and How the Answer
Leads to Good Friday
“What causes
quarrels, and what causes fights among you?” –James 4:1a
The
very first outward sinful action
recorded in the Bible occurred when “Cain
rose up against his brother Abel and
killed him” (Genesis 4:8). Although
nothing specific is stated as to the means of this murder, it is
clear that his methods were primitive, although effective. Everything he needed to accomplish his deed
was right at hand including both his means and his motive.
As I am
writing this article, my radio is repeatedly announcing the one month
anniversary of what is among the ten worst school mass killings in recorded
history at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. Today, in a call to “solidarity” with the
seventeen people who were killed, students across the country are observing a
seventeen-minute period of silence. In
addition however, they are insisting on an overthrow of our current fire arms
laws out of a belief that banning or restricting certain weapons will radically
diminish the level of violence in our society.
Yet it
is not my purpose to discuss gun laws so much as it is to turn our attention to
our society’s glaring neglect of that very cause which precedes either the
raising of a stone (perhaps) in Genesis or the pulling of a trigger today. The Bible identifies that cause with the tiny
word “sin,” while James 4:1-2 as a whole fleshes it out very effectively. The Bible teaches that there is something
morally wrong with human beings because more profoundly there is something
spiritually wrong with us. We have
fallen out of our intended relationship with God and for that reason we are consequently
also utterly out of sync with His creation.
The proper center of our lives is replaced with self-centered us! As James puts it, if we don’t get our way,
then violent acts of varying degrees becomes the means in order to wrest what
we desire from our neighbors.
I find
it astonishing that our society habitually neglects to direct our anger onto
the perpetrator and to name the cause of such massacres as personal sin and
wickedness. Now there is no question but
that our culture dismisses this kind of language as outdated, irrelevant, and
outright offensive. But the major
question of our time is what is our culture offering in its place? The preferred politically-correct method of
addressing such social malfunctions is to name as the cause some overriding
sociological malady, label certain laws (pertaining to guns or methods of criminal
punishment) as barbaric, or source the cause of crimes to the existence of
weapons (be they a gun, a knife, a stone, a heavy stick, you name it —and
that’s the point!) themselves. Even on
today’s news, in response to the attempted kidnapping of a child, it is
proposed that the suspect have “mental evaluation.” No request at all is made for a moral reassessment! One overriding reason for this glaring
neglect is that our culture’s former biblical
worldview has become replaced with an opposing worldview. For the purpose of this article, secularism
doesn’t merely hold to an even-handed view of competing values. Driven by secularized academic circles, it
holds to a view of human beings that is based on Darwinian evolution. In addition to insisting on unguided
evolution however, Darwinism also denies the existence of all things spiritual,
which both removes the authority for moral law and undermines the foundation of
an objective purpose for living. Worse
still, Darwinism holds that human “thinking” consists of nothing more than the
interactions between molecules and electrical charges inside our brain. What logically follows is that what we call
“free choices” are merely the effects of such “physical” events in the past
which firmly determine what we do in the present.
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