The town of Ogi suffered great damage from an earthquake in 2005. A humanitarian group, World Vision, organized an effort to assist victims and channel food and raise the living standards of the people in this desperately poor community. This week 10 militants entered the World Vision offices, sprayed gunfire in every direction, and tossed grenades on the floor before leaving. Six were killed and others injured in this act of senseless brutality.
What can explain this kind of behavior? One minute a group of people seeking to do good and improve the lot of their countrymen were alive, and the next their blood stained the walls and floors of a place that had dispensed hope. Their murder created instant orphans, parents without children, and siblings who had lost brothers and sisters. Those families are changed forever. And the community sinks deeper into fear and suspicion and despair.
What can turn the perpetrators from the kind of behavior that relies on raw power to snuff out lives? What can change the heart of someone who delights in magnifying fear by killing, destroying, and then leaving the scene?
Secular humanism might encourage us to educate the perpetrators. If they only understood their full human potential, if they wrestled through the brokenness of their past through therapy and values clarification, perhaps they would change. Their own brokenness is proof that society has parented them poorly. But as their egos are mended, as they awake to the potential of their true humanity, perhaps they will become healthy life giving human beings.
The problem with the secular models is that they do not have an adequate understanding of evil. Whether it happens in an office in a remote city in Pakistan or to an entire population in Cambodia, the perpetuation of senseless, life-destroying, heartless and unmerciful acts cannot be adequately explained from a secular perspective.
The God of the Bible insists that the moral wreckage of the world begins in the human heart. There is a component in each of us that is warped, twisted, defiled, and dangerous. We can be bitter, unforgiving, illogical, selfish, and merciless. Such tendencies can be exacerbated by events and conditions in our culture, but they do not start there. Such realities emerge from the heart. Jesus said, “The good man brings good things out of the good stored up in his heart, and the evil man brings evil things out of the evil stored up in his heart.” (See Luke 6:45.) Though our behaviors vary in degree, they all bubble up from the same polluted stream that flows inside all the offspring of Adam and Eve. When we face that reality, we begin to see our need for an outside solution—the supernatural help that God offers through a living relationship with Christ. The ‘bad’ news can lead to a better tomorrow because it points to a transformation that is more substantial than the cosmetic efforts of disciplines like sociology and psychology.
Stories of inhuman brutality and destruction also point to the amazing mercy of God, who does not fry the planet in a second of justifiable disgust, but instead offers the gift of his Son to reconcile millions over the course of history to a restored relationship with himself. In scripture we have both an understanding of the nature of evil and a personal remedy that brings us hope for this world and beyond.
