Botched Execution, IRS Citizenship Check, Pentagon's Armor of God

A woman is still alive. After the state tried to kill her. That's the sentence I keep coming back to this morning. This is The Gospel Briefing. I'm Charles King. Here's what we know. Wednesday night in Tennessee, death row inmate Christa Pike was scheduled to die by lethal injection. The procedure failed. She is still alive. Her attorneys say she is in critical condition and receiving life-saving medical care. Her legal team's statement was striking. The real issue, they said, is that we don't know anything. Not what went wrong. Not what was administered. Not what comes next. That is not normal. The state is the one institution we grant authority to take a human life. And the one we expect to explain, in detail, how and why. When it can't, something has slipped. Set aside, for a moment, where you land on capital punishment. Christians have disagreed about this for centuries in good faith. What Scripture does not permit is indifference to the image of God in any human being — including Christa Pike, and the family of the young woman she was convicted of murdering nearly thirty years ago. Proverbs 20:23 says, "Unequal weights are an abomination to the Lord, and false scales are not good." The weight God hates is the one no one can see. If you want to sit with that passage today, open Proverbs twenty in Bible Copilot and read slowly. Development two. The Trump administration is proposing that U.S. taxpayers disclose citizenship and work authorization status directly to the IRS on next year's tax form. Yes-or-no checkboxes for filer and spouse. Not optional. Administration officials say the change could save taxpayers up to two billion dollars by stopping ineligible benefit claims. Privacy advocates warn the data could be used to identify and deport people. Last year, a federal judge halted a similar data-sharing deal — but not before the IRS had already handed over the addresses of forty-seven thousand people to ICE. Here's the tension. Romans 13 gives government real authority to order public life. Exodus 23 forbids using lawful systems to oppress the vulnerable. Both are true. Both bind the Christian conscience. Watch what this policy actually does, not just what it promises. Pray for wisdom today before you repeat what you have heard. Development three. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has launched a new Office of Religious Affairs at the Pentagon, reporting directly to him. He said the department is, quote, putting on the full armor of God. The office will advocate for military chaplains. The Pentagon also recently cut its list of officially recognized religious traditions from more than two hundred down to thirty-one. For Christians, this one deserves care, not cheering. Religious liberty for chaplains is a genuine good. But Ephesians six, the armor-of-God passage, is about the believer standing against spiritual darkness — not a nation-state suiting up. When Scripture gets conscripted into state branding, the Bible usually loses something, even when the intent is sincere. Your practice today. Pray for one person caught in a system you don't control — a prisoner, an immigrant, a service member. By name if you know one. This episode is presented by Bible Copilot. Open Bible Copilot and start with today's Verse of the Day, Isaiah one, verse seventeen. You'll walk through a guided study: what the passage says, what it means, what it reveals about God, and how it lands in your life today. Three questions each day are free. Start at mybiblecopilot dot com slash gospel. That's mybiblecopilot dot com slash gospel, or search Bible Copilot in the App Store. Isaiah 1:17 reads: "Learn to do good; seek justice, correct oppression; bring justice to the fatherless, plead the widow's cause." Four verbs. Learn. Seek. Correct. Plead. None are passive. None require you to run the system. All require you to care when the system falters. Thanks for listening to The Gospel Briefing. The machinery of this world will sometimes jam in public. The throne of God never will. I'll see you Monday.