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Was It Justice?
In a different state he adopted a new name and began a new life. Using his new name, he got a driver’s license, held jobs and even got married.
The years went by, and Robert Lucas lived the life of a model citizen. Ten years-twenty years-and still he lived quietly with his wife and “maintained a low profile.”
Twenty-three years after his escape, plainclothesmen came to his door and asked if he were Robert Lucas. One agent later reported, “He didn’t say much. He just stuttered and stammered for a while, then he said he had a heart condition.”
The heart condition was real: two months later he died of a heart attack while still fighting extradition to the state from which he had escaped.
Friends from his new life bitterly blamed the authorities who ordered his re-arrest. “Going to jail and worrying about it-that’s what killed him,” they said.
But a State Bureau of Investigation official said agents had no choice but to arrest the man. “You’ve got to understand he killed a man,” said the head of the fugitive squad. “It’s our job to find him whether he’s been gone one, two, ten or thirty years. You can’t just forget a man who killed another man. It’s our job. The law says we’ve got to do it.”
Was it justice? Was it justice to take a man who lived an apparently blameless life for 23 years and to put him in prison for a long-ago murder? Was it justice to take him from his wife of 20 years? Was it justice to discount all the good things he may have done in that time?
Yes, it was justice. It was THE LAW. The law can’t forgive. Like the mirror, it can show you how dirty your face is, but can do nothing to clean you up. Whether man’s law or God’s law, it can only judge and condemn; it can’t forgive. It has nothing to do with mercy!
God’s law says that “the soul that sinneth, it shall die” (Ezekiel 18:20). And, “the wages of sin is death” (Romans 6:23).
There is no escaping that law. The sentence has been pronounced on every soul that has ever sinned and, postpone it though we may, in time we must face the fact that “it is appointed unto men once to die, but after this the judgment” (Hebrews 9:27).
The law can do no more, but God can! No, He can’t change His law, which is “holy, and just, and good,” but He can cleanse that sinful heart because “the blood of Jesus Christ His Son cleanseth us from all sin.”
“For what the law could not do…God sending His own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh, and for sin, condemned sin in the flesh: that the righteousness of the law might be fulfilled in us” (Romans 8:3-4).
“For Christ is the end of the law for righteousness to every one that believeth….For with the heart man believeth unto righteousness; and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation” (Romans 10:4,10).
