August 2022
Enough!
We started out with a pup tent and a couple of sleeping bags, expanded the tent and added sleeping bags as we gained children, had a used pop-up camper for a few seasons, now its mostly motels. When camping, we thought about danger from storms and lightning and animals when we were camping. Never did we imagine that somebody would do what somebody did a little north of here.
One of the books I’m reading says that in 1980, almost 90% of murders in our country were solved. Murder used to be committed by somebody you knew, somebody who had some motive to want you dead. Then murders started becoming more random, people being killed by strangers they never met, and for what reason? What happened at Maquoketa Caves State Park has become common.
We call them “mass shootings,” and before last week’s killings of two parents and one of their children, it was a school in Texas, and a Chicago suburb, and a Milwaukee suburb, and every time the response is predictable. People who don’t like Christians will tell us that our prayers are not enough. Others will use the word “enough,” and call for laws to prevent such things in the future.
Murder is already against the law in this country, and people who are going to kill other people will get that done one way or another. It’s probably easiest with a gun, but in the UK they have strict gun control. Murder still happens; the young men who beat the old man to death with a baseball bat, knives, a man pushing his new wife off a cliff. And Chicago has strict gun laws.
The Waukesha Christmas Massacre was committed with a car, in the 19th Century the infamous Benders used their bare hands to kill strangers who were boarding with them overnight, and the greatest mass murder in the history of our country was pulled off using airplanes bound for the west coast and filled with jet fuel. Mass murder has always been there, but it’s getting worse.
Mental illness is a thing, and third-person shooter video games desensitize children to killing people. Theologically, the concept of right and wrong has been diluted, mostly by clergy people who pooh-pooh it. The value of human life has been degraded by fifty years of abortion. People have also been taught that there is no hell, so there are no eternal consequences for murder.
Theologically, when I hear people call for the government to prevent mass murders in the future, what they are asking for is for the government to put a stop to the effects of Original Sin. Does that mean that there’s nothing the government can do? Governments can make laws, and murder is already illegal in this country, but no government can prevent murder from ever happening.
Enough? Fed up with strangers killing people they have never met for no apparent reason? Who isn’t? Not only can I as an individual not do much about it, governments can and do make laws, and people constantly break those laws. I’ve actually been fed up for a long time about the tens of millions of children who have broken no laws, but have nonetheless been routinely murdered.
I don’t expect most Americans to understand that since Adam and Eve we live in a fallen world, and the Law written in the hearts of all people acts as a “curb” to sin, to keep it in check, to limit is, but it does not completely prevent it. God doesn’t like murder either, and one day He will end this all and create a new and better heaven and a new and better earth where we will dwell forever.
When will that happen? Because He is God, because it’s His Creation, when God says “enough.”
Until then, I’m going to keep praying, and prayer is a powerful thing!
In Christian Service,
Pastor Anderson
