In the United States we have experienced too many mass shootings. All of them are terrible because all of them involved the killing of innocent lives. But it is particularly unsettling when these shootings result in the deaths of young children. For most Americans the memories of these shootings begin with the Columbine school massacre in 1999. Since that horrible day, when 12 high school students were murdered, we have had to hear the news of too many school shootings in which multiple murders of children was the result.
Two of these mass murders particularly break our hearts because the victims were grade school children. Just this May, on the 24th, in Uvalde, TX, 19 children were murdered at the Robb Elementary School shooting, and in 2012, 20 first-grade children were murdered at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, CT.
It is no wonder that the emotional response of many is to ban the sale of certain guns, especially to people who are 18 years of age or younger. It is difficult to argue with their reasoning. After all, why wouldn’t anyone want to ban the sale of these guns if by doing so we could spare the lives of so many innocents. To these people, guns are the problem; getting rid of guns is the solution.
Yet it is also hard to argue with those who reason that guns are not the problem; rather the problem begins with the individuals who commits these mass murders. After all, why wouldn’t anyone want to find the root problems that led these individuals to the state of mind that led them to kill so many innocents. To these people, the individual is the problem, and confronting mental health issues is part of the solution.
Arguing for or against gun control will never serve to eliminate these horrifying mass murders. To begin any kind of recovery and remedy we must first acknowledge the fact that those on either side will never come to an agreement on gun control. If we continue to strictly limit our thinking to the control of guns without thinking about other relevant issues, we will likely never come face-to-face with the underlying causes of these mass murders.
In many ways the cause of these murders boils down to the condition of our society. We have a woeful lack of moral understanding, and in today’s society this only helps widen the cultural divide that exacerbates the decaying of our moral integrity and weakens our moral foundations. To add to the problem, we seem unable or unwilling to hold our elected politicians accountable for their own moral deficiencies.
It is a well known truth, as one columnist points out, “. . . today politicians and world leaders remain in office regardless of scandals and corruption. There seems to be very little political accountability. To lie, steal and cheat is actually more what you expect from a politician.” How can it be truthfully argued that this type of behavior will not spill over into our society? This spillover will ultimately lead to those few individuals who see that such behavior as mass murders is the best way to gain acknowledgement that they exist. It does not matter to them that this acknowledgement comes in the form of notoriety that is shunned by most.
But lawlessness does not begin when a person seeks notoriety of this type. Lawlessness in a nation begins when that nation’s government no longer credits its stability on its dependence on God. Lawlessness takes hold in a nation when it’s leaders feel they are powerful enough to step away from God’s laws and makes their word the authority that supposedly guides them. They ignore the reality that the laws of God carry much more authority than any laws man can contrive. They fail to acknowledge that real authority comes from the fact that God is our Creator.
When we have a political party, whether on the left or the right, that creates a government that thrives on ignorance and hides its real intentions we lose the ability to form ideas and policy that comes from a well educated and God fearing citizenry. This is the beginning of lawlessness and a government steeped in corruption. Unfortunately many of our churches have helped further this corruption by not teaching their congregations by not emphasizing the source of good, and soft-peddling the damages of evil. Often the so called cancel culture has silenced many out of fear they will lose their influence, their income, their people, or all these things and more. As a result of not calling out evil for what it is, many in our society, and even in our churches, no longer see a relevant difference between good and evil.
God, however, never shies away from calling out evil. When He did, and He still does, He also provides a way to forgiveness through repentance. But too often, as a nation and more specifically as a church, we have failed to call for repentance. Just look at abortion. This is murder, but too often the church fails to call out this evil, choosing instead to remain silent or hide behind the mantra “my body, my choice.” (See my thoughts on abortion at https://nottospeak.com/my-body-my-choice-is-a-false-premise/ )
History, time after time, has shown us that ungodly people should not be trusted to lead a nation. In spite of what many will try to tell us, through their attempt to revise history, America was founded on biblical principles and values. One of our founding fathers, John Adams, expressed this truth when he wrote, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” It was true then and is true today.
This is no more evident when we consider how inadequate our Constitution has become when it comes to holding an immoral and non-religious citizenry together. Today, Christian “morals that once characterized America are either completely mocked, or redefined to the point where they mean the opposite.” Many in our society still believe in good Christian morals. Unfortunately, with the help of both a willing media and politicians who favor idealism over realism, there has become an increasingly dominate trend to hand control of our culture to those who have effectively decided there is no God. The result is that it is acceptable to make up your own “moral” standards as you go. No wonder those who are willing to commit mass murders have no compunction to consider the evilness of their actions.
When many, who are taught in our public schools, are void of meaningful and lasting values it would be correct to place some of the blame on the lack of teaching Christian values in our schools. This has been the goal of humanism from the beginning. They do not believe in God, therefore see no need to teach Godly values. To the secular humanist, such as Karl Marx, “. . . religion [is] ‘the opium of the people,’ in that religion was not only used by those in power to oppress the workers, but it also made them feel better about being oppressed.” In other words, to them anything that brought God into the picture should be abolished. Only then would “the masses” find freedom and true happiness. But, if God is out of the picture then how can Godly values be taught? Of course the answer is: they can’t!
When God is disregarded then His truth is no longer acknowledged. When God’s truth is regarded as meaningless, what we see are some of the most ridiculous claims made by supposedly well-educated people. Because we refuse to acknowledge God as the source of truth, we fall victim to the most absurd and patently false claims possible. Men can become women, and women can become men. Children in the wombs of their mothers are not viewed as human beings, imbued with dignity and worth, created in the image and likeness of God, but as “nonpersons.” Men can become pregnant and birth children. Children should be able to choose their own gender identity. Pronouns become effectively useless because we wish to use non-gender pronouns to identify our existence. The list of absurdities goes on. Children are expelled from school because they innocently refuse to refer to a woman using a feminine pronoun when she absurdly wishes to be addressed as though she was a man. A man can legally enter a woman’s restroom, locker room, and even a woman’s shower because he “self-identifies” as a woman. (This is not only ridiculous, but perverted and dangerous.)
We are asked to question our own identities. A male can become a female, and a female can become a male. Anyone who believes God is our Creator can see just how senseless that is. We are asked to deny the very power of our own sexuality. So much for women’s rights! God created both man and woman, each equal in His sight, but each meant to compliment each other, not to seek a false identity. All of this can only be meant to demean a person individually and strip him or her of their God given value as a human being. This devaluing of human dignity in turn contributes to the debasement of character, which in turn leads one to place possessions and power over people. We’ve become a nation of filled with self-doubt, instability, low self-esteem and a high level of self-indulgence. We need to take a stand against the foolishness of today’s cultural absurdities.
Without God we no longer have the capacity to think rationally. We become lazy in our thinking. It takes less effort to follow the crowd and anyone who gives what is thoughtlessly determine as a legitimate reason for not thinking. So it is easier and even necessary to silence any opposition to their way of thinking. It is much simpler to crush an opponent than to consider their point of view. That would require them to think! This is why the cancel culture has been so effective. It is easier to cancel someone you disagree with, than to listen to their point of view, and present your own coherent rebuttal. The cancel culture is not only evidenced by social medial platforms that delete accounts, but also by those who refuse to acknowledge another’s point of view. We no longer desire spirited discussion; again, that would require us to think! We’ve become “woke.”
America may be reaching the apex of its loss of faith. This loss of faith, in many ways, has become a generational phenomenon in which each succeeding generation exhibits a greater loss of faith than the generation that preceded it. As a result the apex has come in the form of a generation that no longer takes seriously any threat of eternal condemnation (hell), or sees any need for the salvation offered by a so-called risen savior. They choose to define civility and morality as they see fit, disregarding any standards formerly set by our society, and deny any form of moral absolutes. It is no wonder that today’s culture has produced those who cannot or will not see the depravity of their actions. Especially those who commit mass murders.
As parents we must instill God’s law into our children, then, as they grow older, he or she will become fully responsible for his or her actions. Until then the parent has the responsibility to guide actions, and teach responsibility for those actions. But this parental responsibility has too often given way to parents who harbor the need to look out for their own interests first. We’ve become a nation obsessed with entertainment while ignoring religious foundations. When we couple our culture’s loss of faith with the fact that too many parents are either afraid or unwilling to teach good moral values in the home, then we as a nation begin to suffer the consequences.
School shootings may be the extreme consequence, but the overall fall into depravity in our culture must be reversed before these extreme consequences will ever be a part of our past. No other “control” will even begin to solve the problem. Without someone, namely God, who is the ultimate judge of our actions, and is the only one who will literally fulfill His promised rewards or dire consequences, then we have no restrictions. The mass murder of children is one result.
Once there was a time when one was not ridiculed when he or she proudly proclaimed the truth that the founding of this nation, and its subsequent history for 200 years, was grounded in Judeo-Christian principles. But when we hear what some like to call the cultural elite of today, that is, our liberal college professors, our permanently re-elected politicians, their enabling main stream media “news” celebrities, and entertainment personalities who assume the misguided authority to lecture those with whom they disagree – when we constantly hear these people pay nothing more than mere lip service to these principle, or denounce them altogether in the name of “progress,” we see that the facts tell a different story. They do not honor Judeo-Christian principles, instead putting their voice behind the latest social causes that rarely uphold these principles.
In some sense, the current cultural situation is little different than what our nation has experienced in the past. But in those bygone days we were able to get back to our roots because God’s people could not bear to see what was happening to their country. They were raised in a country grounded in biblical truths, so it was obvious to them that they needed to call on God. They instinctively understood that real change was only possible if they invited God into their society and culture through prayer. Today’s culture has lost that instinct. Certainly there are many Christians who pray, but the instinct too often is to follow the crowd. It is easier to call for gun control than it is to think about the consequences. It is easier to blame the gun than to reach the heart of the one wielding the gun.
It doesn’t matter what our political affiliation; we must strive to elect government leaders today who have the character to uphold the U.S. Constitution. No government official, whether elected or not, can set the standard of good civic virtue if they themselves base their decisions simply to gain political advantage, or are inconsistently swayed by opinion polls?
An oft quoted Bible verse in response to the condition of our nation is Chronicles 7:14, “If My people who are called by My name humble themselves and pray and seek My face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, will forgive their sin and will heal their land.” This verse is quoted because it gives us hope, and as long as we have God we are never without hope. As a Christian nation we should respond to the mass murders of children, and all others, by calling on God. Otherwise we will continually argue about gun control and never agree on the right solutions. In the book of Romans, the Apostle Paul is writing to a church that just came out of a very depraved lifestyle. His warnings should resonate with us today:
“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth about God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator… Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another… Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1: 24-27, 32)
What should alarm us is that we today are among those who know “God’s righteous decree,” and yet we are unwisely and without thinking, or knowingly support the kind of immorality Paul warned us to avoid. Most of the ideas of the “woke culture” are not biblical principles. I mentioned those ideas earlier. They are ideas that are foolish to any thinking person. They are ideas that are the result of the the humanist point of view. According to the American Humanist Association, “Religious Humanism is without a god, without a belief in the supernatural, without a belief in an afterlife, and without a belief in a “higher” source of moral values.” Without God as the “‘higher’ source of moral values,” foolishness can seem wise.
A Christian cannot and should not come to a mutual understanding with such ideas. If the Lord commands the church to be as one body, united in faith under one Spirit, which He does, then we need to understand that the Church, the Body of Christ, must be unified in biblical truths. In other words, the Church should not give in to immoral principles. To paraphrase Romans 1:28-29, “Furthermore, [if the Church does] not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, [God will give] them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice.” Sounds like a prescription for mass murder!
We need to pray for our nation, yet the truth is that not all people will want to hear God. We can come up with a myriad of “programs” designed to help those who, in reality, are filled with unthinkable forms of wickedness, depraved evil, and unquenchable greed. But, just because we present to them the miracle of God’s grace, and extend to them our well-meant compassion, does not mean they will turn from their depravity. Romans 1:28-29 reminds us that these kind of people have been given over to their depraved minds. In America, God will eventually give our society over to its wicked desires. Maybe He already has!
Paul warned Timothy, “But mark this: There will be terrible times in the last days. People will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boastful, proud, abusive, disobedient to their parents, ungrateful, unholy, without love, unforgiving, slanderous, without self-control, brutal, not lovers of the good, treacherous, rash, conceited, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God— having a form of godliness but denying its power. Have nothing to do with such people.” (2 Timothy 3:1-5 NIV)
Ultimately our crime problem originates when we allow people, who may have “a form of godliness,” to influence our culture. Our society in general has birthed and inbred a culture of “lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God.” It is inbred because, as I alluded to earlier, in each successive generation the evil gets more severe and more acceptable. When this happens it becomes easier to blame anything other than the person. We in effect make excuses for evil. When we approach our problems from this perspective we can see why so many insist that guns are not the problem, people are.
Can we return this nation to one that puts God first? Not by our own efforts we can’t! Our prayers are important, not to ask for people to change, but to ask God to intervene. Now, more than ever, we need to realize that “. . . our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.” (Ephesians 6:12 NIV)
We cannot over come evil by implementing man made and man inspired goals, programs and regulations. We must face this evil, this depravity, this wickedness by turning our thoughts to God. We “Therefore [need to] put on the full armor of God, so that when the day of evil comes, [we] may be able to stand [our] ground, and after [we] have done everything, to stand. [We need to] Stand firm then, with the belt of truth buckled around [our] waist[s], with the breastplate of righteousness in place, and with [our] feet fitted with the readiness that comes from the gospel of peace. In addition to all this, [we need to] take up the shield of faith, with which [we] can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one. [We need to] Take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests. With this in mind, [we need to] be alert and always keep on praying for all the Lord’s people.” (Ephesians 6:13-18 NIV)
We need to pray for each other, mirroring Paul’s request to the Ephesians, “Pray also for [each other], that whenever [one of us] speak[s], words may be given [to us] so that [we] will fearlessly make known the mystery of the gospel, for which [we are] ambassador[s] in chains. Pray that [we] may declare it fearlessly, as [we] should.” (Ephesians 6:19-20 NIV).
This is when change will happen! This is when God will be able to use us to overcome evil! For we know that we are not equipped to overcome evil by our own strength. Only the power of God can overcome. Only He is able. He simply desires that we both acknowledge Him, and acknowledge that evil is in the world. When we acknowledge His power anything can happen. Evil will never be wiped out as long as this earth remains, but evil can be defeated any time Christians stand their ground, and after doing everything, to just stand; and rely on God. Evil always struggles to stand against the courage and love of those who belong to Christ.
Revelation 12:11 speaks to how evil is overcome. “They triumphed over him by the blood of the Lamb and by the word of their testimony; they did not love their lives so much as to shrink from death.” (NIV) We must claim the promise given us by God’s sacrifice of His Son, and then testify of His love and mercy. Only through God and our testimony will evil be overcome. We cannot shrink from this battle!
Yes we all are emotionally overcome by the tragedies imposed on us by these mass murders. We want to do something, anything, to prevent them from ever happening again. But, until we face the evil that is behind these acts, and call on God, we will never come close to stopping the acts themselves.