Ten Times Eternity: A Response to the Texas School Shooting

I woke up to find there’d been another school shooting.

I didn’t know what to say.

I’ve written about this so many times. 

I’m told this is the 101st mass shooting in 2018, in 138 days.

Math was never my best subject, but I think that averages out to a mass shooting every 1.36 days.

I’m told there have been 22 school shootings resulting in casualties this year.

I think that averages out to about one a week.

I’m told we’ve lost dozens of young people in school shootings this year, more people than we’ve lost in the military.

I don’t really care how that averages out. Christ came for the sake of each human person individually; all of His passion was for each of us, individually. His heart’s desire is for each of us, individually, that we might be fully alive. The murder of one person is a tragedy and a horror the magnitude of which cannot be expressed. There is no way to multiply and divide human persons, human persons who were alive this morning and are now alive no longer, in order to come up with an average that tells us anything worthwhile. There is no such thing as an average person. All of Heaven is Crucified for the sake of one human person. The deliberate choice to end one human life is the whole rebellion of Lucifer and all of his angels. Heaven is a human fully alive. Hell is the decision that that life should be made to stop.

When Cain murdered Abel, God Himself came down from Heaven to pass judgement. And the judgement was that Cain was accursed and driven from the soil, forced to wander in the land of Nod, but that no one should ever murder Cain in vengeance without calling down seven times that vengeance on himself. That’s how serious a matter it is, when a human being kills another.

Today, I’m told, ten high schoolers were shot to death in Houston. And what can I say about that? What is ten times Heaven and Hell? What is ten times Satan falling like lighning from the sky? Ten times the mark of Cain? Ten times the sevenfold vengeance? Ten times exile in the land of Nod? What is ten times eternity?

Nothing is worth ten times eternity– nothing. Not convenience. Not the constitution. Not your right to feel safe. Not your right that things should go on for you exactly as they have. It is poverty to believe that ten times eternity must die, so that you can go on living as you wish. This must stop.

Of course school shootings are not the only kind of killing that must stop. Our whole culture of death must be converted, so that all of this will stop. While we’re waiting for conversion, we’re of course going to need messier things like legislation and regulation to limit the number of deaths that will result from human wickedness.  And it’s not going to stop in its entirety until Christ returns, but in the meanwhile, we must do everything we can to make school shootings, and every other form of killing, stop.

This is not enough. No response I can write can be enough. There is no dirge, eulogy, or tribute one can give that is adequate to this tragedy.  But here it is.

This is my response to ten times eternity.

(image via Pixabay)