Active shooter attacks on schools and our children are some of the absolute worst. Nashville with 3 adults and 3 little kids murdered. Uvalde, TX with two adults and nineteen children. Just two of the several such attacks. No parent should have to bury their children from a tragedy like this. Unimaginable grief – that I’m sure hits like a tidal wave out of the blue just “one day” when the news report comes on – and it’s your hometown. Then you find it’s your school. Then the confirmation that YOUR CHILD is one of the victims. Unimaginable.
The demands understandably begin that “it must not happen again”, which no one in their right mind argues against. Reactions are visceral because attacks like this punch us in the gut. What I want to do here though is to consider why are we are facing such things to begin with and let that color thoughts on how to respond. The reaction of the world is predictable – go after the method used, not the madness of the shooter, and go after it in a highly political “(D) vs (R)” way, using it to score points for your political side. The world has no way to ultimately explain or address the madness that drives something like this, so it’s left to primarily go after the method used, but not the madness in the heart that drives it. I want to think about the madness; what are some contributors to how someone might get to the point of pulling the trigger in a situation like this. As this is TheoThoughts, I’m looking at it from a spiritual perspective which I believe to be the primary one anyway.
One thing that strikes me is I believe even if you remove a method (gun control), it simply drives murderous hearts to a different method. Maybe a pipe bomb next time. If you think the UK has it right on gun control, I spent a few minutes with the results of a “knife attacks in UK” search. Page after page of stories. Knife attacks there are now reported every 11 minutes. Let that sink in. I proved to myself pretty quickly it’s not about the type of weapon. It won’t change the heart, just make it look for a different way to achieve its murderous goals. I understand the “yeah, but it’s doing SOMETHING!” mentality in light of such tragedies like Uvalde, but there’s far more to think about.
In the hands of one a gun is a means of wanton murder – a way to easily and senselessly destroy human lives; to a vast multitude of others it is equally a means of defense; a force equalizer when the evil to defend against is stronger. There are so many more events that do not get the media attention when someone with a heart of destroying as many as possible is met by another, also armed, with a heart of only using it to defend lives. So many untold stories of armed women being able to defend themselves against assault and rape. The armed citizen in the Greenwood Park, Indiana mall who took down an active shooter in 15 seconds, saving untold lives. So many stories of people being able to deter armed attackers, even gangs of attackers, even if they don’t fire a shot. We don’t highlight these other times when tragedy was actually thwarted and lives saved by someone able to defend themselves and others.
I also consider a while back the mentality across this nation was we could not get guns and weapons in the hands of Ukrainian citizens fast enough so they could defend themselves. We highlighted the bravery and courage of young and old alike, normal citizens taking up arms. We are a fickle people because we are always just reacting to the emotions of the moment.
While thinking about the subject of this post, I ran across these words of Jesus in my morning Bible reading:
35 And he said to them, “When I sent you out with no moneybag or knapsack or sandals, did you lack anything?” They said, “Nothing.” 36 He said to them, “But now let the one who has a moneybag take it, and likewise a knapsack. And let the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one. 37 For I tell you that this Scripture must be fulfilled in me: ‘And he was numbered with the transgressors.’
Luke 22:35-37 ESV
I was shocked by this Scripture passage. Christ had previously sent the disciples out and told them to take nothing and God met all their physical needs. In verse 35 he has them verify this. Now they are entering into a more dangerous time, a time of physical danger, danger that WILL, in fact MUST, get Jesus killed. Jesus knows His execution is very close. What does Jesus command his disciples to do? Buy a weapon – sell your cloak if you need to but get a sword. These are fishermen and tax collectors and the like, not soldiers, but he tells them – arm yourselves. They aren’t going on a hunting trip; he says this at the Last Supper in Jerusalem. After Peter uses his sword to cut off an ear during Jesus’ arrest, he tells Peter to put the sword away; the point is NOT to fight against Christ’s arrest; He must go to the cross. What all this tells me is I think we need to be careful with pronouncements of the need/non-need or morality of owning a weapon as if we have a “thus sayeth the Lord”. Here Jesus knows they are coming after Him and he will be taken – so he says you guys better buy a sword.
I still remember the times in the 70’s and early 80’s when kids brought weapons to school with their shotguns and high-powered rifles hanging in the rear windows of their trucks and nobody thought anything of it. Something changed, and it certainly wasn’t an increase in the availability or types of weapons. I want to think through what has changed.
I’ve been using the word “madness” but I need to get more specific. I’m speaking of evil and sin. Our sinful nature. While sin has been rampant for all humankind in all hearts of all times, these types of shootings among many other current events show us the nature and depth of our outward acts of sin is changing. The problem is spiritual, and I think we are reaping what we as a society have been sowing to even deeper depths as God, as Romans 1 tells us, “turns us over” to ever more of our evil desires – removing his restraining hand. Allow me to fill that statement out.
We’ve now spent decades teaching our youth (including those who are now the parents of today’s youth) that they are simply the product of random time and chance. In my high school science class in the early 80’s, evolution and creation were both taught as theories of origins, and evolution was the one we all ridiculed a bit. Now creation is the one ridiculed if even mentioned and evolution is simply taught as fact literally everywhere you turn in all aspects of life. You are simply random chemicals hit by lightning or something that one day, billions of years ago, just happened to produce chemical life and has over time and with random chance mutated into you. The whole universe just ‘is’, the result of some unexplained explosion. No ultimate purpose and completely and utterly pointless and thus hopeless. There really is no reason for … anything at all. No answer to “Why am I here?” No source of eternal accountability at all. There is no real point to life so to many it’s just “get all you can while you can”; others cave to madness and despair from the very logical conclusion of this worldview. Why? Because we no longer as a society teach people they are a special creation, the image of the creator God and accountable to Him, with the principles of His law embedded in their own conscience and the law of our land. As “progressives”, we have progressed beyond those myths; we have progressed to ‘true’ freedom from the mythical bonds past generations put themselves under. We have deceived ourselves.
If we are simply products of evolution, then might makes right (survival of the fittest) and there simply is no basis for the very concept of “wrong”. The powerful elite decide that for you and change it on whim when it suits them. Interestingly enough, sexual assault is in the news, but in this evolutionary worldview, why is it wrong? There is no ultimate authority of moral absolutes in the world’s system. Is it only wrong because some group “feels” it’s wrong? So? It probably feels “right” to the abusers; they felt they deserved to get what they wanted and they took it. We are in a worldview now where it is promoted and defended that what an individual FEELS is the truth for them, and you dare not question it.
That has MASSIVE consequences to society. We’ve “progressed” to the point we’ve crumbled ALL foundation and the very idea of objective truth. That is fatal to any society.
In this ‘individual feelings based truth’, evolutionistic worldview, “Get all you can while you can” is perfectly valid. Whatever YOU feel or think is as valid as any others’ feelings. Eat, drink, be merry, loot, forcefully gratify your sexual appetites from another, shoot those you don’t like, for tomorrow you die. Pity those who didn’t get the most gusto out of their time while their body performed its chemical processes until it stopped. For that’s all there is.
This is all the perfectly logical conclusion of an evolutionist’s worldview minus the Creator. We now have a generation and their parents most of which know no other worldview. This is the air they breathe. We as a society do not understand all the implications of this, but we are living it to a greater degree day by day. We do not yet understand the depth to which we are sinking. We know not what we’ve lost, what we didn’t work to conserve, which was a Christian-based worldview/ethic/culture in the society at large. We’ve worked, and continue to work, to remove all vestiges of it, sadly, in the name of individual freedom. In reality what the Bible teaches us is we are simply moving into ever greater slavery – to sin. We as a society moved to a post-Christian culture and now act surprised at the results. God is not mocked.
Another example – we also have a zeitgeist now against the God-designed family as the building block of society, and then we wonder why society is crumbling around us. So many grow up with no stable family as God designed it to be. Some popular organizations even state this as a goal.
Imago Dei, the ‘image of God’ in us, includes those in the womb. Persons. I believe, and this is the core of the matter, that in every abortion two people enter the clinic; one person walks out. Another message preached every day to our youth, from the highest offices in the land today, is that human life is expendable. Baby not wanted right now? Might cause some financial hardship? Better to kill the child by dismemberment. What message are the youth of today supposed to take from that? If a mother can decide to kill her own child in-utero for any reason whatsoever up to the moment of birth, and we as a society say that is not only not wrong, but a fundamental RIGHT…well I can see how that can play into a a “human life is cheap” worldview and reasoning. The question is – is every human life valuable or not? That is a Yes or No question and is not to be answered with “well, there’s all this nuance…” What standard do you use to answer that question? If “evolution, survival of the fittest, might makes right, no objective truth, you are your own truth” is your worldview, then there really is no such thing as a category of “wrong” for you. That person in the school hallway you’ve pointed a gun at is just another bag of chemicals. Baby in the womb? Another very small bag of chemicals. If there’s no inherent value given by God, then there’s no inherent value at all. That’s what our society is reaping. We’ve sown it, we’re getting the fruit.
If these seem like I’m just jumping all over the place to random or “pet” topics, I’m not. In ALL these ways, subtle and blatant, we as a people, as a society, devalue human life – because we’ve lost our sense of the transcendent God. Murder in the womb is better than to be born “poor” in one of the richest countries on the planet. Our children see our leaders actually red in the face and screaming because the Supreme Court said Roe vs. Wade was bad law to begin with and we may lose the legal right to kill children if they simply aren’t wanted.
Message received.
While the shooter himself of course ALWAYS bears full responsibility and will suffer due punishment under God’s perfect justice as well as any justice received here, we as a people all bear some responsibility and not because we didn’t make the gun harder to obtain.
Our Psalm 2 rebellion against God as King of all kings and the devaluing of the image of God in humans has severe consequences. We’re living it. It will not improve until we as a people begin, through repentance and revival, to at least acknowledge the real problem. It isn’t bullets. It’s the world’s rebellion against its Creator. A refusal to call sin, sin. That the problem of a school shooting isn’t the method, but the madness in the heart. Therefore all of the world’s solutions don’t resolve anything.
We live in post-Fall Genesis 3 world, subjected to futility (Romans 8). However, it was subjected to futility “in hope”. God in his grace has given us an answer to the madness within by the gospel of Christ. Our natural hearts of stone can be regenerated. We can be given eyes to see, for those who will have it, that we have personal Creator God who has revealed himself and his love in the provision of our Savior Jesus. Our task is to work through the church to proclaim it.
But you see, the world cannot go for the actual root cause because if it did, it would completely undermine the foundation of its idols like evolution and abortion. Therefore, all it can do is go after method, solving nothing.
Lord, have mercy.