Blacksburg

“if thou doest not well, sin lieth at the door.” Gen. 4:7

More bad news. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any worse, it does. Blacksburg has now put itself on the map as the latest and worst of anger gone amok. I am thinking of you with young children. How do you relate this news to them? Some are too small to even ask. Others are terribly perplexed. How is it possible to feel safe anymore? I struggle to think of anything comparable when my children were small.

Security is a deep felt need in us all. Yet events like this reveal how vulnerable we all are to such pointless and random violence. This is terrorism of the worst kind. There seems to be no agenda, no ideological grievance or injustice to blame or to try to understand. It appears to be pure fury unleashed from the troubled soul of a madman. But even worse, it could turn out to be not the rage of a madman in the sense of some deeply deranged lunatic. It could be that he was just an angry man.

Angry young men have been with us ever since Cain slew Abel. But the circles of violence have grown, the means more available, and the precedents established that break old barriers of civility with callous impudence. These cause us to question our society, our culture, and our values as a nation. And so they should. These events do not happen in a vacuum. They are symptoms of forces deep, dark, and disturbing within our civilization as we know it. Hundreds of opinions will be forthcoming shortly reflecting upon causes and solutions by philosophers and columnists alike. It is becoming a tiresome task, however, as we seem to be revisiting this deep, dark well with increasing frequency. Despair at finding an answer is, in itself, a symptom of our arrival in some perplexing new age.

My nominee for an explanation to this deadly scourge of disasters upon our national stage of horrors is simply that we have forgotten God, which Solzhenitsyn once said propelled Russia’s slide into Communism’s dark age. How many of these mass killers are children of the age; aimless, detached from normal families, seekers of meaning in a material culture, suckled by the exciting panoply of virtual media violence, and most significantly, totally devoid of sexual mores which lead them into destructive relationships that collapse of their own dead weight? I vote that lesson one is that there is no such thing as victimless sin. Somewhere, someplace, bad choices will bring forth bad fruit that kill and destroy and stink up the neighborhood with the smells of decay. It is true for our culture and true for us as middle class Christians. Secondly, ideas have consequences. Moral relativism breeds a revolution whose offspring will self-destruct and take the innocent with them. Sin destroys and the resulting destruction can ignite anger that knows no bounds.

The reports I am hearing indicate that our younger generation is playing at sin with frightful ferocity especially in the area of intimate relationships. This is true within the church and without. I continue to believe that God’s laws were planted in our midst for our own protection and not simply to spoil our fun. It is our duty to testify to that truth, uphold the law without embarrassment, and name sin for what it is. We must share the bad news before the good news of God’s love and forgiveness makes any sense. I am becoming convinced that this is an important step if we are to reach a generation which has lost its sense of shame. In the meantime, living in this increasingly insecure world demands we stay prayed up each day and rejoice in each day’s blessing of life. Life is worth living, and death only promotes us to glory.