for Eye, Restitution, and the Sword

Well, okay, so think about the way in which we find justice being described in the Scriptures. Now, it's important to remember that the covenants that God made were in the shape of creation with the shadow of Christ.

They address the ruin of Adam and Eve, the ruin of sin, okay, but also anticipates the reign of Christ. So, this is not simply a passive waiting around during the covenants, twiddling your thumbs, waiting for the Messiah, there actually is a development of understanding and enrichment of the, of the idea of what it means to be made in God's image through, through the various covenants.

So, we see what the image of God is in the Garden of Eden and then the covenants enrich that even as they address the sin problem and anticipate the arrival of Christ. So, we start off in the garden and what is it?

Well, death for death. Okay, so you, you separate yourself from God, God separates himself from you. You rebel against God, he exiles you from the garden. You say you don't need God, then you're going to live without him, without that special fellowship out, you're gonna be exiled.

So, you see God rendering a sentence of justice that would later on be described eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, life for life. And that was expressed in the Sinaitic Covenant.

And you see it in other agreements even prior to Sinai, but the idea is tit for tat, eye for eye, and, and God says to the judges, to those in charge of justice in Israel, again Israel is Adam writ large, here is humanity in, it's, it's Adam writ large, but it's the image of God writ small.

So, it's not all nations, it's one nation, but it's many people functioning where Adam should be functioning. So, it's important to keep that in mind. So, the justice that should be occurring within Israel, God says to them in Deuteronomy 19 .21, your eye shall not pity.

Because what does pity have to do with justice? It doesn't belong. They don't go together, do they? They don't go together in the state. It makes no sense that they would come together. Your eye shall not pity, life shall be for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.

Now, that would be the idea of justice. Now, in the Mosaic case law that we would glean wisdom from, there was monetary restitution as an option available. You didn't necessarily have to, you know, rip out your own eyeball and give it to the guy that you poked his eyeball out.

Okay, that doesn't actually restore his eyeball. Right. Okay, but let's say you refuse to make the monetary restitution that was said to be on the level. Equivalent. Equivalent for him losing his eye and the work that he would lose from that and his ability and skills that he would lose from that.

Let's say you couldn't make that restitution or wouldn't. Well, the threat is we're gonna gouge your eye out and then you're like, I don't want that. Okay, then you have to create the value that belongs to this man.

Okay, so that's where slavery, servitude, came in and it worked in Israel in this way because you would work for a time and be freed the seventh year. You would maybe have to sell your property, but you would come back on the year of Jubilee and there would be certain resets involved in the life of Israel where this system made sense.

Okay, how do we take the wisdom that we find in the Sinaitic Covenant, which has been fulfilled, the Old Covenant has passed away, the entire New Testament was written in the last days of the Old Covenant and it has passed away.

How do we take the wisdom of that and apply it to our modern solutions today? After all, Romans 13 says that the state is God's deacon, his minister, to punish evildoers and the church is the pillar and ground of the truth that should be saying to the state, hey, if you would like to know what what evildoers are versus doers of righteousness, whom you're supposed to praise, hey, here's what evildoers look like, here's what doers of righteousness look like.

Please punish the evildoers and please praise the doers of righteousness and here's what we would recommend, right? So, in a sense, the question is trying to get at what would we recommend, what would you think is more biblical than long-term prison sentences, right?

How can we actually.

Justly do this? I think that goes back to what you're talking about, do not pity. Yes. If you are pitying, if your mindset is this poor victim, which is everything is victim mentality now, this poor victim, they just need more help, they need to be changed, they need...

We would agree they need changed. They need changed, yes, but how do you get that changed? And so what the pity does, I was reading this, Ecclesiastes 8, because the sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.

Because the sentence is not executed speedily, so you have this growing and growing acceptance of sin. Yes, it was bad, but we don't have to punish it in that way. Maybe we can do better than what God has prescribed.

Maybe we can just change them, work on them, and enough time they'll change. Yeah,.

So that is, that's where Lady Justice, who was supposed to be blind, right? No pity. You're not supposed to be looking at are they poor, are they rich, what color they are, what their background is. It's simply, you know, innocent until proven guilty, but proven guilty, no pity.

This is the proper approach. Now we don't have Lady Justice, right? What do we have? We have like a codependent grandmother, maybe? Something like that, yeah. Sure. You know, pity is a poison to justice.

It completely undoes the point of justice. And so if we're waiting around and looking for some sort of way to nice our way out of the problem, if we just be more nice to people, then they'll be nice to us.

Yeah. Then once again we're ignoring the basic condition of man, and the fact of the matter is there needs to be a proper response. So for example, Proverbs 19 .29 says, judgments are prepared for scoffers and beatings for the backs of fools.

Now, do we understand what a fool is? A fool is someone who knows better but does it anyway. Now that basically sums up a whole lot of the prison population. They knew not to do that, they knew better, and they did it anyway.

Okay. And so in God's wisdom, in his observation, this kind of timeless proverb, what is prepared for.

The backs of fools? Beatings. Beatings. It used to be on the books. It was like the old.

Fashioned canings, is what they used to call it. But now pity has poisoned justice. Right. So now we're going to put them away, because we're being merciful, we're going to put them away out of sight, four hots and a cot, make sure that they have everything that they need, and that's going to be our punishment.

Or that's going to be our rehabilitation. This is our answer. And yet, putting someone away for 50 years or 25 years for something that could have been handled with a.

Beating is not righteous. I hadn't thought about this before, but in that instance, the beatings are a reminder, and it stays with you for a while, I'm sure. But there's still common graces that are being deprived when you lock someone up.

Yes. Being able to see your children or your wife, being able to go outside and see the sky, being able to meet with friends, people who might have the gospel and preach it to you, access to all types of things that would be a grace or a mercy from God, all of that's taken away.

Because in the name of mercy, like, oh this will be nicer for you, because this is just, we've deemed this as inhumane, and yet we're gonna lock you in a cage like an animal, and.

That's more humane. So let me tell you a story about a guy named Michael Johnson. He was 6 '11 and a half, and I met him in my first year of pastoring here at Sunnyside. He was cold calling churches from a rundown motel looking for a ride to a gas station out in Choctaw, Choctaw Road.

And I took the call, so I went to go give him, I went to go give him a ride. He had spent 25 years in prison in Texas because he was hot and bothered one night, and he punched a police officer. 25 years?

Yeah, assault a police officer, he got 25 years. So, and he said, I did the wrong thing, I broke the law, I lost my temper, I shouldn't have done it. He didn't say anything else beside that. Though he did, you know, he did say 25 years seems like a little long time for that.

And I would agree, right? Now that doesn't sound like blow-for-blow. No. And does that overzealous prison sentence fix anything? No. His wife didn't divorce him, and she was out in eastern Oklahoma, and to, he went to prison, of course, for a long time.

It was poor me, he talked about this, it was poor me, not my fault, so on and so forth, until he came to repent of a situation. Guys from DTS, Dallas Theological Seminary, were coming in, doing expositional Bible study with the prisoners, and Michael said, you know, you could really tell when, when guys changed.

They stopped making all those excuses, and they just took ownership. What they did was wrong, and they wanted to get to know the Lord, and grow in the Scriptures. And he said that helped him more than anything else, that he was able to grow in the Scriptures.

Well, he was on his way out to eastern Oklahoma, to go live with his, with his wife's brother, and just sleep on the guy's couch, until he could find a job, and find a way to reconcile with his wife. So I drove him out quite a ways longer than Choctaw, but he called me a couple of times to confirm that he had gotten there, and then later on, he let me know that things were getting better with his wife, and he had a job, and so on.

So you could see God's grace at work in his life, but I think 25 years for assaulting a police officer, hey, I don't think anyone should assault a police officer. You know, you get all hot under the collar, you shouldn't be swinging at an officer of the peace.

However, I think 25 years is not the righteous response. So what would be the righteous response? Well, it seems to me the wise response is also the righteous response, and we're looking for that in the Scriptures.

And, you know, Paul got beat by Jewish authorities and Roman authorities, and many times he was put in prison, trying to get him to trial, and very often he had lengthy prison stays, two, three years sometimes, and he was languishing there, and it wasn't good.

I mean, there was no, there was no justice being done there. It was just, no one knew what to do with him, so they just left him there. And then one administration would go out, another one would come in between Festus and Felix and all of this, yeah, and waiting for the bribe, right?

Waiting for, hey, you know, you ready to bail yourself out yet, you know? And Jesus even brings this up. He talks about how the prison system is a matter of money. Okay, so Jesus says this in Matthew 5.

He gives some sage counsel, you know, and a lot of what he says has this twinkle in his eye, you can imagine, as he says it. But in Matthew 25, I'm sorry, Matthew 5 verse 25 says, "...agree with your adversary quickly while you're on the way with him.

Lest your adversary deliver you to the judge, the judge hands you over to the officer, and you'll be thrown into prison. Assuredly, I say to you, you will by no means get out of there, till what? Till you have paid your debt to society?

Till you have been punished duly enough? No, till you have paid the last penny.". See, even Jesus said this whole prison incarceration system's all about money. It's not about justice. So we see the need to have maybe temporary holding cells for trials and so on, but what would be justice, biblically?

I think what would be wise would be an approach that says eye for eye, you know, tooth for tooth, hand for hand. We're not simply taking up the old covenant and saying plug and play into American society, but we see the wise principle there.

We see the wise principle there. So you come down to the very practical things, and what do you do with somebody who will not comply with societal standards? You've beaten them three times. You know, they still go back to it all.

They refuse to go work off their debt. They won't hold down a job so that you can properly take their money, take a big portion of what they're earning, and then give it to the people that they wronged.

I forget the technical term for that. Garnish their wages. Garnish their wages, right. They won't hold down the job that has been given to them so that you can't garnish their wages and give it to the people that they wronged.

They just won't comply. Now what do you do? Well, you can either execute them or you can exile them to Canada, you know, but something, right, something. There has to be something. There has to be something.

It would need to be wise. It would need to be just. Mm-hmm, yeah, and I had.

Brought this up jokingly, but in Romans 13 where it talks about the state bearing the sword. Yeah. That's a, the sword is a death sentence. It's a punishment. It's not just like a, you know, eh. In vain here is like not an empty.

Threat. Right, right. This is coming. Mm-hmm. Yeah, and the sting of the the rod and the whip is a reminder of, hey, there's a sword behind there somewhere. Yeah. You know, you need to turn around and go a different way.

So, and again, just just to make the point, let's say you get the wrong guy and let's say that, you know, it was totally mishandled. The whole case was mishandled. You got the wrong person and you convicted the wrong person and you gave him 40 stripes.

Well, you know what? 40 stripes, getting that wrong is a lot better than getting 40 years wrong. Indeed. And we know that the justice system is flawed, so. Yeah. That would also be. We know what's going to happen.

Yeah. We got. That's also a wise consideration. Yeah. Well, I think there was a follow up. There was. So the listener also provided some context saying that Oklahoma has the largest number of women incarcerated in the entire nation and top three in the entire world on a per capita basis.

We live in a state that all 77 counties went red for three national elections, but we have one of the highest teen pregnancy rates, highest divorce rates, drug and alcohol abuse abound. I've always found that very hard to reconcile in a state that has one million households attending church weekly.

How do we reconcile that? Well, it's that's a sad thing, but we were saying earlier, perhaps Oklahoma is very progressive. We're very egalitarian that we incarcerate so many women along with so many men, you know, equal rights and equal treatment under the law.

But that's actually it feels really bad, doesn't it? It does. Because we're made in the image of God. We know somehow that that's just not the way it's supposed to be. Do I want that equally applied to women?

You know, like, do I really want that? Do I want this egalitarian? Yeah. Do we want do we want women in the way that they are specially made in the image of God? Do we want them filling up our prisons and filling up, for instance, on the front lines?

Do we want to see them, you know? No, that's not. That's not good. There's something very wrong here. Yeah.

Well, when you start saying that there's no fundamental difference between men and women, then that's the route you're gonna you're gonna go down. And when you say, okay, have no, the Bible says, have no pity.

And yet we've, we're in a feministic age where it's all, you know, heartstrings and and all of that. And then we don't know how to handle, like, violent men. It's like, you're gonna be met with violence.

But oftentimes with women, it's like, we know there's a difference between men and women. In some of these cases, you almost think where is the man, whether it's the father or the husband, you bet, that is not standing between saying, I will take responsibility for this, for this woman.

Instead, it's like, well, you're, you're gonna get locked up. You know, it's.

Interesting, after they meet trial and they're duly convicted, declared to be guilty by a jury of their peers, they stand before judges who often see lighter prisoners, prison sentences instead of death penalties and such as the more merciful route, like we have been discussing.

Is that really what is just.

This cruel, this cruel mercy? Yeah, it doesn't, it doesn't seem just. You're.

Taking... So therefore we end up having more and more women. More and more, yeah. Yeah, I signed up for several emails to come in for local and state government trying to keep my eye on things and they grew up to homicide number 16 of Oklahoma City and I was surprised to see how, how often the violence was being done by young women and that was a surprising, surprising look at that.

The idea that red counties mean Christian ethics. Yeah, righteous counties? Yeah, red does not mean righteous. Right. Yeah, red does not mean biblical. If you've paid attention, the radical fundamentalist left, leftists, you know, from the, from the deep left, whether the East Coast or the West Coast or the, the North, the, the deep left has so jumped the shark.

I'm gonna mix my, mix my metaphors. They've moved the Overton window so far to the left that they have ostracized many who used to identify with them and now they're all flooding to the middle where Trump, the Democrat of the 90s, welcomes them with open arms.

And so the Democrats of the 90s are now the party in control and we think, oh look at all the red. Conservatives won. No, the radical leftists won. The talking heads are all crowing on YouTube about how bad the approval rates are for the Democrat party.

Okay, they're like, hey we won, they've totally nuked themselves, so on and so forth. They wisely nuked themselves. They're getting what they want because everything is moving left. And so the people who are in charge now say they're all red, but in fact this is simply the Hegelian dialectic thesis, antithesis, here's the new synthesis.

And so in this new synthesis, what will rise up to meet it is a new antithesis, right? This is just the way of the the cultural Marxism as it marches through the institutions. So there's not really any victory here and just because Oklahoma's got all these red counties doesn't mean that there's Christian righteous ways of thinking, as can be noted from the other statistics.

Look at all of the teen pregnancy rates, all of the family destruction, look at all of the drug and alcohol abuse. Are we the number one state for pot shops? Yeah, well I don't know about that, but Senator Lankford, if I am recalling correctly, had an interview that I saw an article that we had like nine times more pot shops than the state of Colorado, whereas they have over a million more in population.

Yeah. So okay, so so many people go to church. Okay, well I'm glad that so many people are attending church regularly, but what goes on there? What is what is actually happening? Is it more or less everyone showing up and saying, to be a Christian, affirm everybody and be nice?

Niceness is the way. If you're showing up and they're saying, well things are getting bad, but it's supposed to, and don't try to get involved and change anything, because if you get involved with government, government is the beast promised, and therefore you're just helping Antichrist, and there's no reason to rearrange deck furniture on the Titanic.

It's supposed to get bad, but we're gonna get helicoptered out of here soon. Okay, if that's the mindset, then a million households attending church is not going to translate into some sort of salt, light, city on a hill.

Mm-hmm. Okay, that doesn't really translate that well. So I think that's probably how I would account for the disconnect. Now I don't I don't think it's gonna stay that way. I think Jesus has things well in hand.

I think that he turns people around, is turning people around, and I think that there's a whole lot of things going on that aren't being talked about. We live in a day of information, an age of information, but we do not live in an age of understanding.

I don't know all that Christ is up to, but I know I can't tell all that he's up to is my Great Shepherd just from the news headlines. That's right. Or from the statistics. Yeah, I was talking to.

Brooke this morning, we're talking about Revelation, but we're very short-term minded. So we look at right now, it looks real bad right now, so it's real bad. And then we're also geographically America or Western minded.

Yeah. When there's people all over the world where God is working and we don't hear about it. That's true. So long-term minded and just globally minded, it's all in his hands. He's got the whole world in his hands.

I like that song. It's a good song. It's.

Good. It's catchy. Yeah. Let me just briefly discuss that. I said there were nine times as many dispensaries. It was five. If that makes a difference. Five times. There are 12 times more licensed growers here than in Colorado.

And the amount of marijuana which is produced is 32 times the amount that is consumed in the state of Oklahoma. So I wonder where it's going. We're an industrious people.

But maybe that's the thing. Yeah. It's a Protestant, a Bible belt. Yeah. All right.

Media Recommendations and Closing Thoughts

Thank you for addressing that. Do you have any media recommendations? Yeah. I'm going to recommend a book by Barry Webb. It's part of the New Studies in Biblical Theology series. It's called Five Festal Garments, Christian Reflections on the Song of Songs, Ruth, Lamentations, Ecclesiastes and Esther.

Those are the five scrolls. They're called the scrolls. And they were set together in the Old Testament canon under the Hebrew arrangement and the Tanakh, the Torah, Nevi 'im and Kethuvim. And so these five scrolls go together and they were traditionally attached to major feasts in Jewish life.

And they would be read. Each one would have its reading just prior to those or during those feasts. So it's an interesting way to study these shorter books and to think about why were they placed together, how they bring a message of Christ, ultimately, as they are put together in connection to the liturgical calendar of Judaism.

So it's a really interesting book. It's not long. And because these are short books in the Bible, they're also short looks in this book. And I think it's very.

Interesting. So I don't have necessarily specific media recommendation. I recently started at a new job, which is requiring a lot of me. And it's requiring a lot of learning. I know this one's been mentioned before, Udemy.

There's also Pluralsight, places where you can go to learn. YouTube, you can go to learn. I would encourage people to take inventory of any tools or skills that maybe you've only been introduced to or that you've kind of started and see if there's anything there that you could expand or incorporate more in your life.