Behind the pounding fists and finger-pointing surrounding the still-partial release of the Epstein emails, there are grave warnings to clamp down on. One of them is the discarded adage, be sure your sins will find you out.
Scripture describes the evil man reassuring himself his wickedness is hidden from God:
For the wicked… says to himself, “God has forgotten; He has hidden His face; He will never see it.” (Psalm 10)
The righteous know better:
O God, it is You who knows my folly, and my wrongs are not hidden from You. (Psalm 69:5)
It is appointed unto man once to die, and the Christian lives in the constant knowledge of what follows death: the judgement seat of God.
For God will bring every act to judgment, everything which is hidden, whether it is good or evil. (Ecclesiastes 12:14)
The surveillance state
It’s one thing for God to know all, but quite another for rulers to seek this same knowledge for the purpose of having more control over their citizens. This desire for knowledge reminds us of the Tower of Babel, and also of Margaret Mead’s response to the release of the Kinsey Reports:
Quite a good deal of our virtue has depended upon people not knowing what other people were doing—if they had known, they would have gone and done likewise; and when they weren’t quite sure, sometimes they didn’t.1
America’s surveillance state is destroying privacy. Two things brought this home to us the past few weeks.
The search for Nancy Guthrie has been at the top of national news for weeks, and Americans have found out Google provided law enforcement officers access to recordings from Guthrie’s Google Nest doorbell cam, and this despite Guthrie never giving permission for Google to store her images. Then a warmhearted Super Bowl ad for Amazon’s Ring doorbell cam showed Ring cams surveilling the neighborhood and finding a lost dog. Meanwhile, our cities and towns have installed Flock cameras on roadways and intersections to track when and where we drive. (Check out your local Flock cameras here.)
Some pushback is developing, but why? Isn’t it good to find lost mothers and dogs?
Knowledge, power, and corruption
Of course it’s good to find lost dogs and mothers, but ends don’t justify means. When the price we pay to find lost loved ones and dogs is big tech working with government hand in glove to keep on file for immediate access by law enforcement officers the most intimate knowledge of every word and action of every American citizen, that price is absurdly high and will bankrupt our civil freedoms.
Many mothers will argue for it, but I trust we still have a few fathers able to say “No.”
Not being callous about the suffering of those whose dogs and loved ones are lost, the establishment and maintenance of our surveillance state must not be justified by the possibility of solving such personal tragedies. Freedom and justice are not protected by sentimental appeals pitched to the weaker sex. It took bloodshed to end the Third Reich, not poems and lullabies.
If power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, every last civil entity that employs tech to surveil its citizens inevitably will employ this power to control its citizens politically (which means spiritually). Speaking truthfully, even if the Trump administration wipes out our present evil Deep State (which, tellingly, they haven’t done yet), I don’t trust President Trump or any of his administration to leave an administrative legacy we can turn our attention from because it’s safe.
“Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” from the greatest cut of the greatest rock ‘n’ roll album is a truism for a reason. Pres. Trump has done a herculean job, but the good he and his administration have done should not lull us to sleep concerning the danger of near-absolute power and the certainty it will be abused by the Trump administration, also. Up there near the top of the threats we face through the abuse of power is the abuse of technology to destroy privacy.
It shouldn’t be necessary to say this to Christians, but President Trump is not the Second Coming of Jesus. He is a fallen man, like the rest of us, and if we’re honest, each of us knows the temptations we would be susceptible to if we lived in the White House and flew on Air Force One. So then it is only love for us to keep close watch on President Trump and his appointees, reigning them in at points where they abuse their power.
Epstein’s flame and moths
Turning from the surveillance state, we now focus on Jeffrey Epstein and all the moths who circled his flame and are now, years later, getting burned. State surveillance and the state’s release of millions of private documents should serve as a white-hot reminder that God sees all.
As has been made so horribly obvious, the rich, entitled, and powerful forgot this. Hubris led them to consider themselves above the law, but even that didn’t work out for them. Yet this is quite insignificant, actually, when we consider the strand of spider’s web they hang from in their finals years before facing God and eternity.
The Christian’s freedom
Christians usually think the extent of their duty to God and man is to keep their own hands clean. Personal piety is the height of our aspirations, but this is contrary to God’s command. We are not just to repent of our own sins, and privately, but also to expose others’ sins, doing so publicly. In other words, whether intentionally or not, the civil authorities obeyed God’s commands when they broadcast the millions of Epstein documents chronicling the things that were done by him and his friends “in secret”:
Do not participate in the unfruitful deeds of darkness, but instead even expose them; for it is disgraceful even to speak of the things which are done by them in secret. (Ephesians 5;11-12)
By way of contrast to all the Epstein filth and degradation, see how the godly live; and especially how they pray.
Surely readers have noticed how often in funerals and worship services, the first two thirds of Psalm 139 are read while the last third is left unread. The Christian who knows the fierceness of battle between good and evil in the world and his own heart, though, finds great comfort in the oft-deleted last third of David’s prayer:
Surely thou wilt slay the wicked, O God: depart from me therefore, ye bloody men. For they speak against thee wickedly, and thine enemies take thy name in vain. Do not I hate them, O LORD, that hate thee? and am not I grieved with those that rise up against thee? I hate them with perfect hatred: I count them mine enemies.
Search me, O God, and know my heart: try me, and know my thoughts: and see if there be any wicked way in me, and lead me in the way everlasting. (Psalm 139:19-24)
“Search me, O God.”
Try me, Know me, See me. Lead me. It is not man’s law that is the deepest concern of the godly, but God’s Law. The Christian man asks God to examine him down to the bottom of his heart. Has he loved God and has he loved his neighbor?
He knows only God can see him as he truly is, in all his most devious and calculating thoughts, and only God is able to correct his hidden sin and make him righteous. For this reason, this is his plea to God: “Lead me in the way everlasting.” Holiness is what he seeks. Holiness is the “way everlasting.”
Many of us have hidden sins known only to our wife or closest friend or pastor.
Some have hidden sins known only to God—or maybe, better, all of us have countless sins known only to God. Again, in the end, everything will be brought to account:
The sins of some men are quite evident, going before them to judgment; for others, their sins follow after. Likewise also, deeds that are good are quite evident, and those which are otherwise cannot be concealed. (1Timothy 5:24-25)
For nothing is hidden that will not become evident, nor anything secret that will not be known and come to light. (Luke 8:17)
It should be a relief to us that nothing is hidden from God, and yet it is not a relief to the masters of the universe caught with their pants down, hanging with Jeff and smirking at one another as they fly in his jet down to his island, or join Woody Allen at Jeff’s soirees at his Manhattan townhouse.
Why not?
Because these men know nothing of godly repentance. Rather, the repentance they know intimately is their sins being found out. They should have been sure of it, but in their hubris they thought they were above any accountability so that, now, all they regret is being caught and publicly pilloried.
Repentance: the Christian’s privilege, joy, and peace
The first of Luther’s 95 Theses was “When our Lord and Master Jesus Christ said, “Repent” [MATT. 4:17], he willed the entire life of believers to be one of repentance.”
Read Thomas Watson’s little book, The Doctrine of Repentance. Preach a three-part sermon series on repentance using it as your help.
Like the apologies and forgiveness which are the currency necessary for restoring the unity and peace of the Christian home and Church, no repentance is ever perfect. But there is an eternity of difference between the repentance of those who thought their sins were hidden from man and God, then found they were awfully wrong; and the repentance of those who asked God to search their heart and see if there is any wicked way in them, and He did.
How did they respond?
They ran to Him for forgiveness and mercy:
So he got up and came to his father. But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and felt compassion for him, and ran and embraced him and kissed him.
And the son said to him, “Father, I have sinned against heaven and in your sight; I am no longer worthy to be called your son.” (Luke 15:20-21)
Dear reader, Dietrich Bonhoeffer blesses us with this description of the bondage of secret sins:
The more isolated a person is, the more destructive will be the power of sin over him, and the more deeply he becomes involved in it, the more disastrous is his isolation. Sin wants to remain unknown. It shuns the light. …In confession the light of the Gospel breaks into the darkness and seclusion of the heart. The sin must be brought into the light.2
Come to Jesus. Come to Jesus as you are—not as you parade yourself on socials or cosplay at church Sunday mornings. Not as you purport to be as you demand the admiration of your wife and adulation of your children.
Come to Jesus with your secret sins and ask your wife, children, and church; ask the people of God to help you repent and flee from them.
This is the first and main lesson believers and unbelievers together should learn from the Epstein files: God sees all, Jesus came to save sinners, and those who fear Him run to Him in true repentance, seeking from Him forgiveness and sanctification.
Any church corporately practicing this life giving call to repentance and faith—particularly in the matter of secret sins—is a church united in unity, purity, and peace.
Don’t ever forget or doubt Jesus’ declaration in the face of the Jews’ endless parading of their law-keeping and self-righteousness:
It is not those who are well who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous but sinners to repentance. (Luke 5:31-32)
Were he not already dead, Jeffrey Epstein could come to Jesus and be forgiven.
So can you. So can I.
| ↑1 | Margaret Mead, “An Anthropologist Looks at the Kinsey Report,” Child and Family 18, no. 4 (1979): 294–303. Mead’s speech was given at a conference sponsored by the American Social Hygiene Association. The conference was held in New York City in 1948, two months after Kinsey’s first report was published. |
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| ↑2 | Bonhoeffer, Life Together; p. 112. |
