Shootings at Ferndale and VT — What’s wrong with the world?
The picture is from the front page of the Detroit News website. Two shootings, one day, two different parts of the country.
The question that I see in my Twitter feed is simple: What’s wrong with the world?
The answer to that question is simple too: We live in a sin soaked world that is broken.
Does that answer sound trite? It’s not. You see living in a sin soaked world means that we should be surprised when good things and not the bad. We typically think of sin as a simple moral act of doing wrong.
Sin goes much deeper though.
It corrupts everything it touches. It makes all things broken.
Do you notice that we are appalled?
Think about it, we live in a world where we are surrounded by brokenness the way a fish lives in water, and yet we are shocked by these kinds of things. I think that’s because we experience the common grace of God on a moment by moment basis. This means that we experience the fact that God is with holding most of the evil in the world.
Occasionally evil is allowed to occur.
When it does we are shocked.
When it does we ask questions and we doubt.
We pray.
We think.
C.S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains; it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.”
Pain is the result of evil.
Evil is the reult of sin.
What do we do with sin?
Nothing.
It’s been dealt with for us. Jesus, lived, died, and resurrected to deal with sin, the results of failing to live in covnenantal relationship with God. He is the culmination of the story of God’s people where we find redemptive grace and reconciliation.
Today’s shootings are a reminder that we live in a broken and sin soaked world. They are a reminder that we need to deal with this sin. They are a reminder that we need to be in relationship with grace soaked redemptive God who is speaking through pain.