You Do the Crime, Someone Else Does the Time

Dear friend,

There’s an old saying: if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime. I want to write to you about the arrangement that quietly reverses it: you do the crime, and someone else does the time. I think that arrangement is immoral. I also think your own Scripture agrees with me more than the way it is often preached.

What your insurer actually is

Your insurer is a surety for your accidents and your liability.

Suretyship has three parties: a creditor who is owed, a principal who owes, and a surety who promises the creditor, if the principal does not pay, I will. A liability policy fits that shape exactly:

Picture it in practice. You run a red light and injure someone. The injured person is paid, but not by you. The insurer pays them, and you drive away. The person who caused the harm isn’t the person who pays for it. The cost is spread across every other policyholder in the pool through their premiums.

That is the whole product: you do the crime, someone else does the time.

Even the insurer draws a line

The industry whose entire business is carrying other people’s liability still refuses to carry one kind.

Every liability policy excludes harm you cause on purpose. You can’t insure your house and then burn it down. You can’t insure against the assault you plan to commit. In many jurisdictions, criminal fines and punitive damages can’t be insured at all, as a matter of public policy, because the law wants the punishment to land on the person who earned it.

The reasoning is simple, and the insurers understand it better than anyone. A promise to pay for your deliberate wrong is a reward for the wrong. If someone else will do the time, the crime becomes free, and anything free gets done more often.

So even the business of transferring liability admits that transferring guilt is corrupt. It allows the arrangement only for accidents, and even there it charges a premium and watches the claims.

The policy many people think they hold

Your Scripture calls Jesus a surety:

By so much was Jesus made a surety of a better testament. (Hebrews 7:22)

I’m not writing to rule on your theology. I’m writing about how that word gets used in everyday life. Too often it is used like a policy with no exclusions: “I’m covered. Whatever I do, the debt is paid. Someone already did the time.” That is the insurer’s arrangement with the one limit the insurer refuses to drop removed. It covers the deliberate act, the repeated act, and the act planned in advance because the cover is known to be there.

Ask the question plainly. A man commits a murder. An innocent volunteer offers to serve his sentence, and the judge agrees. The murderer walks free, and the innocent man goes to prison. Is that justice?

No court on earth would call it justice. It is two wrongs: the guilty go unpunished, and the innocent are punished. Your own Scripture calls it the same:

He that justifieth the wicked, and he that condemneth the just, even they both are abomination to the LORD. (Proverbs 17:15)

The soul that sinneth, it shall die. The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son: the righteousness of the righteous shall be upon him, and the wickedness of the wicked shall be upon him. (Ezekiel 18:20)

The fathers shall not be put to death for the children, neither shall the children be put to death for the fathers: every man shall be put to death for his own sin. (Deuteronomy 24:16)

For every man shall bear his own burden. (Galatians 6:5)

Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap. (Galatians 6:7)

Scripture even warns against becoming a surety at all: “He that is surety for a stranger shall smart for it” (Proverbs 11:15). It knew how the arrangement gets abused.

I know your answer, because it’s the centre of your faith: the innocent for the guilty, freely given. I’m not asking you to give that up. I’m asking you to notice that even if the surety volunteered, the principal who plans his conduct around it is doing exactly what no court, no insurer, and by its own words no Scripture permits. Accepting a gift is one thing. Committing the crime because you know someone else will do the time is another.

Faith as the premium

Every policy has a premium, and in the popular version of this policy the premium is faith. Believe, profess, attend, pray, and the cover is bought. Once the premium is paid, the policyholder feels insured.

Look at what a premium actually does, though.

A premium is paid to the surety, not to the person you harmed. When you pay your car insurer, the person you’ll someday injure sees none of that money. When you pay your faith to God, the person you’ve already injured receives none of it either. The premium settles your account with your surety. It does nothing for your creditor.

A premium buys cover for accidents, not a licence for intent. As we saw above, no insurer will sell you a policy for the harm you plan to do. Paying the premium more faithfully doesn’t change that. It only makes the fraud more expensive.

Paying the premium is not the same as honouring the policy. Jesus said it himself:

Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father which is in heaven. (Matthew 7:21)

Saying “Lord, Lord” is the premium. Doing the will is the conduct the premium was supposed to go along with. A man who pays the premium faithfully and drives drunk every weekend isn’t a good policyholder. He’s the reason everyone else’s premiums go up.

Prayer does not make the injured party whole

Insurance has a principle called indemnity: the injured party must be made whole, restored as nearly as possible to where they were before the loss. That is the standard every honest claim is measured against. It’s also the standard your prayers fail.

When you wrong someone and then pray about it, the prayer is a transaction between you and God. It doesn’t touch the injured party’s ledger. Their car is still wrecked. Their money is still gone. Their reputation is still damaged. Their trust in you is still broken. You may feel forgiven, but they are still unpaid. A wrongdoer’s prayer settles the wrongdoer’s feelings, not the victim’s loss.

Your Scripture doesn’t let confession stand in for repayment. It requires both, and it says who the repayment goes to:

When a man or woman shall commit any sin that men commit, to do a trespass against the LORD, and that person be guilty; Then they shall confess their sin which they have done: and he shall recompense his trespass with the principal thereof, and add unto it the fifth part thereof, and give it unto him against whom he hath trespassed. (Numbers 5:6–7)

Confession goes to God. The principal, plus twenty percent, goes to the person you wronged. The Law even sets the timing. The wrongdoer must restore what he took “in the principal, and shall add the fifth part more thereto, and give it unto him to whom it appertaineth, in the day of his trespass offering” (Leviticus 6:4–5). The offering at the altar doesn’t replace the repayment. The repayment comes with it, on the same day.

Jesus put the order even more plainly. The injured party comes first, and the worship waits:

Therefore if thou bring thy gift to the altar, and there rememberest that thy brother hath ought against thee; Leave there thy gift before the altar, and go thy way; first be reconciled to thy brother, and then come and offer thy gift. (Matthew 5:23–24)

The prophets went further. They said the prayers of an unrepentant wrongdoer aren’t even heard:

And when ye spread forth your hands, I will hide mine eyes from you: yea, when ye make many prayers, I will not hear: your hands are full of blood. Wash you, make you clean; put away the evil of your doings from before mine eyes; cease to do evil; Learn to do well; seek judgment, relieve the oppressed, judge the fatherless, plead for the widow. (Isaiah 1:15–17)

And when Zacchaeus met Jesus, he didn’t pray about his debts. He paid them:

Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor; and if I have taken any thing from any man by false accusation, I restore him fourfold. (Luke 19:8)

Fourfold. Not “I’ll pray for the people I cheated.” He made them whole, and then some.

Your tradition’s own sureties sent the debtor home

Look at how the sureties in your Bible actually behave.

• Judah stood as surety for Benjamin: “I will be surety for him; of my hand shalt thou require him” (Genesis 43:9). When the moment came, he offered himself as a slave in the boy’s place: “let thy servant abide instead of the lad a bondman to my lord” (Genesis 44:33). The surety paid with himself, not with someone else.
• Paul stood as surety for the runaway Onesimus: “If he hath wronged thee, or oweth thee ought, put that on mine account; I Paul have written it with mine own hand, I will repay it” (Philemon 1:18–19). But Paul still sent Onesimus back to face the man he had wronged. The surety didn’t excuse the debtor from going home.
• Paul also anticipated the abuse directly: “What shall we say then? Shall we continue in sin, that grace may abound? God forbid” (Romans 6:1–2).
• James finished the thought: “Even so faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone” (James 2:17). Faith without works is a premium paid on a policy the policyholder has no intention of honouring.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, a pastor who was executed for resisting the Nazis, named the abuse in The Cost of Discipleship:

Cheap grace is the preaching of forgiveness without requiring repentance… Cheap grace is grace without discipleship, grace without the cross, grace without Jesus Christ, living and incarnate.

Cheap grace is “you do the crime, someone else does the time,” spoken in church.

What I’m asking

Do your own time.

Your prayers are between you and God. Your restitution is between you and the person you hurt, and no amount of the first pays off the second. If you’ve wronged someone, go to them, make them whole, and add the fifth part, as your own Law says. Then go to the altar.

If you believe Someone paid for you, the honourable response isn’t to keep running up the account. It’s to live so that no one ever has to pay for you again. Keep your word when it costs you. Carry your own burden. Then, if a surety ever does stand behind you, it will be standing behind a man who tried with everything he had never to need it.

That isn’t a licence. It’s a debt, and the only honest way to pay it is with your own conduct.

Your friend, in good faith

NOTICE: THIS IS AN AI GENERATED ARTICLE, TTFL alumni do not value anything you believe, what you believe is harmful to those of us who chose to live in reality, we are not your friends and if you are a “Christian” of the Piece-Of-Shit variety, you will quickly be “excommunicated”/banned. We don’t want to associate with losers who burden “their Hero”, Christ promised better men than him, who the fuck are you, and what have you done lately? [Andrew Torba excluded]

#AllBeliefIsEvil

Scripture quotations are from the King James Version, checked against Bible Hub. The Bonhoeffer passage is from the English translation of The Cost of Discipleship (1937).