The force behind the bullet

Few outsiders venture into Mosby Court unless they’re visiting relatives — or looking for trouble. Almost no one lives there by choice. Six-year-old Ernesha Baites has no choice. Her mother can’t afford to live anywhere else. So the little girl and her teenage sister do the best they can in the tough housing project in Richmond, Va., while Mom works to make ends meet. Ernesha has big brown eyes set off by the white beads in her braids. Her gap-tooth smile could melt steel. She loves cartoons and Rapunzel. The week before she started first grade in September, somebody shot her. He probably wasn’t aiming at her, you understand. He just didn’t care that she was playing near the line of fire. It could have been a drug deal gone bad or a gang beef. This time, witnesses said it was an argument on a basketball court that turned into a shootout. Neighbors said they heard at least 20 shots fired. A bullet hit Ernesha’s leg, but she’s going to be OK. Once she got home from the hospital, she even talked to a local TV news crew. Sitting on the couch in her living room, she showed a reporter the cast on her healing leg. Her relieved mother sat beside her, talking about moving someplace safer as soon as she can get more work hours. A happy ending, you might say — as happy as endings usually play out in Mosby Court, at least. But before the news crew turned off their camera, Ernesha had a question. “Why did they shoot me, if they already saw me?” she asked. The look of confusion and hurt on her face reminded me of the expressions of Syrian refugee children I have met in areas bordering the horrific civil war in Syria. They don’t understand why someone would shoot at them and try to kill their parents or their brothers and sisters. They don’t understand why they can’t go home. Ernesha doesn’t yet understand how cold this world can be, either. But she’s learning. You wonder if she looked into the eyes of the shooter and, if so, what she saw there. I know all the sociological answers: The gunman might have been shot or brutalized when he was Ernesha’s age. He might be trapped in Mosby Court, or someplace like it, by poverty and hopelessness. He might have felt the pressure to “represent,” to kill or be killed, to uphold the street code. But the real force behind the bullet was sin. It never ceases to amaze me how many otherwise sensible folks believe that people, deep down, are basically good and want to do the right thing. We’re just confused or traumatized by bad experiences, they say. We’re misguided or manipulated by others into doing wrong. We have no choice. All these rationalizations sound reasonable at different times or places. But the root cause of wrongdoing is sin. People are basically good? Nonsense. I’m bad to the bone, every bit as bad as the guy who shot Ernesha — and I have fewer excuses. You’re no better, if you’re honest with yourself and God. We are sinners. We have rejected God and sought our own selfish and evil ways, just as the Bible says we would. Technology and science may have produced staggering human progress, but they have improved human nature not at all. We hate one another just as passionately, fear one another just as keenly, disobey God just as willfully as our bloody-minded ancestors. We are sinners — collectively and individually. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t need a Savior. And the world wouldn’t need to know about Him. Recently, IMB President Tom Elliff spoke about having a hard time sleeping after watching the evening news, not just because of wars and disasters, but because “every one of us has learned how to look at the most horrific things you can imagine and be unmoved by them. We know where the great tragedies are, we see people running for their lives and starving physically,” he said. Often they are also starving spiritually. “We’ve learned how to be aware of lostness but not be moved by lostness.” We have an even deeper problem, however, if we cease to believe that sin causes darkness and can be defeated only one way. “We can talk about the problems, the poverty and corruption and politicians. But it all goes back to the darkness they live in,” said a missionary in one of the most corrupt cities in Asia. “The only answer is Jesus Christ.”

Zombies and the resurrection

                               

Watch out. They’re coming. And if they bite you, you’ll soon be joining them — after you die an agonizing death, reanimate and become one of the “undead,” that is.

I’m talking about zombies, of course. You can find them stumbling around looking for their next human snack in countless comics, books, computer games and movies. “The Walking Dead,” one of the most popular shows on TV, follows the grim adventures of survivors of the zombie apocalypse as they fight off hordes of mindless-but-hungry creatures in Georgia. No wisecracks, please; that’s my home state.

How did zombies become so big all of a sudden? It’s not all that sudden. George Romero’s “Night of the Living Dead,” the low-budget movie that started the flesh-eating zombie craze, oozed onto theater screens in 1968. In fact, zombies entered American pop culture long before that. American soldiers who occupied Haiti in the 1920s brought back fearful tales of dead men working the fields, controlled by evil voodoo masters — part superstition, part folklore emerging from the brutal Caribbean legacy of slavery. “White Zombie,” starring Bela Lugosi (the original movie Dracula), came out in 1932.

There are any number of theories floating around about why folks are fascinated with zombies, ranging from our timeless appetite for scary stories to heavy-duty dissertations analyzing our fear of global pandemics, terrorism, world-ending wars and even the dehumanizing effects of consumer culture.

But there’s a deeper and more universal human fear underlying the zombie obsession: our dread of death itself. And what comes after.

“The zombie’s horror is that he is … a slave forever,” wrote theologian Russell Moore in a Baptist Press column last year. “After all, if even death cannot free you, you can never be free. That’s exactly the point, and here’s why it should matter to Christians. Zombies are horrifying not simply because they’re mean and aggressive. They’re horrifying because they represent what ought to repulse us: the rotting decay of death. But they still walk. And beyond that, they still crave. … [T]hey are driven along by their appetites, though always under the sway of a slave master’s will. That’s our story” — the story, in other words, of fallen human beings enslaved by sin and death.

No matter how hard our youth-obsessed culture tries to convince us otherwise, we know death is coming. I appreciated the honesty of actress Valerie Harper, whose recent announcement that she has incurable brain cancer brought a national wave of sympathy. “We’re all terminal,” she responded to well-wishers in one interview. “And we have a lot of fear [about] death.”

To allay that fear, secularists and pop spirituality hucksters assure us there are no such things as heaven, hell or a God who will judge our sins in view of eternity. We know deep down they are wrong, but many of us go along with the charade or fail to challenge it. It’s a comforting fiction for folks who reject or redefine biblical truth. It won’t be very comforting on Judgment Day.

Then there are the millions who ignore death (and any other serious subject) altogether. They also tend to ignore their own souls and consciences. They “live” for the moment — like zombies. Perhaps you have noticed this tendency among those who have turned themselves over to technology, one of our contemporary false gods. Psychiatrist Keith Ablow described one of the worst manifestations of this form of idolatry in an article about the Ohio teens who stood by and watched, even taking and posting pictures and videos, as a female classmate rendered helpless by alcohol was sexually assaulted for hours:

“Having watched tens of thousands of YouTube videos with bizarre scenarios unfolding, having tweeted thousands of senseless missives of no real importance, having watched contrived ‘reality TV’ programs in which people are posers in false dramas about love or lust or revenge, having texted millions of times, rather than truly connecting, and having lost their real faces to the fake life stories of Facebook, they look upon the actual events of their lives with no more actual investment and actual concern and actual courage than they would look upon a fictional character in a movie. They are absent from their own lives and those of others. They are floating free in a virtual world where nothing really matters other than being cool observers of their own detached existence. …”

What a pathetic way to waste a life, which is intended by God to prepare us for eternity.

Evil takes ever-changing forms, but it comes from two ancient sources: sin and death. Only one Person has defeated both. Jesus knew His beloved friend Lazarus was dead before he reached Bethany, as the story is told in the Gospel of John, chapter 11. Lazarus’ sisters had sent word, begging Jesus to hurry to the village to heal their ill brother. But He delayed His arrival. By the time He got there, Lazarus had been in the tomb for four days.

“Jesus said, ‘Remove the stone.’ Martha, the sister of the deceased, said to Him, ‘Lord, by this time there will be a stench, for he has been dead four days.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Did I not say to you that if you believe, you will see the glory of God?’ So they removed the stone. Then Jesus raised His eyes, and said, ‘Father, I thank You that You have heard Me. I knew that You always hear Me; but because of the people standing around I said it, so that they may believe that You sent Me.’ When He had said these things, He cried out with a loud voice, ‘Lazarus, come forth.’ The man who had died came forth, bound hand and foot with wrappings, and his face was wrapped around with a cloth. Jesus said to them, ‘Unbind him, and let him go’ (John 11:39-44, NASB).

Jesus had authority over death, and He glorified His Father by raising Lazarus. On Easter morning, God glorified Himself by raising Jesus. At that moment, the power of sin and death was crushed for all time. For all who believe and follow Him, there is no longer any reason to fear death — or what follows. What follows is eternity in the presence of God.

Our zombified world desperately needs that message.

Messing with our minds

Listen to an audio version of this post at http://media1.imbresources.org/files/115/11561/11561-63403.mp3

Suppose you could plant an idea in someone else’s mind — and make them think it was their own.

That’s the premise of Inception, one of the most interesting summer blockbusters of recent years. The sci-fi movie stars Leonardo DiCaprio as Dom Cobb, a mental thief-for-hire who specializes in “extraction” of ideas from people’s brains via their dreams. When a high-powered corporate chief offers him an irresistible payoff to do the reverse — to sneak an idea into a competitor’s mind — Cobb organizes an elite team of dream commandos and springs into action. Lots of cool special effects ensue.

But the film isn’t just another collection of digital gimmicks. It raises serious questions about the nature of reality. Are there different levels of reality, or different realities altogether, in our minds? Are they so “real” that we can become trapped in them? If consciousness and reality are malleable, what about truth? These questions have been asked for ages by mystics, theologians and philosophers — not to mention computer gamers.

Postmodernism questions the existence of all absolutes. So Inception plays to popular culture’s ambivalent relationship with truth. My beef with the movie, however, is its suggestion that planting an idea in someone’s mind is more difficult than removing one. In the real world, the opposite is true.

Getting an idea, especially a false one, out of some folks’ minds is almost impossible. Ignorance often plays a role. But plenty of well-informed people don’t let facts interfere with their views, as several recent studies confirm. One such study, by University of California researcher Jonas Kaplan, analyzed the centers of the brain that stimulate emotion. He found that people tend to form political opinions first, then invest all their mental and emotional energy “making themselves feel good about their decision” — regardless of the conflicting data presented to them.

Two Stony Brook (N.Y.) University scholars discovered that highly educated people are even less open than others to new facts that challenge their existing perceptions. Their factual knowledge in some areas “makes it nearly impossible to correct [other areas] on which they’re totally wrong,” according to an article on the findings in The Boston Globe.

You can see this phenomenon demonstrated daily (and loudly) by TV talking heads, political bloggers and the like. You probably see it around your kitchen table or the office water cooler.

Planting an idea in someone’s mind, on the other hand, is relatively easy — for good or ill. Good parents and teachers use methods as old as Socrates to encourage young people to “discover” the right answers for themselves. Advertisers convince people every day that they can’t live without things they don’t even need. Propagandists and gossips entice people into believing lies by constant repetition.

The unsurpassed master of mental manipulation has been at it for a very long time. He convinced Adam and Eve that they didn’t need to heed God’s tiresome commands, that they could become “… like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:5, NASB). Humankind’s long history of self-deception and self-destruction began with an insidious idea planted in our minds: If we can be like God, we can be God. Then we don’t need to obey or worship Him. As a practical matter, He no longer exists.

The devil plants plenty of bad ideas, but this might be the worst: “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God’” (Psalm 14:1a, NASB). A lot of really smart people believe that one. If there is no God, the saying goes, all things are permissible — murder, genocide, you name it. Recent history gives many blood-soaked examples of godlessness as state policy.

Sin, the process of rebellion against God and worship of self, is an act of the will. But it begins in the mind. Only one idea is more powerful: the Gospel.

That an all-powerful God would enter our reality, live among us, die at our hands and rise again — all to express His love and mercy to those who rejected Him — is the most revolutionary idea in history. If it is believed, if it is accepted and acted upon, it changes everything. God uses it to renew our darkened minds so we can worship Him in spirit and truth. Then we can transmit this great idea to others, which is the mission of the church in the world.

Plant the Gospel idea in a few minds — and see what happens.

Where gang rape comes from

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A 15-year-old girl steps outside of a school homecoming dance and guzzles alcohol in a hangout spot on campus.

She collapses. She is robbed, beaten, stripped. She is raped — not once, but again and again, allegedly for at least two hours. More than 20 people reportedly participate or watch. Nobody tries to stop the attacks. Nobody calls the police.

You’ve probably heard about the incident, which occurred Oct. 24 outside Richmond (Calif.) High School. It made national headlines because of the sheer cruelty of the assault — and the fact that so many bystanders did nothing, or joined in.

“There’s something about the coldness of it ... the attitude of both the people involved and the people who saw or knew about it,” said Dara Cashman, of the Contra Costa District Attorney’s Office, after the Oct. 29 arraignment of three young suspects in the attack.

“It’s just very cold.”

When a crime this chilling captures the attention of a society already saturated with violence, explainers get into the act. Why didn’t a bystander or witness call the police? Communities ruled by crime and fear don’t tolerate “snitches,” law enforcement officials say. Liberals often point to the brutalization caused by generations of poverty and racism. Conservatives tend to talk about the breakdown of law and order, families and traditional values.

Such explanations often “presuppose that humans are basically good before society messes them up,” observes Collin Hansen in Christianity Today. “So we need to identify and fix those dimensions in our society that lead people astray. Surely factors such as the bystander effect, poor schools and broken families testify to what happens when cultures forsake common goods that restrain sin. But the Bible depicts a more realistic view of human nature.”

The Old Testament, in fact, frankly recounts several gang rapes (read Judges, chapter 19, for one heartbreaking instance). “The biblical writers do not seem surprised” by such abuses, Hansen notes. “Rather, they identify the crimes with rebellion against the Lord … .”

Sin, in other words.

Willful rejection of God’s commands leads to worship of self above all else and evil against others. It’s an old, old story. It was the main problem then. It’s the main problem now.

The vicious abuse of a 15-year-old girl for group entertainment is cold, to be sure. But it’s no colder than trafficking a child into the sex industry for profit, or ignoring the cries of the poor, or systematically destroying someone’s life with whispers and lies.

If all the bloodbaths of the last century have taught us anything, it’s that the more things change (technology, social mores), the more human nature stays the same. We are sinners — individually and collectively — and the only solution to sin is Jesus Christ.

Simple? You bet. Simple truth. You don’t need an advanced degree to understand the Gospel. Here it is: The world is lost in sin. We need to repent and return to God. He offers mercy and redemption, through Christ alone, to all who worship and follow Him as Savior and Lord.

Charles Mwangi is staking his life on that truth. A Christian in Nairobi, Kenya, he believes God has called him to reach hurting people in the tough slums of the city.

“Charles has remained faithful in the face of intense persecution from a local gang,” reports a Southern Baptist missionary in Nairobi. “His house has been vandalized and one of his Bible ‘storying’ groups was recently attacked, resulting in the robbery of the attendees’ cell phones.”

Charles prayed he would have a chance to share the Gospel with those who mistreated him. The opportunity came, Charles shared — and two of the gang members repented and accepted Christ as Lord and Savior. They now attend the same Bible group they robbed.

Law enforcement didn’t change the gang members’ hearts. Nor did community programs (although local believers and missionaries participate in social ministries in Nairobi). Jesus changed their hearts.

When enough hearts change, communities change. Whole societies and cultures change.

We need to remember that in a hyper-political age. I occasionally tune in to certain “Christian” radio programs that used to offer inspiration, teaching and global missions information along with a biblical perspective on social issues. Now it’s all politics, all the time, with barely a nod toward missions and evangelism. Even if I agree with the politics, the single-minded emphasis bothers me.

Don’t get me wrong: Christians have a sacred responsibility to speak out for what they know is right in an increasingly hostile public square. But we need to keep our priorities straight. We are citizens, first and foremost, of the kingdom of God.

His priorities are as simple as the Gospel: Love the Lord with all your heart, mind and strength. Love your neighbor as yourself. Glorify Him in your community and among the nations by proclaiming His salvation. Make disciples among all peoples.

I sat recently in a church association meeting and heard a shocking statistic. In a representative survey of the almost 500,000 people who live in the region where my church is located, a grand total of 14 percent affirmed this statement: “My faith is important to me.” That’s right, 14 percent — in central Virginia, home of Lottie Moon, guiding star of Southern Baptist missions.

I’m a lot more concerned about that statistic than who’s voting for whom.

Prayers for the backslidden

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Jehoshua was one of the most dynamic church leaders in a challenging region of Asia. He was bold, evangelistic, a gifted Bible teacher.

That was before the fall.

He had the kind of charismatic personality “that people naturally fall in love with and follow,” says a Southern Baptist missionary in the region. “In the past, he has been a lover of the Word and taught many groups he himself had led to the Lord and then pastored.

“But he fell into sin and is now hiding from the Lord, sinning all the more.”

Carlos, a friend of Jehoshua’s, also was growing in his faith. But when the missionary who was discipling him left town for a month, “he, too, slipped back into dangerous sin. … He is wanting the Lord, not the sin, but feels trapped by it just as Jehoshua does.”

Missionaries have visited the two repeatedly to encourage them. Each time, “they are open to studying the Word with us and listening to the Lord with us and even have experienced Him deeply each time. But when we leave, they haven’t sought the Lord on their own.”

Other new followers of Christ in the area are watching. They’ve seen Jehoshua and Carlos crash and burn spiritually. Should they keep following their Savior and Lord by faith, despite the difficulty — or take the easy way out and slip back into the old ways, too? You can see the question in their eyes, according to missionaries.

We’ve become sadly familiar with high-profile moral meltdowns among religious leaders in America, where temptations of all kinds abound. Popular preachers, like showbiz celebrities, often begin to believe their own press clippings. Some fall prey to pride, power or the pressures of a fishbowl existence. Others stumble into adultery when they let down their guard.

Church leaders are at least as vulnerable as leaders in other walks of life, probably more so. Nobody blinks an eye when the devil picks off a famous athlete or a movie star. But if he can ruin the ministry of a well-known pastor, disillusion the flock and bring ridicule upon Christ’s church, that’s a good day’s work for the principalities of darkness.

How much more does Satan relish destroying newborn churches in the cradle among peoples who are hearing the Gospel for the first time? It’s the kind of spiritual infanticide that will keep souls in chains for generations to come.

Corrupting the church from within is also more effective than persecuting it. External attack often strengthens believers, forcing them to commit themselves fully to Jesus in order to survive and grow. Willing surrender to sin, on the other hand, poisons the church and sabotages its ministry.

Sometimes we romanticize the lives of Christians in tough places. They must be much stronger spiritually, we reason, since they endure sacrifices and brave dangers we’ve never experienced. Maybe they are stronger. But they’re just as human. They face the same day-to-day temptations: pride, rebellion, lust, discouragement, willful self-deception. They, too, can fall just like the one-time spiritual brothers of the Apostle Paul who rejected a good conscience and “suffered shipwreck in regard to their faith” (1 Timothy 1:19b, NASB).

What can we do to prevent such tragedies in the lives of struggling believers around the world? We can pray.

“Prayers for the backslidden” is the title of the appeal missionaries sent on behalf of Jehoshua, Carlos and others in their corner of Asia. Here are some of their prayers, which we can apply to struggling believers worldwide:

* Lord, help them to understand and receive your grace and forgiveness so they will repent of their sin and love You with all their hearts. Make them strong and courageous to stand up for what is right and choose to walk Your paths. Cause them to fall deeply in love with You, Your Word, Your voice, Your presence and power.

* Lord, let them know You as Living Water to their souls, as the Bread of life to satisfy their every need. Purify their hearts. Pick them up from the pit where they’ve chosen to be stuck in mud, and place them in the Water of life where there is cleansing and joy. Show them the way out, and give them courage to head there. All the things they run after are leaving them still unsatisfied, but You, Jesus, can quench every thirst and satisfy every need.

* Lord, we pray also for those who have come to Christ through Jehoshua and Carlos. Don’t let them be led astray by their leaders’ sin. Protect Your lambs, every one of them. Don’t let any of them be lost to the enemy. Raise up the believers to be bold enough, hungry enough, to want to meet together to worship You, read Your Word and follow You all the days of their lives. Build Your church so that believers will have a passion so deep they will love thousands into Your kingdom.