Worldviews

I was driving home from the work the other day listening to a Christian Radio show. I don't typically listen to it, but this day I was.

The two hosts (one I presume was a guest host) were talking about gang violence that left 9 people dead in the city of Chicago in April. The two hosts were talking about the tragedy, about gun violence, and one of the hosts said something along the lines of, "Let me say something else that may be a bit controversial: I think the cops know where the guns are." The other host didn't really comment on this, his response was a sort of a I-can't-really-agree-or-disagree kind of response. A couple minutes later a woman called the show and said a number of things. 1st, she said that she thought the cops knew who the drug dealers were, but didn't really do much to stop it; 2nd, she couldn't say whether the host was right in his assertion that the cops "knew where the guns were"; and 3rd, the young men involved in the shootings were being oppressed by evil spirits and need prayer. The host readily agreed with everything the caller had to say.

Here's my issue: in the span of about 5 minutes the host and the caller both blamed the police for the violence because of their inaction, and portrayed the gang members that murdered these 9 people as victims deserving sympathy.

If you want my personal point of view (which you do, otherwise you wouldn't be reading this), I think that Satan and his minions are much less preoccupied with tempting gang members and killing 9 people than they are with promoting a perversion of God's Grace to be accepted by an entire generation. The gospel message is that we are all deserving of eternal condemnation because of our willful sinful disobedience, and it is the Grace of God that extended us an opportunity to be saved from our own sinfulness through Christ's sacrifice. It is Satan that would like us to believe that we are victims of society, of poor parenting, of genetic deficiencies, or of spiritual oppression, and that because our sin is not our fault, we are not deserving of condemnation. The mentality is that we are victims, and as victims we deserve to be saved because our situation is not "our fault".

There are times when we forget that we are ALL sinful and undeserving of God's Grace, and it is then that we ought to be reminded that we are no better than those gang-bangers because we all reject God's commands. However, just because we are all sinners doesn't mean that no one is guilty and no one is deserving of judgment. We cannot use the "everyone is doing it" (or the "everyone is a sinner") argument to excuse any kind of destructive behavior. We do a disservice to God's Just and Righteous character by minimizing his hatred of evil.

Let me also say I'm not trying to cast aspersions on the radio host or the caller. I'm sure they are intelligent God-fearing people and they are probably both theologically sound. However, their conversation contained elements that I wanted to use to illustrate a point.