I’ll confess I’ve become numb to these horrific events. It’s hard for normal people to wrap their minds around such grotesque evil. Yet, we cannot allow numbness to dull our response to evil, wherever it may rear its ugly head, no matter how small or large. The question is what our response ought to be. Jesus had a counter intuitive response, as he normally did to everything, when unexplainable evil happened to people: repent. It seems callous at first glance, until we realize that it is the only actual logical response to such suffering. In Luke 13 Jesus tells us how we ought to think of such senseless slaughter:

Now there were some present at that time who told Jesus about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had mixed with their sacrifices. ² Jesus answered, “Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans because they suffered this way? ³ I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish. ⁴ Or those eighteen who died when the tower in Siloam fell on them—do you think they were more guilty than all the others living in Jerusalem? ⁵ I tell you, no! But unless you repent, you too will all perish.”

Repent or perish is the logical response? What exactly is Jesus saying? We’ll often hear people say that someone’s death, let alone 19 children and two of their teachers, is a tragedy. For their loved ones and friends, it is an unspeakable tragedy. Only those who know of such sorrow can understand the pain of it, but it cannot end there. Jesus’ point isn’t that if we repent, somehow, we’ll escape death, gruesome or otherwise. No, rather it is that this life isn’t the end, isn’t all there is. Every time we see or experience death firsthand not our own, we ought to contemplate the eternal nature of our soul. Are we right with our Creator? Have we accepted the free gift of grace in Christ, a righteousness from God by faith, that we might be reconciled to him, and live life eternal with him?

Sadly, most people will not react this way because they have bought the lies of secularism that this life is what counts, and what we do and get here is what matters most. Only, it doesn’t. This life is a mist and will be over in mere moments, then what? Such an eternal perspective on things doesn’t make us indifferent to things of this world, however. It should make us more determined to see the Lord’s prayer, Thy kingdom come, become more of a reality in this fallen and often dark world. It was this mentality of the first generations of Christians that turned the pagan world, a world Thomas Hobbes described as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” into the modern world that is far less so. I heard a statement this week that captures the futility of secularism, and its discontents: You can’t fill a God-sized hole with a government peg.

Yet Democrats, progressives and leftists, all have the same response to such horrors as school shootings: It’s the guns! Get rid of guns, and like magic, school shootings will cease. The moral inanity of such declarations is not worth addressing, if it were not such a pestilence on modern society. Guns, of course, do not kill people, but evil people use guns to kill. If we could find some way to rid America of the three hundred plus million guns in circulation, evil people would find other and more creative ways to kill. Contrary to Rousseau, who asserted that men are born free but are everywhere in chains, men are born in chains and are only set free by an inner spiritual transformation of the heart. Ultimately, only God in Christ by the power of the Holy Spirit can truly transform sinners into saints. I heard about this statement this week, and I thought it captured well the spiritual malaise of so many in modern secular society:

Walsh added, “There is a terrible spiritual sickness permeating our society. Evil has a deep foothold here. We scratch at the surface of the problem but never look below.”

These are terribly complicated problems, but they have very simple explanations. It of course goes back to the fall, and man ever since succumbing to the temptation that he can “be like God, knowing good and evil.” When man tries to be God, it doesn’t work out well. The most obvious explanation at this end of history is a rampant fundamentalist secularism. Western intellectual and cultural elites had been trying since the 18^th century to rid western civilization of God, and in the 20^th century they realized their objective. In America, that was fulfilled by the mantra of the “separation of church and state,” a dogma used to actually separate God and state. But it wasn’t enough for these elites to get God out of government; he needed to be out of every square inch of American culture as well. They were fine as long as “religion” was a personal thing, but bring it into the public square, and the next thing you know there will be a bunch of little Torquemadas on the loose burning heretics at the stake.

Contrary to the rabid secularists, though, America was founded if not as a “Christian nation,” then as a nation deeply influenced at every level by Christianity and Christians. In the famous words of the not terribly religious John Adams:

Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

And the religion Adams was speaking of? Christianity. If America is not to turn into a police state, or a state of anarchy, it will only be Christianity that can save it.

I quoted Jesus in my last post saying, if we’re to follow him we must take up our cross daily and follow him. That daily part tells us loving others is an ever-present challenge that requires a continual dying to ourselves. As I shared in the first post, I learned a phrase when I was introduced to Reformed theology in my mid-20s that “love is efficacious.” That, to me, is the essence of love being omnipotent: it works, and it can’t help but working with everything it encounters. It accomplishes something, and something that is beautiful and beneficial to both the lover and the loved. That is also why it is the hardest thing in the Christian life to do because it goes so against the grain of incurvatus in se, of who we are as sinners; we are beings who are curved in on ourselves. The self-obsession is who we are by sinful nature. The paradox is that the cross is the greatest enemy of the self, but also its liberator. When the self is the driving force of our lives, it is the means to the death of the true self, us as we were meant to be as God’s most magnificent creation. When we understand the sin principle in our life, that which seeks our fulfillment above all things, we will understand why it must be committed to the cross.

These are all nice sounding words, but somewhat abstract. What exactly does it mean in practice? First, I will establish that there is nothing more important than love in the Christian life. Jesus, when he was asked by an expert in the law (Matt. 22), “which is the greatest commandment in the Law?” he answered with these words:

³⁷ Jesus replied: “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ³⁸ This is the first and greatest commandment. ³⁹ And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ ⁴⁰ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.”

The profundity of these words could not be overestimated. Jesus is saying love is the whole deal; it’s all about love! We can boil the entirety of God’s revelation in Scripture to these words, love God with everything that you are, and your neighbor as yourself. The last time I read through the New Testament epistles, I was struck by just this, that love is the essence of the Christian ethic. This is, of course, impossible, but as Jesus also said, with God all things are possible. The reason it is possible, that it is doable to love God, ourselves, and our neighbors, is because God first loved us in Christ. He didn’t demand of us, or command of us, something he wasn’t willing and in fact did himself do for us. Jesus said love your enemies, and even while we were his enemies, he loved us!

Love in practice is revealed to us all throughout Scripture if we know how to look, but God in condescending to us as he always does, boiled love down for us through the Apostle Paul in I Corinthians 13. Paul tells us we can do all kinds of amazing things, good things, religious things, spiritual things, but if we don’t have love, we’re just noise. Then he goes into the impossible possible description of what love is:

⁴ Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. ⁵ It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. ⁶ Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. ⁷ It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

And to top off the apparently impossible, he ends with a statement that perfectly captures the omnipotence of love: “Love never fails.” Never. But we might reasonably reply that we’ve tried to love others, and it most definitely failed. Did we really? Are we sure of it? If we read these few verses of Paul, did we really love with this kind of other worldly love? It’s almost an impossible question to answer because doing these things is humanly speaking absolutely impossible. Keep no record of wrongs? Seriously? How exactly does that work? Do we lose our memory? No, but it is possible because God keeps no record of our wrongs, so we are compelled to keep no record of the wrongs done to us. This doesn’t mean we are stupid toward others who do wrong to us. True love is not naïve or gullible, nor is it easily taken advantage of. This requires a common biblical theme, wisdom. The Greek word for wisdom means clarity, the ability to see things as they are. The beautiful thing about Christianity is that there is no rule book, just do x and y will result. It’s much harder than that, and requires faith, which means trust in the God of love to help teach us how to love others.

I could write many more posts on the most important topic of living the Christian life, but next time you read through the letters of the New Testament, notice how the exhortation to love is everywhere. In all of the New Testament, the word love and its variations is used 261 times. That’s a lot of love! I’ll end with a verse that says it all, I Peter 4:8: “Above all, love each other deeply, because love covers over a multitude of sins.” God loved us so much he gave his life for us in Christ, covering over the multitude of our sins, so we can realistically love others.