Shooters at schools and theaters are often called"sick" or "mentally ill." I would be more open to that explanation if they had stormed armed police stations instead of vulnerable schools and a theater. People who are sick or ill are not responsible for their actions, and our desire not to be accountable to God causes so many to label harmful behavior anything but sin.
The extremely good news is that Jesus died on the cross as a substitute for our sins. He did not die because we have a sickness or disfunctional family or because we make mistakes. There are no disfunctional families, but only sinners who make excuses for our sins. There is real sickness that îs painful, but sin then causes us to plan pain for others. The theater shooter in California planned his actions for over 2 months. Yet we hear all these calls for counseling, instead of repentance. People who sincerely repent of their sins and who follow Jesus Christ do not go around shooting people, especially innocent folks who never harmed them at all!
But even our vocabulary has retreated from words that are Biblical and call us to be responsible and to repent when we disobey the teachings of the Holy Spirit given to us in the Bible. No one in this country commits adultery any more, for example, but instead we just have affairs. No one fornicates, as the Bible clearly and repeatedly forbids, but we just have premarital sex. No one lies, we only fib, nor do we steal as the Bible condemns, so we just purloin. "It is appointed unto man once to die, and after death the judgement," the Bible tells us. But we do not even die anymore, we just talk of "passing," as if we were playing a football game instead of facing eternity with or without God.
Many even in the churches have bought into the notion that language of the Bible is unsophisticated and primitive, and we need to soften the words that teach the necessity of repentance. Repentance sounds harsh when we want to keep on sinning and to be affirmed in our sins. But unfortunately for murderers of innocent children and adults (as well as we who have just garden varieties of sins), who label their actions as "sick," it is only repentance that opens the door to union with the risen Jesus Christ, who has all power in heaven and in earth, and who is coming back as the judge of all the earth.
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