Some months ago, a lady jogger was captured by a group of rampaging youth in New York’s Central Park, and she was without mercy beaten, repeatedly raped and finally murdered. Her body was hidden in the bushes where it was later found by a passerby who was walking his dog. The nation was shocked. When we hear discussion of such horrendous crimes on the TV talk shows, we are given proof positive that many in our postmodern society have taken leave of their senses when they dress up such evil actions in all their psychobabble and language of victimology. These sophisticated relativists blame such horrific behavior on poverty, stress, boredom, rage, etc. When we ask them about evil in our world, they reply that the concept of evil is too simplistic, and that it is altogether outmoded. We are told that evil, especially as it is set forth in the Scriptures, does not exist and never really has! Friends, if such behavior is not evil, what is it?
We simply do not buy the psychobabble about stress, poverty, boredom and all the rest of this senseless claptrap. As a boy in rural West Virginia, during squirrel season, we used to take out twenty gauge shot guns and hunt on the way to school. As we approached the school, we unloaded the single shot and put the shells in a box. At the old one room school, we “stacked arms” in the corner, put the shells on a shelf and spent the day studying. When school was out, we took our guns, removed ourselves from the area of the schoolhouse, loaded and hunted on the way home. We were as stressed, bored, at times as angry and always as poor as anyone else, and it never occurred to us to take those guns and start shooting in the schoolhouse! We never even dreamed of grabbing any female who was walking on the path through the woods on her way home and raping and murdering her! This kind of foolish talk just shows how cheap human life has become in our society and does a lot more to promote horrific actions than it does to either explain them or deter them.
Friends, a society, any society, that finds the language to excuse evil will eventually find the means to keep it from being punished, and then no one, including those who excuse evil, will be safe in their own homes. This kind of sick tolerance purports to show great respect for human life, but what it is really doing is showing how cheap human life is in the sight of those who preach tolerance of evil. When we abdicate moral judgments of what is right, wrong, evil and good, we actually diminish respect for anyone or anything. When we abdicate the moral judgments of God, we diminish respect for the One who taught us to love and respect one another in the first place. We have allowed, in many states, the postmodern moral relativists to take over the legislatures so that we no longer have capital punishment for the evil that destroys not one, but many lives. West Virginia is one of those states. When we have done this, we have announced to the world that we consider the life of a thoroughly evil person of greater value than that of an innocent victim. Some evil person can come to West Virginia and victimize, molest and murder innocent little children and never have to worry about having to pay the ultimate price. This is the result of saying there is no such thing as evil.
We care not how bored, poor, angry or stressed anyone is, he has no right to destroy the life of the innocent! And if we allow such to happen, we are saying that such a person is of greater value than the innocent person who has been destroyed. Evil is in our world! It is all around us! And when it reaches its filthy tentacles out and takes hold of the postmodern relativist, his mourners can finally admit that it exists!
Apart from the values set forth for us in the Holy Scriptures, we are all potential Hitlers, Stalins or other genocidal murderers who have lived in the 20th century. Unless we are willing to recognize that evil exists and stand forthrightly against it, we must become its victims. God help us to recognize the evil that is all around us all the time. “A good man out of the good treasure of the heart bringeth forth good things: and an evil man out of the evil treasure bringeth forth evil things” (Matthew 12:35).
