Guns Don't Kill People...Sin Kills People...all People

I am weary. I feel tired and lifeless. Watching the horror yesterday just sucked the energy out of my soul. I am a dad. I have a daughter. Not that long ago she was in Kindergarten too. Not that long ago she was just a little child with wide eyes as Christmas approached. She was just like all those precious little children yesterday in Newtown. I am just like their parents, and their teachers.
The horror has already been discussed. Nobody who hasn't been in a coma can say they don't know what happened. And the usual discussions have begun again. "Take away the guns!" "Arm the Teachers!" "How did he get a gun when he was obviously crazy?"
Everyone has an answer but in their hearts...every single person out there knows one thing is true...they don't really have an answer. Not really.
Because somewhere lurking in the hearts of even the most ardent gun control disciple, there exists the knowledge that someone who could do something like this to children would simply find another means. He'd make a bomb, or steal a truck and drive it through the crowded schoolyard at the end of the day when the parents were picking up their kids, or he'd just grab a knife like the guy in China did yesterday. (China has very strict gun laws...NOBODY owns guns except the government.)
Maybe that's what drives people to want to take away weapons from good people. Because in their hearts they know there really isn't anything you can do to stop this but "by God we have to do something". Disarming is knee-jerk. Arming the teachers would be a means of lessening the damage, not ending it. Someone returning fire yesterday would undoubtedly have stopped some of the carnage...maybe even most of it. But certainly not all of it. So in reality, even the solution I agree with, (I am most decidedly pro-gun) is not a total cure.
That brings us to the real problem. The problem of evil. The fact that you can't ever cure this. The problem is not guns...the problem is us.
Man was not created to kill. Adam didn't have this insidious cruelty in his soul when God formed him from dirt and breathed His very Spirit into his lungs and brought him to life. And had man simply obeyed God we'd be living in perfection right now and the only mass shootings we'd experience would be when we good-naturedly spit watermelon seeds at each other on summer evenings. But that's not how it happened and we have been declining ever since.
Man's fate was sealed the moment the sound of Eve crunching the apple echoed through the Garden and the battle for man's soul began. Not long after that, her son Cain got jealous over his brother finding favor with God and picked up a rock or a log and beat him to death with it. It wasn't the rock or the log that did the evil...it was the evil heart of Cain.
God could have chosen to leave this situation as it was. He could have just turned His back on us and let us descend into an abyss of evil and depravity that knows no bounds. Instead He already had a plan in place. His plan was costly and heartbreaking and it is ironic that this horrible evil occurred yesterday in Connecticut during the very season we celebrate the birth of His Son...and the beginnings of that costly, heartbreaking plan.
God lost a Son too. It's His birth we commemorate at this time each year and it's His birth that was the beginning of the Great Plan of Redemption. A plan made necessary by the kind of evil that causes things like yesterday in Connecticut.
If you are looking for a reason for this tragedy...and all tragedies where man harming man is concerned...you need only look to Jeremiah 17:9 "The human heart is the most deceitful of all things, and desperately wicked. Who really knows how bad it is?"
Yesterday was undoubtedly "desperate wickedness".
God sent His Son into this world to pay the price for the kind of evil that would inflict this on little children and their parents. God paid the ultimate price to end evil once and for all and redeem us from the curse we brought on ourselves.
Make no mistake...the same evil that could perform the evil feats of Newtown, Connecticut resides in the heart of every human being. Sin is inherited in humanity. We all have the potential to do this sort of thing. What keeps the vast majority of us from falling prey to this wickedness is simply the Grace of God. God's presence in this world keeps the great majority of us from going off the rails and succumbing to the deepest evil present in this world.
If you can imagine the cruelty and evil and demonic anger present in the mind of Adam Lanza yesterday as he executed a classroom full of 5 year olds...then you can imagine the cruelty heaped upon the body of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary.
Evil has it's genesis in Satan himself. Coupled with mental instability and chemical imbalance it becomes a witches brew of horror. But at the base of it is the sin nature of man. Man before the fall would not even entertain the idea of yesterday...much less attempt it.
There is but one hope for this world and one hope for the battle against the evil that desires your soul and mine...the man Christ Jesus.
God cares. God's heart is rent in two today for moms and dads without their kids. God's heart is grieved for a nation and a world that is progressively more afraid, more angry, more desensitized, and more numb. God did not cause this. God did not stand idly by while this occurred.
God is not sitting slumped on His throne, absently staring at the carnage and caring little or not at all. God is ministering right now through His people. He is hearing the prayers of the saints from around the world and He is acting on those requests. But God has already made arrangement for the overcoming of evil.
The only hope this world has is in Jesus. The only way that hope can be accessed by the hopeless is through the work of God's people. God's voice in this world is the voice of His Word and the voice and work of the Body of Christ...the church. It's time we stopped running churches like corporations and like spiritual libraries for the believers and spend ourselves spreading the Gospel. It's time we stop the nonsensical and shameful gluttony we practice by continually feeding ourselves on "Personal Christianity" while an unsaved world starves to death. It's time we leave our little enclaves of spiritual safety and waddle our bloated butts out into the field and get busy harvesting again, as Jesus commanded.
It's time to get back out into the highways and hedges and proclaim the Salvation of souls and the setting free of prisoners and the crushing of the serpent's head.
The problem is sin. The problem is evil. The problem has been dealt with already but those with the solution need to get busy applying it.