So James Holmes goes into a movie theater and starts shooting and murdering little kids. The world is aghast and searching for answers. Talking heads and PHD’s get on television and bombard the airways with theorems ad nauseum, but nothing seems to adequately address the basic questions of why someone would do something like that and why a loving God would allow it?
Hmmmm… That’s a tough subject. What I can tell you is that murder is not unique to our modern society; it actually began with the very first family and their sons Cain and Able, and the brutality and blood lust has continued in every society right on through today.
I imagine that Adam and Eve understood more clearly that their sin was the catalyst that brought murder into their once perfect environment. God told them what would happen if they disobeyed His command; “You will surely die!”
Yep that is what happened and the ultimate curse for sin has continued right through today.
I imagine Adam and Eve’s grief for their kids was as real and heart breaking as those families directly affected by James Holmes. Or for that matter the families of the victims of the Romans, Alexander the Great, the 17,000 killed so far in Syria, the hundreds of thousands killed in Iraq, and elsewhere in the Middle East, or in Chicago’s vicious Southside District where Bloods and Crips have made Chicago the murder capital of the world.
Taking away guns won’t stop it; in fact murder cannot be legislated away. Murder is sin and sin will be removed when people turn to God; sadly that will not occur until after this life has run its course and Jesus removes us from this spoiled fallen world.
So why does God allow it? Only He knows the complete answer to that question and I’m not sure anyone has the intellect to understand even if He chose to further explain; otherwise He probably would have done so.
Personally I don’t think God is interested in spending His days with a bunch of robots. He chose us and He gave us a free will to choose or reject Him. As a result He will spend eternity with those who love Him, and those who reject Him will spend eternity apart from Him where there will be “weeping and gnashing of the teeth”…
Murder began with the disobedience of Adam and Eve and we inherited that DNA. Shedding of blood has special significance in the Bible and in fact Jesus had to shed His blood in order that we might once again be reunited with Him and live forever free from sin.
Why?
I don’t know.
I do know that death is the ultimate consequence of sin and it causes unbearable grief to families. David Wilkerson once said that passion for Christ is born out of a “baptism of anguish”. As I pray for those in Aurora Colorado this morning I pray that their baptism of anguish will yield a passion for Christ because only He can fill the terrible hole left in their hearts by a crazed gunman. Perhaps that is one good purpose that God will achieve with this horrific tragedy.
Unfortunately that is the only encouragement I can muster this morning aside from urging our dear Lord to come quickly and end the madness of this sick fallen world.
There will be those this morning who disagree with my analysis. It is interesting to me that satan whispered to Eve, “You will not surely die,” the serpent said to the woman”. Satan is a liar and deceives many. The Apostle John named him as a murderer; maybe you’ll believe him when I urge you to blame satan, our own sins, and not God for this tragedy.
John 8:44
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desire. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies.