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Heroes and Madmen
Evil came to Virginia Tech, but so did hope
Presenter: Larry Kirkpatrick
Location: Mentone
Delivery: 2007-04-22 03:09Z
Publication: GreatControversy.org 2007-04-22 03:09Z
Type: Sermon
URL: http://www.lastgenerationtheology.org/lgt/doc/mis/kir-heroesandm.php
This week was little different than any other. The news was dominated by another tragic crime. Gunfire erupted on campus as a shooter ran amuck. Virginia Polytechnic Institute saw 33 killed. But these shootings are nothing new to us. We’ve seen them for years.
Why Address Such Things in Church?
It may seem almost contaminating to address such events here in church. Surely somewhere in this greasy world we should find sanctuary. If not in church, then where? The Word of God is not driven by news cycles. It is understandable that we would prefer a rest from the oppresive news ever hovering over us from this world that is passing away.
At the same time, some are quick to complain that church is irrelevant and refuses to deal with everyday realities. It is also true that for a few days, or hours at least, neighbors and coworkers, relentlessly assaulted by the airwaves they choose to listen to, cast about for tidbits of interest about the currently front-burner matter before turning to the next madness waiting in line.
The church is not a bubble. Some of us have kids in schools, relatives, grandchildren. We want reassurance that God is in control, that all will come out right in the end.
And when we don’t address such things, and the evening news broadcast does, we encourage the mentality that the evening news is the preeminent cultural spokes-agency, while religion and Christianity has nothing important to say. We must reject that idea. So there are several reasons for us to address such things, including (1) relevance, (2) witness, (3) daring to affirm that Christianity has insight in such matters, and (4) reassurance that God is in control.
And as we draw closer to the climax events in world history, we know that these kinds of mayhem will increase more and more. Surely God wants His people to have clear-headed expectations and explanations, that, through us, His people, He may work to bring good out of evil. Yes, when dozens are murdered, God has a Word.
Perilous Times Shall Come
We all know that somewhere in Hollywood, before the Virginia Tech victim’s’ blood had cooled, scriptwriters were pounding away at their keyboards, drafting scripts that will be turned into movies on TV screens just a few months along. Hollywood both repeats and echoes the darkness enveloping our society. The cycle is vicious, and we’re in it.
But should we be surprised at the rapid deterioration? Not if we pay attention to the future that the New Testament foretells:
This know also, that in the last days perilous times shall come. For men shall be lovers of their own selves, covetous, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, without natural affection, trucebreakers, false accusers, incontinent, fierce, despisers of those that are good, traitors, heady, highminded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God; having a form of godliness, but denying the power thereof: from such turn away. For of this sort are they which creep into houses, and lead captive silly women laden with sins, led away with divers lusts, ever learning, and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth. Now as Jannes and Jambres withstood Moses, so do these also resist the truth: men of corrupt minds, reprobate concerning the faith. But they shall proceed no further: for their folly shall be manifest unto all men, as theirs also was (2 Timothy 3:1-9).
The Bible foretells an increase in immorality and a decrease in commonly endearing character qualities in people especially just before the close of the age, in a period Paul here calls “the last days.” Life has always had its dangers, but the last days especially are times characterized by peril.
The inspired description of those days, (and I think we can agree that those days are these days), includes a list of, count them, 19 anti-virtues, with six more anti-virtues especially prevalent among some religious leaders. A very shallow self-love drives the decline in positive moral conduct anticipated at times end. Look at the description:
First on Paul’s list is that people will be “lovers of their own selves.” The last days will not be characterized by holding out against excess, but intemperance will have free reign. If it feels good, people will do it, regardless of the consequences. Self is first.
The next marker is covetousness. People will be wanting things they don’t have, whether material, or social in nature. The nondescript will covet fame, the child will covet the privileges of adulthood. Remember, we are not talking about in common ways, but of going to extremes.
There will be a loss of reverence and respect in society, including of self-respect. Men will be boasters. When they should cringe and let their crimes fall out of the spotlight, they will be found emphasizing their excesses. They won’t know when to shut up.
Men will be proud, thinking themselves worthy of their attainments. The contrasting virtue, humility, will be uncommon.
In a special sense, people will be in rebellion against God, going out of their way to be offensive in how they speak of Him, blaspheming Him in creative new ways. The last days will be absolutely full of open rebellion against God, although at the same time the text does not require that this blasphemy be against church. It may be found exactly there, in the church, in abominable teachings and practices blended into what is seen as being acceptable worship.
The last days will be an unusually vivid time when parents, mothers and fathers are abhorred, mocked, disregarded, ninnied. The common line in the media will encourage disregard and disobedience of parents. The forces in the lead will emphasize whatever they can to separate young people from the acquired wisdom of their parents. Satan knows that that makes destroying them less difficult.
People will be, as never before, unthankful in their outlook. That which others do will be ignored and devalued. People will expect things as if they are entitled to them. There will be no spirit of thankfulness, and when that is lacking, few thanks are given.
Another characteristic, or anti-virtue that will dominate men and women of the last days, will be unholiness. Religion itself will go on, but any teaching that it actually transforms people in this life will be viewed as cultic.
There will be a sharp decline in basic human feeling for each other. The last people born into the world will be without natural affection. Without God’s converting work on the hearts of people, they will treat their own babies inhumanly and hardly blink at doing violence to their spouses.
They will, easily, break their agreements, and be trucebreakers. People will become harder and harder to depend on.
Accusation will become the food of the hour, as false accusation becomes commonplace. Lawyers will be coming out of the woodwork to urge lawsuits. While there will often be accusations that are truthful, the last days will be especially characterized by the making of the false kind.
People of the last days will be incontinent, that is, lacking self-control, self-restraint. Addictions to uppers, downers, food, sex, gambling, games, sports, gossip, television, will be common. In just San Bernardino and Riverside counties, more than 10,000 children have been removed from their families, mostly to protect them against endangerment caused by rampant methamphetamine use by their parents. That’s just two counties in California.
It will not be enough for people to coexist; they will feel a need to show others how unafraid they are. They will be fierce and in your face.
It will not be live and let live, but the tide that will overwhelm our culture in these last days will include a despising of those that are good. Goodness itself will be questioned. The accepted theory will be that everyone acts out of self-interest and that no higher motives exist.
In the last days men will be traitors, undependable, making commitments and then denying them, and more, betraying them.
People will be heady. They’ll take foolish risks. They’ll be bold when they ought not be.
They will be highminded, holding their goals and plans and dreams in superiority over those of others.
The eighteenth of these often overlapping anti-virtues is that people will be lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God. Again notice that this doesn’t say they aren’t in church, but that their deep priorities make the love of pleasure first. These are the people that church growth experts will be bending their slippery methods to catch.
The nineteenth item is especially interesting to us. Men will have a form of godliness but deny the power of godliness. That is, religion will not go away or shrink. On the contrary, religion will be quite popular. But it will be a farcical kind, an empty shell, a form making claims to spiritual power, but unable to demonstrate it. The following quote shows where, even a hundred years ago, most professed Christians were experientially:
Religion has become the sport of infidels and skeptics because so many who bear its name are ignorant of its principles. The power of godliness has well-nigh departed from the churches. Heart union with Christ is a rare thing now. The majority of church-members know no tie but that which joins them to an organized body of professed Christians (Ellen G. White, Spirit of Prophecy, vol. 4, p. 295).
Heart union with Christ was, we are told, but a rare thing 123 years ago. If it was rare then, if “the majority of church-members” then were in the church but did not have Christ in them, then how is it today?
Thank God, we are urged to turn away from those characterized by the 19 anti-virtues. There is hope! You can turn away! Not all will be like that. Some will turn to God and be converted.
In this passage, Paul presses on to highlight six particular sins that will especially afflict some in positions of spiritual leadership, namely, deception, sexual immorality, much education but little knowledge of truth, resistance of truth, corrupt minds, and reprobation, or lack of principle concerning the faith. But God will not be mocked. In His time He will make their false faith evident to all.
The special problems themselves for church leaders in the last days is not our topic here, but the particular decline in the quality of people in the last days. Given such a prediction of catastrophic moral decline especially to be seen in the end, if there is any surprise for us, it is that there are not more madmen running loose, and that there are as many heroes roaming the world as there still are.
Monday, April 16, 2007 Virginia Polytechnic Institute Shootings
Madmen
We turn now more specifically to the events of just a few days past. A lone student ruthlessly shot 32 innocents and then turned the gun on himself. Five days later it is still the front page story. What shall we make of this tragic event?
In this case, the shooter invoked comparisons between himself and Christ. In his words, “You have vandalized my heart, raped my soul and torched my conscience. You thought it was one pathetic boy’s life you were extinguishing. Thanks to you, I die like Jesus Christ, to inspire generations of the weak and the defenseless people.”
No one, of course, vandalized his heart, or raped his soul, or torched his conscience. Student after student and professor after professor interviewed sought to be friendly to him, reach out, only to be rebuffed.
Clearly, he chooses for himself the victim role. In one breath he vilifies Christ for supposedly enjoying crucifying him; in another, he claims that in embarking on his murderous course, he, the shooter, is dying like Christ, to inspire the weak and defenseless.
Well might he have considered that Jesus’ earthly life ended, not in any flashing sword fight and the bodies of Sadducees, Pharisees, and Romans cut down in the street, but that Jesus told His followers to put up their swords, and that He restored one man’s ear that had been sliced off in the melee when the mob came to apprehend Him (Luke 22:50, 51).
Heroes
Indeed, not the deranged shooter, but some of the victims most resembled Christ. Doubtless there are many such persons and parallels that could be found. One case in particular that stands out to me is the following. The man is a Jew.
Professor Liviu Librescu was born in 1930 in Romania and eventually became a leading aeronautics expert. During WWII he was interned at a concentration camp in Transnistria. Tens of thousands of Jews from his region were murdered. The Communist government prevented his immigration to Israel, but finally gave way. Librescu travelled from Israel to America where he taught engineering at Virginia Polytechnic for two decades.
On the morning of April 17, 2007 Librescu was teaching in his classroom when shots were heard in the building. As the gunman approached seeking to enter Librescu’s classroom, he barred the way. He leapt to the door and held it shut against the gunman’s attempted entry, urging his students to flee through the windows.
While Librescu placed his body between the shooter and the students, a hail of bullets rained against the door. The students escaped out the window. One said that the last thing he saw before he exited through the window was the professor holding his bleeding body against the door. The students in his classroom lived that day. Librescu’s body was pierced by five bullets. He was, ironically, murdered on yom hashoa—Holocaust Remembrance Day. He survived the Holocaust only to die at the hands of a determined killer one third his age.
Apparently, Librescu was an observant Jew, a believer in God but not in Jesus. We do not know all that there might be to know about his life, his beliefs, mistakes he made, character flaws cultivated or overcome. What we do know is that in a moment in time, perhaps without premeditation, he took the measure of the situation, quick-mindedly grasping its mathematics, and eyes full of the oncoming gunman, the 76-year old leapt to the door surrendering his life and buying time for others.
Which party—the shooter or the professor—dies more like Christ?
If Librescu was an observant Jew, then our comparison of him with the Christian Christ would have been unwelcome to him. Still, we remember that there is only one name given under heaven whereby men may be saved—the name of Jesus (Acts 4:12). What ever then will become of the heroic Librescu?
God will judge him fairly and mercifully and justly. What he could know about Jesus will be part of the mix. The way Christianity was portrayed to him will be part of the mix. His surroundings, his opportunities, the biases that enveloped him, the behavior of the Axis soldiers while he was in the concentration camp—all these will be taken into the accounting. He’ll have no excuses. But it is also true that if he did any good, (and it seems that on Monday he did), then, while that good cannot save him, that still that good could be accomplished only through Christ. The good that he did shows, or at the very least, suggests, the working in him of a power above and beyond himself, a power of goodness. Remember, “Christ is the source of every right impulse” (Ellen G. White, Steps to Christ, p. 26).
What Librescu did happened in just a few seconds, then he was dead. Perhaps he did it as an act of faith in God as he knew Him. But it all happened so fast. It is equally possible that he did what he did very simply because of who he was. He acted as he did because in his life he had, in copartnership with God, built a godly character with all the insight he had. Character is not formed in a moment, but it may be exemplified in just two seconds. God is not willing that any should perish. He is watching for every soul, seeking to save it—yours, mine, and Librescu’s.
Concerning the Shooter
Turning to the dismal business of the shooter himself, one who reviewed his actions and expressions suggested that “he craved being ‘seen,’ being visible, being attended to. Why? Because he had a profoundly fragile sense of who he was. He did not know who he was—and what he did know, he hated.” (Golan Shahar, “Analysis: Gunman Craved Attention Because He Loathed Himself, ” The Jerusalem Post, April 20, 2007). At one level we can dismiss him as being a profoundly sick person. His actions were certainly premeditated. Was he a mentally competent individual? Heaven will have the answer to that. But before we leave him to the dustbin of history, what of these points?
That he mailed the videos and materials to NBC does suggest that he craved being seen. (And NBC, to their disgusting shame, aired them.) He wanted fame. So now he is a dead shooter. Here is seen a great narcissism, one of the plagues of our era. The Dictionary offers this as part of its definition: “Extreme selfishness, with a grandiose view of one’s own talents and a craving for admiration…” Narcissism is exactly the devil’s fully developed character trait and the opposite of Christ’s. Satan has an extraordinary self-love; he longs to be worshipped by all, even by God. It is so obviously sick. The shooter craved fame more than his life; indeed, his murder spree defined him.
Did the shooter have a fragile sense of who he was? It is apparent that he did. He seems to take up poses from certain movies, to copy and venerate the Columbine High School killers. He doesn’t have his own identity, but can only recycle other old images.
Here is where contemporary Christianity usually fails the world. Where our lives ought to be providing thousands and thousands of models for holy living, we provide but few. Without positive models to emulate, negative models fill the vacuum. If we present a Christianity to the world that is incapable of changing people and offers no expectation of changing them, people will throw away the Christian option.
When we are afraid of being authentically apocalyptic, we ourselves become signs of the times, our lukewarmness condemns us, and our failure to reproduce the character of Christ in His strength means that demonic options for mayhem are increased. Edmund Burke said that “All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” The church used to teach that through the power of God men could become good. But more often today the church teaches that men cannot become good, that they can only be declared good. Well, if, to start with you, don’t even think that you can be good, then obviously men can do little to prevent the ultimate triumph of evil, and so they will not try. This is all to say that when we deny God’s mission for His church, to make people holy, it is we who contribute to mayhem of the madmen, we who prolong the Great Controversy War, we who fuel the darkness and actually arm the wicked.
What he did know about himself, he hated. He felt an antagonism to the world, and took out it out on others in his self-hatred, shooting a lot of people he felt were better than himself. He hated their success, their energy, even their attempts to befriend him filled him only with contempt. He hated himself.
Sympathy For the Devil?
In an awful song from 1968 titled “Sympathy For the Devil,” Lucifer taunts, “What’s puzzling you is the nature of my game.” And yet, the answer to the puzzle has been revealed to us. Satan wants us to hate ourselves. He wants us to lose hope, to curl up into a ball and shrivel up and withdraw from life and from our God’s initiatives to heal us. He wants us to see what he has prompted us to become and give up—not what God’s Holy Spirit wants us to become and the hope offered in a truly Christian life.
The human conscience is not always right, not always dependable. And so in His Word to us, He gives us some quite helpful texts. Like 1 John 3:20: “If our heart condemn us, God is greater than our heart, and knoweth all things.” Stop and think about that.
It is true that when we choose to act against God’s kingdom and principles, we may act condemnably. The Holy Spirit will then come to us to convict us of sin and urge us to receive repentance and the hope that comes from the transforming divine presence. There is a true sense of conviction.
But there is also a counterfeit. The counterfeit sense comes from Satan and from our own heart. In the counterfeit version, there is condemnation but no real hope. The call to transformation does not come, but instead, to self-destruction. How can we tell the two apart?
In precisely this way. True conviction brings with it an appeal to the rational mind, a yearning for something better, and a hope that through God that is possible. False conviction brings none of these. If our heart condemns us and refuses to hope for God’s forgiveness and strength, then God is greater than our heart, then we must trust His Word more than our heart.
Hope In Christ
When we see the mayhem, we realize that the world is waiting, not for a demonstration of how much more wicked things can get, but of what happens when God changes people. The whole creation groans awaiting the manifestation of the sons and daughters of God (Romans 8:19-23).
There are two mysteries we want to experience. The first is found in Colossians 1:26, 27. This is the mystery of Christ in you, the hope of glory. It is the mystery of people being changed by God. We need to experience this mystery now, during this life. With God working in us, we’ll be transformed. The world will have a picture, through us, of the positive rather than the negative.
The second mystery we want to experience is the resurrection/translation, the change of our bodies. This corruptible must put on incorruption. First Corinthians 15:50-57 outlines the change. It will occur in a moment, but it will occur only if the first mystery occurs. First John 3:2:
Beloved, now are we the sons of God, and it doth not yet appear what we shall be: but we know that, when He shall appear, we shall be like Him; for we shall see Him as He is.
When do we become like Him? Here. Now. Character change must happen in this life. Notice that changed, holy characters are required:
Follow peace with all men, and holiness, without which no man shall see the Lord (Hebrews 12:14).
Holiness is required now, before the Second Coming. Holiness hastens the Advent, unholiness blockades it (2 Peter 3:9-12). God’s plan is that His people will be heroes through Christ, not madmen. They will follow the pattern of hope. They will come to the place, each one, where were there madmen in heaven, they would throw themselves between innocents and the shooter, blocking the door. They would willingly be pierced that others might live. Instead of complete self-love, unmitigated narcissism, they will be ready, each one, to sacrifice self for others.
How do we know? Very simply.
We’ll be safe to take to heaven then because we allow ourselves to be made safe to save now. We know we won’t choose to sin then because with Christ within, we learn how to live without sinning now. We will, all of us, be the kind of people, who would leap to bar the shooter at the door, to say, Here it ends. To draw the line and say, I would rather die than sin. To starve out the madman within. Fallen people, all of us, develop a madness in our heart (Ecclesiastes 9:3). But the business of God is to lead us to sanity (2 Timothy 1:7; Philippians 2:1-5). In the end, Jesus stands with them (Revelation 14:1-5).
Conclusion
The Bible predicts that in the last days, times will come especially characterized by peril. Looking about, it seems those times have come. Our human race seems less and less human. The more we seek our unmitigated pleasure, the less human we become.
The same Bible that predicted this devolution of our nature also tells us that God’s creation is groaning, waiting for the manifestation of the sons and daughters of God. Instead of destroyers, Heaven makes us restorers. The same revelation that told us men would degenerate also foretells a day when group who follow God cooperate with Him and are changed by Him. When these have been made ready, Jesus will come for them. Free will? We will always have it. Capability to sin? We will always have it. Interest in sinning? No. That is ended as we break away from habits and inclinations and choose selflessness instead.
In Librescu of Virginia Tech we see a picture of God’s work in us. A man chose to be moral, to sacrifice for the good of others, elected to die rather than stand still while evil triumphed. God is seeking a generation who will do the same.
Heroes or madmen, the choice is ours, but only because God is reaching out to recover our race from where it is headed. Without Him, evil would have triumphed long ago. In the end, love will prevail—love of self, or love of others, evil, or goodness. Our lives are the test case. In the moment of decision we will be what we are and the universe will see what we are. God help us so that what we are recommends Him. LGT
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