Another School Shooting

Why do these things keep happening? Now it’s a Christian elementary school. Little 9-year-olds mercilessly gunned down!

Some point to the proliferation of guns. That argument can be made, though more households had guns in America when I was growing up then today, but there were no school shootings that I remember hearing about. Some could point to the divisiveness of ideology in the country, but there was a time when Americans were engrossed in a civil war and mass killings of innocent civilians were virtually unheard of. I’ve made the case for the devaluing of human life and morality among our general population, and I still believe that’s a big contributor.

But ultimately, we will continue to have these horrible things happening to people perpetrated by other people until Jesus returns to take over. That’s not to say that we should not do everything we can to curtail evil in our society. But we also know that for all of human history, beginning with Cain and Abel, people have done terrible things to each other. Consider the atrocities of the Babylonians, Assyrians, Persians, Romans, Mongols, Vikings, and Nazis. Long before the Nashville shooter, there was Xerxes, Alexander the Great (yes, he was viciously cruel), Nero, Vlad the Impaler, Genghis Khan, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, and many, many others.

While all people have been created in God’s image, that image has been tainted and all human beings are now depraved. The prophet Jeremiah wrote, “The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?” (Jeremiah 17:9). Jesus said that only God is genuinely good. The prophet Isaiah acknowledged that people do good deeds, but that these deeds are merely “bandages” that cover the visible infection of our sin (Isaiah 64:6).

I grieve for these families in Nashville. I am angry with the evil woman who did this. I’m also a bit angry with the news media that seem to be blaming Christian values for this crime, and politicians who are using this to promote their agenda.

But more than anything, I long for Jesus to return. He alone can fix the mess we are in. In the meantime, we should do our best to work for justice and righteousness, starting with ourselves, but the sin-saturated society we live in will continue to act out human sinfulness until Jesus returns and rights all wrongs and sets matters back in line with his creative purpose.

“Even so come, Lord Jesus” (Revelation 22:20).