The one thing about the Epstein mess that we all should be talking about, but no one is

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Peter Heck

Jul 18, 2025

It's the story that won't go away. Theories abound as to why President Donald Trump has announced the Jeffrey Epstein files to be a hoax after his own Justice Department led everyone on through a grandstanding photo op with online influencers.

  • Maybe he's on the list himself.

  • Maybe a close confidant is on the list.

  • Maybe the list has been contaminated after being handled by any number of unreliable actors.

  • Maybe there were people who did bad things with young girls, but not in some grand clandestine operation that Epstein nefariously organized.

I don't have the answers to any of it, and all people talking incessantly about it don't either. Still, I wonder if any of us have taken the time to acknowledge a truth made apparent by the Epstein furor - one that unlike the compulsive obsession with knowing the grimy, perverted details of the serial molester's behavior, will have an eternal impact on us.

At the heart of the Epstein outrage is a furious, fanatic demand for justice. Young girls were wronged. They were abused. They were exploited. Left or Right, liberal or conservative, Democrat or Republican, the voices demanding "the list," the details, the flight logs, are all doing so because they want justice for those girls.

Is there an ulterior, political motive? Isn't there always? Democrats demand the list now because they think it will implicate Donald Trump and his friends. Republicans giddily anticipated the list because they believed it would implicate leftist Hollywood elites and the Obama cabal. But notice, regardless of their motive, the ultimate desire of both is to bring perpetrators (whether it's Donald Trump acolytes or leftwing partisans) to answer for their crimes.

Here's something that would be worth asking:

Where does that desire for justice originate? Where does it come from?

The uncomfortable answer that logical minds know (even if they war against admitting it) is that apart from receiving an internal, moral sense of justice from some objective, morally just Source, we cannot answer these questions sufficiently. Evolutionary biology may try to explain a sense of justice derived from group selection or reciprocal altruism, but for critical thinkers, this falls woefully short.

Justice often demands helping others at a personal cost, assuming a risk of enduring punishment personally in order to stand up for the vulnerable. Not to mention that natural selection operates at the individual or gene level, and a self-sacrificing, just person would be quickly overcome by a selfish individual in their group. It all leads to a dead end for evolutionary naturalists: what is "good for the group" isn't always good for the individual; and natural selection doesn't operate on the basis of group loyalty.

The truth is that those of us angry about the crimes allegedly committed on Epstein Island feel this sense of moral outrage despite those injustices not affecting us personally. What explains that? Certainly not any "tactical fairness" principle. No, it's an excessively moral proposition. And without a Moral Authority to the universe apart from ourselves, that just shouldn't exist. But it clearly does.

If "justice" is merely a useful instinct, rather than something objectively true, then it isn't real justice, it is merely an illusion. Real justice cannot truly exist without being rooted in something that transcends our shared experience.

So let's be clear:

What Jeffrey Epstein did to underage girls isn't unjust simply because it violates what our culture has evolved to regard as unfair or inappropriate. It isn't some subjective preference voted on by the collective conscience of ultimately self-serving humans. Yet that is all that evolutionary naturalism would allow us to conclude, and it's exactly what those who deny God's existence are forced to admit at the presuppositional level.

I have a better answer. What Epstein did was wrong because it violates the character of a just God who Himself isn't only "just," He IS justice. He's the standard. He's the guidepost. He is how we can determine what is right and wrong, good and bad, true and false.

The impulse in each of us that fuels us to care about injustice even when we aren't personally impacted, that provokes us to risk our lives for strangers, that prevents us from (at least in some cases) killing even in self-defense, that causes us to pursue abstract justice (things like laws, rights, and principles) - that is the image of a just Creator tattooed on our hearts.

It's the only reasonable explanation for those not just looking for a way around the obvious.

And why do so many look for a way around admitting it? Because that sense of justice also convicts us of our own injustices, our own faults, failures, and sins. We recognize that though we haven't committed the crimes of Epstein, our record is not unblemished, our consciences not unscathed.

We know that if there is a Justice that will hold child-molesting human monsters eternally accountable for their misdeeds, It will surely hold us accountable for our own.

It's a terrifying proposition.

Well, it was, until the Cross changed everything. There at Calvary that just God met His own demands and offered us an undeserved absolution. And truthfully, THAT is where the Epstein drama should lead us all. It's where everything should lead us all.

Because in the end, that's the only Truth that matters.


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Disclaimer: The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of Not the Bee or any of its affiliates.