All of you probably know about the horrible masacre in Colorado at a midnight showing of The Dark Knight Rises. A 24 year-old man came into a theatre and took at least a dozen innocent lives and injured scores of others. It was monstrous.
Monstrous. That is my first reaction and the reaction of millions of others. "What kind of a freak could do this?!" How many of you thought that? I did.
When I was in Germany I got the chance to visit a concentration camp in Flossenburg. This camp was the place where Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed along with, literally, a pile of others. As I was being driven to the concentration camp I thought I was going to see a place where innocent lives were ruined and taken by monsters. This is not what I saw.
After taking the tour I felt immense guilt. I had become friends with many Germans and found them to be just like me. During the tour I had found that much of the ground that was the concentration camp was now the backyard for normal families. I left the concentration camp with this thought, "I could have participated in this."
I could have been a German during WWII and let the monstrosity of the Holocaust happen or perhaps I could have participated. This is frightening.
When we hear of this "monster" in Colorado we ask "What kind of a freak could do this?!" A human one, that's what kind. We humans are built with a default setting, "monstrous enemy of God and man." In all of us in the capability to do evil.
The salvation from sin offered by the Almighty is the only thing that can fix this default setting that has been in place since The Fall of Man. Salvation is not just freedom from the penalty of sin, it is freedom from sin. From one degree of glory to the next we are saved from sin until His work in us is complete.
Without God we are all monsters in one degree or another. The only way to fix this is to cry out to God through faith in Jesus for salvation today.
Huh...thanks for the reminder.
ReplyDeleteGood post.
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