The Laken Riley Act to be discussed by the Senate

Laken Riley was a twenty-two-year-old nursing student who was murdered last year in Athens, Georgia, by Jose Ibarra. Ibarra is a Venezuelan immigrant who was in the US unlawfully and had been previously apprehended by the Border Patrol and released. He was sentenced last November to life in prison without parole for Riley’s murder.

Now an eight-page bill named for Laken has passed the House of Representatives and will be considered by the Senate this week. Its lead provisions would force immigration officers to arrest and detain immigrants in our country unlawfully who are suspected of minor theft of $100 or more. The bill would also allow state officials to sue the federal government to have specific immigrants detained and would force the State Department to block visas from countries that won’t take back individuals being deported.

This last provision is especially important, given that several countries, including Nicaragua, Honduras, Brazil, India, Russia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, are currently unwilling to accept people being deported from the US, even if they originated in these countries.

The bill passed the House with unanimous support from Republicans and the backing of 48 of 215 Democrats. In the Senate, 31 Democrats joined all Republicans to move the bill forward. Only nine Democrats were opposed.

My purpose in this article is not to discuss the bill in detail, debate its relative merits, or engage in larger controversies regarding immigration in the US. (For a larger discussion of the immigration issue, see my book, The State of Our Nation: 7 Critical Issues.) Rather, I’d like us to think together about this issue as a spiritual parable, one that applies to us all today.

“Faithful and just to forgive us our sins”

The Bible consistently reminds us that this world is not our home:

• We are “strangers and exiles on the earth” (Hebrews 11:13).
• “We are strangers before you and sojourners, as all our fathers were. Our days on the earth are like a shadow” (1 Chronicles 29:15).
• “I urge you as sojourners and exiles to abstain from the passions of the flesh, which wage war against the soul” (1 Peter 2:11).

By contrast, “Our citizenship is in heaven” (Philippians 3:20). In Christ, “You are no longer strangers and aliens, but you are fellow citizens with the saints and members of the household of God” (Ephesians 2:19).

We are not in our present “country” illegally: God created our lives at conception and brought us into this world by his providence (cf. Psalm 139:13–16). But we are nonetheless immigrants for whom this “country” is not our true home.

And, like the individuals for whom the Laken Riley Act is intended, we have committed crimes while here. Some are more severe than others, but “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23). We can ignore this fact; we can try to justify our sins to ourselves and others; we can try to atone for them ourselves.

Or we can be “justified by [God’s] grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (v. 24). How? The apostle continues: “whom God put forward as a propitiation by his blood, to be received by faith” (v. 25). “Propitiation” renders a Greek word that can be translated “means of forgiveness procured by a victim on our behalf.”

When we receive this gift of forgiveness by faith, our Father is “faithful and just to forgive us our sins and to cleanse us from all unrighteousness” (1 John 1:9). He then separates our sins from us “as far as the east is from the west” (Psalm 103:12), buries them in “the depths of the sea” (Micah 7:19), and “will remember [our] sins no more: (Hebrews 8:12; cf. Isaiah 43:25).

But what about the victims?

But I can hear someone asking, “How can God be just and forgive our sins without punishing us for committing them?”

Imagine how you would feel if the courts treated Laken Riley’s killer in this way. If he had confessed his crime and repented of his sin, would you be happy with the justice system if it forgave his crime and wiped his slate clean?

The biblical doctrine of grace is good news for us when we sin. But what about the victims of our sins?

Here we can note two relevant biblical facts:

One: God forgives the sins we confess, but their consequences remain in our lives. 

We lose reward in heaven (1 Corinthians 3:11–15) and often suffer for our sins on earth as well. Criminals, even when forgiven by God, are still subject to the criminal justice system, as they should be. If I drive a nail into a wall, you can remove the nail but the hole remains.

Two: God calls us to forgive those who sin against us, for their sake but especially for our own. 

We are to “love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (Matthew 5:44) so as to break the cycle of vengeance and retribution and absolve yourself of the burden of revenge.

I have long appreciated Frederick Buechner’s definition of “anger”:

Of the Seven Deadly Sins, anger is possibly the most fun. To lick your wounds, to smack your lips over grievances long past, to roll over your tongue the prospect of bitter confrontations still to come, to savor to the last toothsome morsel both the pain you are given and the pain you are giving back—in many ways it is a feast for a king. The chief drawback is that what you are wolfing down is yourself. The skeleton at the feast is you.

Again, this does not mean that we should not pursue legal response to crimes committed against us. I agree completely that Laken Riley’s killer deserved his sentence. But it does mean that while we trust justice to the justice system, we can choose to “be kind to one another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, as God in Christ forgave you” (Ephesians 4:32).

Biblical forgiveness is not pretending that we were not injured, overlooking the sin, excusing the behavior, or trying to forget it happened. It is pardoning the criminal, choosing not to punish the crime. Again, we do this for their sake but especially for our own.

In addition, part of why Scripture commends the importance of a system of justice that can pass judgment on crimes and those who commit them is to better allow us to practice such forgiveness in our own lives (Romans 13:1–7).

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free”

For what “crimes” do you need forgiveness today? Ask the Holy Spirit to bring to your mind anything that is wrong in your life, then confess what comes to your thoughts, claim your Father’s forgiveness, and make restitution where appropriate.

For what “criminals” do you need to choose forgiveness today? What sins have been committed against you? What pain are you carrying today? What thoughts of justice or even vengeance are living in your soul? Name them, turn them over to God, trust him and our justice system to respond appropriately (Romans 12:19; 13:1–7), and ask him to help you pardon the crimes so you can move forward unburdened by their pain.

Ethicist Lewis Smedes, author of the marvelous book Forgive and Forget, observed,

“To forgive is to set a prisoner free and discover that the prisoner was you.”

What “prisoner” will you set free today?