Deut 19:15 One witness is not enough to convict a man accused of any crime or offense he may have committed. A matter must be established by the testimony of two or three witnesses. (NIV)
I’m a news junkie. I read two newspapers, two news magazines, and multiple news websites daily. So even though I would like to I can’t avoid seeing at least the headlines of some pretty scurrilous stuff. If it is shallow and salacious (read: Michael Jackson and Kim Kardashian) it gets skipped. But if it is serious it gets analyzed.
The allegations against Herman Cain are pretty serious stuff. Do we want a man like that, if he is like that, in the highest office in the land? And what about Penn State Coach Joe Paterno? Is he the icon of integrity that he has preached and promoted? Or is he a bum who sold out helpless kids in order to protect his football program?
Or is the truth about both men, both situations, something none of us really knows? I believe it is.
I had a taste, just a tiny taste once, of Washington Politics, and I saw the viciousness of those whose summum bonum is power. It would not surprise me to find that the charges against Cain are fabricated.
And I once had a good friend, a colleague in the church choir, who to my utter shock and surprise showed up on NBC’s “To Catch a Predator” clearly caught in the act of preying on teenage girls. I learned then the deceptive power of sexual predators. It would not surprise me to learn that Joe Pa was deeply deceived by his former apprentice.
That is why I wish, I wish very deeply, that the rest of us would take these kinds of situations – where careers, character, honor, and justice are concerned – as seriously as God takes them. Over and over again, the Spirit-inspired writers of scripture quote the command stated above: “Every matter must be established by two or three witnesses.” (Nu. 35:30; Dt. 17:6-7; Matt. 18:16; 1 Tim. 5:19). And that not in the media “mob”, which cares more about eyeball counts than impartiality, but in an orderly court of law. If we did that, if we took them as seriously as God takes them, we would grieve over the possibility that men could be guilty of such evil, we would pray more often to be delivered from it, and we would wait for truth to be established before we take up stones to throw.
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