Daily Devotional – I’m Normal.™ I AM Ministries
“To promote Godly living in a culture committed to destroying it”
Tuesday, September 9, 2014
An Absence of God
Where was God on the morning of Friday, December 14, 2012? This is the day deranged killer Alan Lanza entered Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut and massacred nearly 30 people, most of them children. The horror of innocents slaughtered wholesale staggers the imagination. It rocked both our nation and our souls to the very core. One has to wonder how such evil can exist. Nothing about it makes sense and the prospect of avoiding future incidents seems dim. So how, then, do we process these horrific events?
Sadly, this is not the first mass shooting at a school. Before Newtown came massacres at Lindhurst, Jonesboro, Springfield, Columbine, Red Lake, Nickel Mines, Virginia Tech, Chardon, Oikos, and others. These past experiences do not help us understand or process the unspeakable horror of Newtown, they only intensify the grief, anger, and frustration, both residual and present, by reminding us of how powerless we are to prevent them.
School shootings were all but unheard of until the 1960s. The first incident was in 1966, when Charles Whitman killed 14 people at the University of Texas in Austin. Mass shootings now occur with frightening regularity and have accelerated in recent years. Clearly our nation is headed down an unwanted path. We can only pray for these events to cease in our schools.
Prayer is an appropriate response, but there’s a sad irony – we have forbidden prayer in schools and other public places. How, then, can we pray effectively for our children and they for themselves? Yes, we can pray outside the classroom, but the history of prayer exclusion in schools and our society reveals an underlying moral decline that has a notable match to the timeline of school and other mass shootings.
In 1963, Madalyn Murray O’Hare’s lawsuit officially removed prayer from the classroom. Is it mere coincidence mass school shootings began three years after the Supreme Court decision? Subsequently to the school prayer ban, atheist groups have intensified their lawsuits, attempting also to remove prayer from public meetings and governmental proceedings. In many cases they have succeeded. Their goal is to eliminate God from all areas of our lives. They call it, “Freedom from Religion” and “Separation of Church and State”. These are dangerous bromides, and spell disaster for a nation. “When the foundations are destroyed, what can the righteous do?” (Psalm 11:3). These people are asking for an absence of God.
An atheist may tell you God doesn’t exist, then use an event such as the Newtown massacre to prove the point. They would argue a loving God would not permit such atrocities, adding to the list horrors such as child abuse, sexual molestation, painful diseases, and other grim realities of a fallen and sinful world. Hence, they conclude God doesn’t exist; that is, He is completely absent. Moreover, they wish believers would waste none of the atheists’ time worshiping or talking about God in any way or in any venue.
The prospect of refuting these atheistic assertions seems daunting until one considers how “non-existence” or “absence “works and how the atheist logic is flawed. This can be demonstrated by everyday phenomena. For example, darkness is the non-existence or absence of light. There is no physical measurement for darkness, only for light. We can study light, but not darkness. Therefore, darkness is simply a term we use to describe the absence of light.
Similarly, temperature is a measure of the amount of heat in an object. There is no measurement for cold, only heat; therefore, cold is simply an absence of heat. At absolute zero (-460 F), there is a total absence of heat. At that temperature, all matter becomes inert and incapable of reaction. When heat is absent, matter, in effect, becomes dead.
These physical world examples help describe phenomena in the spiritual world, specifically, evil, which does not exist in and of itself, even though we describe the events at Newtown as such. As with darkness and cold, evil is just a word man has created to describe an absence, in this case an absence of God. Evil occurs when there is an absence of God in a man’s heart. Evil is not a creation of God, it is a lack of Him and His presence in a person.
As a nation, we have asked for an absence of God. We’ve asked Him to leave our schools, leave our public places, and to leave our government proceedings and operations. We have asked for God to be absent. As the old saying goes, be careful what you ask for. An absence of God in a man brings frightening and unconscionable results, and not just in Newtown. For example:
– On July 20, 2012, God was absent in the heart of James Holmes, who entered a public movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado. Dressed as Batman, he shot and killed 12 people, injuring 56 others.
– On January 8, 2011, God left the heart of Jared Loughner, who entered a political constituent meeting at a Safeway in Tucson, Arizona and shot Congresswoman Gabriel Giffords. He also killed six innocent bystanders.
– On November 5, 2009, God left the heart of Nidal Malik, killed 13 at the Fort Hood Army base in Texas.
– God has left the hearts of many who work in our government. Our vernacular now contains the phrase “going Postal” as a result of numerous shootings in government post office facilities.
Our nation should take a historical perspective on how God punishes those who reject Him. The Bible tells us God chooses to protect those who honor Him and withdraws His protection for those who don’t. “Blessed is the nation whose God is the LORD.” (Psalm 33:12). Whereas, the Israelites were God’s chosen people, when they asked God to be absent He punished them. When they bowed down to the Golden Calf, God sent the Levite priests to kill those responsible and about 3,000 people died (Exodus 32:27-28). God has noticed how our nation now worships the “golden calves” of money, power, fame, entertainment, greed, and other worldly pursuits.
When the Israelites grumbled in the desert, God sent venomous snakes and many died, including women and children (Numbers 21:4-6). During the time of the divided kingdom, God sent “my servant Nebuchadnezzar” (Jeremiah 25:9, 27:6, 43:10), a ruthless and bloodthirsty king, to conquer His chosen people and to take them into exile. God does not react kindly when we request His absence.
God loved everyone present in Sandy Hook Elementary School that morning, even the shooter. God, however, also loves holiness, justice, obedience, and our worship. He is merciful and gracious for a time, but He must punish sin in order to maintain justice and His holiness. Therefore, He may choose to bring misfortune upon a rebellious nation to get their attention. Only God knows whether He sanctioned the Newtown tragedy, but it certainly got our attention.
It is not normal to have an absence of God, for when He is not present, evil is. God was present at Sandy Hook Elementary School on December 14, 20012, but not in every heart. God was with the heroic teachers and staff who protected innocent lives, some of whom died in their efforts. However, God was absent in James Lanza’s heart, and evil resulted.
We cannot remove God from our daily lives and expect Him to continue to provide protection; you can’t have it both ways. God is in control and can choose to protect our nation or choose otherwise. If we give Him reason to choose otherwise, we should be afraid. “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the Living God.” (Hebrews 10:31). Atheists, be on notice that, one day, you will meet God (Isaiah 43:25, Romans 14:11, Philippians 2:10).
Each of us, as well as the nation, must decide our spiritual path. My advice is to follow behind Joshua. “But if serving the LORD seems undesirable to you, then choose for yourselves this day whom you will serve, ….But as for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.” (Joshua 24:15). A nation should do likewise.
Pray for those affected by the shootings in Newtown. The hurt and heartache lingers. As for the nation, God bless America, for it is in God we trust. These aren’t just antiquated slogans, they’re expressions of the only protection we have. An absence of God is the situation we should fear most.
In His love and service,
Jeff Myers
A servant of Jesus Christ
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