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LITTLETON TRAGEDY #1
Hello, everyone.
We're here in our studio on the Monday after the tragedy at Littleton,
and a week before you'll hear this. So an additional seven days' worth
of information will have come out by then: more details, more motives,
maybe more suspects. But we're not a news program, and the Voice of Prophecy
isn't much of a psychiatry/slash/radio ministry either. All we have is
a Bible, and a shared sense — with all of you — that here we are again.
Time after time after time, this fragile, weeping world gets hit with
another headline demonstrating that something has gone agonizingly wrong.
This certainly isn't a week where we'll look for silver linings. Not that
they're there to be found anyway . . . but especially by people safely
removed from the pain of Columbine High School. I didn't lose a relative
in the Tuesday shooting; neither did David or Lonnie. But it IS proper
and encouraging to see that all around the world, on TV programs and in
newspaper headlines and in schools and churches everywhere, people know
that what happened to those 13 victims was a terrible sin. There's a way
things SHOULD be, and in the city of Littleton, a week ago Tuesday, there
was instead a pile of dead bodies. Cassie Bernall, Steven Curnow, Corey
DePooter, Kelly Fleming, Matthew Kechter, Daniel Mauser, Daniel Rohrbough,
Rachel Scott, Isaiah Shoels, John Tomlin, Lauren Townsend, Kyle Velasquez,
and a teacher: Dave Sanders. And yes, two others: a 17-year-old kid named
Dylan Bennet Klebold, and his 18-year-old friend, Eric David Harris. They
died on the same Tuesday, with the same kinds of bullet wounds as the
others.
And where was God when this happened? Did the heavenly Father of those
14 high school students take a break at 11:20 in the morning, Mountain
Daylight Time? There was supposed to be, in the hallways of that Columbine
campus, an armed security guard . . . and a loving Deity named God. The
guard got off a shot, unsuccessfully. But where in the universe was this
Person who promises to protect His children? According to an L.A. Times
report, Cassie Bernall was a born-again Christian, having accepted Jesus
just two years ago. She went to church youth programs and Bible study
groups every week. John Tomlin, a 16-year-old student, had just come back
from a missionary trip to Mexico, where he and his family helped build
houses for poor people. Doing God's work. And where was God now when the
two-man army from the Trench Coat Mafia assassinated him? Why didn't God
do anything to protect Rachel Scott, who was an active member at the Celebration
Christian Fellowship Church? The most agonizing story is about the moment
when one of the two killers, brandishing his weapon there in the library,
asked a girl: "Do you believe in God?" When she said yes, he
shot her point-blank. She confesses God as her Protector, and that Protector
stands by while she dies. Why?
Friend, that's the hardest question in the world to answer, and it's inappropriate
for those of us who watched from the safe sidelines to give glib answers.
But it's a fact of this planet's sin-soaked history that murderers have
very often been allowed to murder. Clear back in the fourth chapter of
the Bible, when there were only FOUR PEOPLE walking around on this earth,
one of them picked up a weapon and bludgeoned another one to death. And
there's only four people for God to keep track of! Not 1,870, the number
enrolled at Columbine High. Not six billion, which is what heaven is supposed
to be protecting now. Just four! And yet the all-powerful Lord of all
creation stood by, silent, unmoving, His power masked, His defensive prowess
hidden away, while a resentful kid named Cain killed his fellow student
there in the Eden Elementary School.
Year after year, with shooting after shooting raining down on us all,
the books come off the presses, grappling with this question: Where Is
God? Maybe you've read the Philip Yancey book with the telling title:
Disappointment With God. The book by Rabbi Schulweis: For Those Who Can't
Believe. Where Is God When It Hurts? And on and on.
Somehow, even in the darkness of not understanding, not knowing why, the
human race, though, still seeks God. On that terrible, dark Tuesday, hundreds
of people crammed into the Light of the World Catholic Church. Not just
to memorialize the dead students, at that time still unknown to an anxious
world. But also to seek this hidden God. To assure themselves that He
was still there, watching from the Rocky Mountain shadows. I think we
all know in our hearts that somehow, for reasons we don't yet understand,
God permits these things which cause Him a greater ache than anyone else
feels. Preachers everywhere, not just in Colorado, struggled to find stuttering,
clumsy words to express what we all know inside: God is still good. God
is still love. God weeps too.
Just down the freeway from us, reporters got a hold of Rev. Gary Hall,
who pastors at All Saints Episcopal Church. "Why did this happen?"
the media wanted to know. "Where was God?" And he gave a good
answer, I think. "God is brokenhearted too," he told them. "I
don't think God was in control of these events; I think God will be found
in the healing."
Even with our hearts filled with such hurt, we're invited to look soberly
at the big picture. God had — and still has — an Eden plan for this world.
A plan with no death, no sin, no swastikas, no guns, no bullets, no funerals.
But for now, for a very long time now, our world has been held by an enemy
named Lucifer. And it's clear in Genesis, then again in Job, and yet again
in Revelation, which describes the generation of 1999, that God does PERMIT
the blueprint of the dragon named Satan to be manifested here. There's
such a thing as free choice, liberty of conscience, the power to choose.
People are invited to ally themselves with God, but they're also permitted
to swear allegiance to Satan. Babies are born pure and innocent, but as
they grow up and reach the age of accountability, God doesn't force them
into a straitjacket of holiness, of unthinking good behavior. Two young
men grew up into their teen years, and freely made the decision to embrace
a world known today by a new label: "Goth." Short for Gothic,
with dark clothes, dark nails, and a dark vision where evil is good. Down
here in Beverly Hills, on Melrose Avenue, is a curio shop that sells the
long trench coats, the dark makeup. It's called "Necromance."
"Goth" culture, we now know, celebrates the occult. It obsesses
on two things in particular: death . . . and Satanism. And people can
choose Satan. God allows them to sign up with the enemy. And then to pick
up a Hi-Point 9-millimeter carbine and use it.
Friend, I know I can't understand the end from the beginning, and fully
grasp why God permits this. Why did God permit Dylan Bennet Klebold and
Eric David Harris to choose the "Goth" route? And put on the
Internet: "Kill ‘em all!"? And write as their slogan: "I
kill who I don't like, I waste what I don't want, I destroy what I hate"?
Those three sick lines are Lucifer's word-for-word motto, and God permitted
these two boys to adopt it as their own. That's free will. Which, until
the end of the experiment called sin, is permitted to continue here.
There was much talk this past week about a mysterious number: "420."
What did it stand for? What was it doing in the notes the police found?
Well, "420" refers to the date: April 20. The day life ended
for the 13 victims at Columbine High School. But it didn't take long to
notice that April 20 was also the birth anniversary of a baby who was
born innocent and pure, back in the year 1889. One hundred and ten years
ago, a mother gave birth to a son, and she named him Adolf. He was pure;
he had the same innocence as these high school students when they were
born. He played with toys and he practiced his German spelling words in
elementary school. And as he grew up, he embraced the "Gothic"
vision of his generation, a world where revenge and payback and destruction
and bombs and bullets were the way to show others that you were important
too. Just as these two boys shouted out amidst the bursts of gunfire,
"We've waited our whole lives for this!", he screamed out to
anyone who would listen about his hurts. MY struggle: Mein Kampf. And
before he was done, and before he, too, killed himself in a bunker, six
million people were dead. And a silent, weeping God stood by. Not powerless,
but waiting. Not unfeeling, but waiting.
But not forever. Friend, I can't answer all questions, but I can tell
you this with absolute assurance: God fixes it all in the end. Death and
Gothic darkness and school shootings are not only eliminated, but FIXED.
God completely repairs what went so tragically wrong in Colorado 13 days
ago. Not just by washing out the bloodstains, and re-stucco-ing the walls
where bullets took out a chunk, but by restoring LIVES. Those students
will live again. Families will be reunited, and then eternally protected.
I think somehow those students from Arapahoe High, who got together Wednesday
the 21st to pray at Robert F. Clement Park in Littleton, somehow knew
this. The 700,000 who gathered together last Sunday to pray knew it. They
knew that God was the only solution, the only Father with power to completely
FIX. Then, and today, and always, He's our strength and our only hope.
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