What will God do against such reckless hate?

When I was reading the news online one morning last week, I learned that at a college in Virginia, Virginia Tech, someone had killed a person and wounded eight or so others. I felt very sad for them…but it happens so often…you’re always hearing how someone opened fire at CNN and killed two people, or something. It’s awful. Then after chapel in the afternoon, I learned that 32 had died. Soon discovered that two hours after the first shooting, the guy went elsewhere on campus and started killing people there. It might even have been happening while I was sitting there feeling sad for the family of the one person. It was such a shock, I suppose, to go looking for news of the eight injured and see the death toll suddenly jump to 32. And of course now I know that that won’t be the only toll. Some people will take a lot longer getting over this than just the mending of their physical bodies in the hospital. The line Théoden says in “The Two Towers” never fails to come to mind: “What can men do against such reckless hate?”

Some other things mix with my thoughts as I think about this horrible situation, things about the general condition of the world and humanity. I’m doing a lot of study into slavery for my book Blaise, The Deliverer, and it’s pretty awful. I was reading a book a few days ago called “Dehumanizing the Vulnerable” about the skillful use of language to make certain portions of the human race not seem human at all, thus giving people excuses for their depredations on them. Calling some races “subhuman”; calling unwanted pregnancies “parasites;” even calling prostitutes “sluts,” anything to emphasize that they’re not worth what the rest of us are. Just an hour later, I watched a fictional television episode about human trafficking, girls from Eastern Europe smuggled into the U.S. and enslaved, and how one, desperate to get free, killed a kind man who was trying to rescue another girl because he couldn’t rescue her, too. And recently I’ve watched three different versions of Les Miserables, and the characters in it that grip me the most are Fantine and Eponine, two young women with the most wretched lives possible who then die, largely without hope, without joy, in their wretchedness and misery. At least Fantine had Jean Valjean who took care of her during her last few days and promised to take care of her child and did, and Eponine had Marius who, though in love with another, gave her just a little tenderness and care before she died.

And then I’m doing a study of God’s holiness for Old Testament Theology, and what I’m finding out is that God would not let his Name be desecrated by Israel and the nations. Their sin desecrated it by, in essence, saying to the nations around them, “Our God is nothing more than your gods, no more powerful, no more important.” Their scattering in punishment desecrated it, because the nations believed that God had failed in his ability to protect Israel. All these things made God seem less than he is, and when he punished his people and when he brought them back, he was doing it so that His Name would be glorified and so that they would know that he alone was God. And it’s made me wonder, What about today? God’s own people desecrate his Name constantly, from things like behaving in ungodly ways at work, to things like making Christianity and thus God look bad in the public arena, to the horrific things like condoning slavery and the worst abuses. The horrible things rampant in this world make people ask, “Where is your God now?” and say, “If there really were a God, He wouldn’t let this happen.” So I can’t help wondering why God lets us dim the visibility of his glory and holiness now, when he took such stern measures against the Israelites. And of course I know that he revealed his holiness once and for all on the cross, and that he is exercising patience so that people can still have a chance to be saved, and that eventually he himself will return and reveal himself and his holiness with finality, and all chances will be over, but… I guess I just answered my own question. He’s revealed himself ultimately in Jesus, and now he’s giving humanity, which he loves, a chance to turn to him before he finally is done once and for all with sin and the things we do to each other and to him.

Thank God for the chance.