To awake in the morning and find that a long time saint in my church had passed away overnight was difficult but not unexpected. Discovering that over fifty innocents were viciously executed by an evil man with high powered rifles from his lofty perch in a hotel room overlooking a crowd? That is a cold slap in the face. That is too difficult to handle. It defies any hope I have of wrapping my mind around it. Fifty-plus bodies on the hard sidewalks of a desert city. Bloodless bodies. Voiceless bodies. Bodies that would lay there for eternity if no one picks them up. The video's revealing the staccato cadence of automatic weapons firing on the innocents. Automatic weapons that are not legal anywhere in our country. First the tears come and then the blood boils. I feel my fangs growing like those of a rabid dog ready to pounce on whoever perpetrated this insanity.
The voices are already crying out. "Why? Why did this happen?" The Bible's answer is clear. Because evil exists. Because the planet is broken. Because the results of that evil and brokenness is more evil and brokenness.
Jesus told a story in Luke 13. It seems that Pilate had his soldiers murder some Galileans who were worshipping. Pretty cold blooded, wouldn't you say? Kind of like Las Vegas last night. The question posed to Jesus was the same one we pose. "Why did that happen?" Jesus reply was enormously relevant for their day and ours. "Do you think those Galileans were worse sinners than all the other people from Galilee? Is that why they suffered? Not at all! And you will perish, too, unless you repent of your sins and turn to God. And what about the eighteen people who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them? Were they the worst sinners in Jerusalem? No, and I tell you again that unless you repent, you will perish too."
Jesus wanted to squash an idea quickly for all time. Our chances of being the victim of a catastrophe is not determined by the level of our sinfulness. He wanted it made clear that all of us ... ALL OF US ... deserve the painful and deadly results of living on the broken planet because we were the ones who broke it. When we chose to disobey God rather than to obey Him, we set off a chain reaction of very bad things. People without God go mad. People without God do evil things. People without God attack other people. And sometimes bad things just happen for what seems no reason at all. Maybe a tower falls on you. A tower that nobody pushed over. As a pastor, one of the godliest people I ever buried was a young woman who repeatedly battled leukemia until it finally took her life in her early twenties. The tower of cancer fell on her. Who pushed it? Who can I point a finger at and demand retribution from? Well. We all pushed it when we invited sin into our world and thumbed our noses at God. Jesus wants us to know that He cares very much ... but the truth is ... we all deserve a tower to fall on us. So before you start pointing fingers at those you believe are most responsible for the evil perpetrated last night in a desert city in our homeland, remember the words of Jesus, "...unless you repent, you will perish too." Was the shooter insane? You bet he was. Was he evil? Absolutely. If he had survived should he be held accountable? Yes ... for every single bullet fired and every single life stolen. But before you start throwing around the blame to those you would call his "enablers," remember this. I broke this world when I agreed with those before me who invited sin into it. And so did you. Nobody deserves to have a finger pointed at them today. Everybody deserves to have a finger pointed at them today.
God help us.
I have no answers today for how to fix the evil embedded in our nation, other than the advice that Jesus gave. And so I repent. I repent for being one of the sin-filled people that brought us to this place. And then I choose to live out Ecclesiastes 5:2, "...God is in heaven, and you are here on earth. So let your words be few."
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