Anti Existance said:
What a horrible world we live in
, lets try to keep spreading the love and light into this world filled with hate,greed and anger.
You are right, spreading love and light is a very important task for us to keep focussed on. It is situations like this that test to the very limit our abilities to put Christian principles into practice. We all learn the theory of such virtues as turning the other cheek, blessing those that hate and persecute us, meeting evil with good, and forgiving those that sin against us, etc. But when we face people capable of committing such gross callousness against other humans, our reaction is understandably to wish that God would simply rip their guts outs and smash them to pieces.
But when we feel like that I think we need to remind ourselves of another of God's qualities. Whilst we normally concentrate on God as love, we need to remember he is also a God of perfect justice. We know that because our faith is based on God's greatest demonstration of his justice - the suffering and death of his own innocent Son. Justice requires that all sin has to be paid for in some form, and even though we who believe in Christ are redeemed from our sin, God still did not circumvent this requirement, but fulfilled it instead through his Son. So if God was prepared to let his own Son suffer in the name of justice, how would he allow those humans who have rejected Christ to avoid justice for their own sins? We really need to trust God absolutely in this, otherwise we cannot focus properly on what is the right Christian approach towards all human beings.
We need to remember that God loves all humans, without exception. And that makes it important, as Christians, to try to learn to love the person and hate the sin. It is sin that is our enemy, not the individual. That in no way excuses or diminishes the gravity of such terrible deeds, it only reminds us that God's mercy extends to all humans such that anyone who really genuinely repents, is broken with remorse, and turns their life over to Christ (there are some who fake this as a cover for their feelings of guilt, but they do not fool God) is not irretrievably rejected by God. This is demonstrated by both Christ and the apostle Stephen when asking God to forgive even those that were unjustly murdering them at that very moment.
God shuts out sin, not people. There is only one unforgiveable sin. Learning to fight sin without shutting the door on the sinner is perhaps one of the hardest aspects of Christian living to put into practice. God allows the weeds to grow alongside the wheat, so it is not for us to judge who is which, but to help the wheat to grow and manifest itself and avoid becoming suffocated by the real weeds. This is one reason why we have pastors whose vocation in life is to work in prisons with even the hardest of criminals. Christianity is certainly not a soft sell that offers an easy way out from crime and sin. But it
is a faith that does not permanently close its doors
because of our history, rather it is ready to open its doors to anyone who truly repents
in spite of our history.
When specifically dealing with grief, feelings of hate and anger towards others and towards God are often inevitable and should not be considered wrong. We cannot fight what is natural to our human instinct and makeup. However, I think we should recognise that these need to be temporary reactions that require treatment and healing in order that we can recover from tragedy. It is when we cling to hate and anger that these emotions start to turn themselves inwards and eat away at the victim rather than the villain in the form of bitterness and self-pity. This becomes a stagnant condition that can gradually destroy the person even more than the original tragedy. However, this is not to say that recovery from hate and anger is a rapid process, it can take many years. But both the pace and the permanence of this recovery is certainly accelerated by the light and love that friends and loved ones can give by standing by those in trouble.
Spreading light and love through Christian example is indeed an important, and extemely difficult, task for us all.
This is a personal interpretation only and I hope not to have offended anyone. I am not diminishing the gravity of crime, nor do I intend any condemnation for anyone feeling anger or hate in the face of brutality or tragedy. If anyone should feel offended by my post them please simply ignore me as a fool, or feel free to tell me so outright! - either here or by PM
