Phil Congdon, NBBC, October 4, 2017

It’s less than two days since a gunman opened fire on a crowd of thousands of concertgoers in Las Vegas, killing at least 59, and wounding hundreds more. The video of the scene is ghastly: The sound of gunfire is like something you’d expect to hear in a battle zone. The senseless loss of life is deeply painful and sobering. This is a far-too-common occurrence in the world today, and makes us all wonder, ‘What’s happening?!’

The names of victims were not even known before a search for reasons, and partisan recriminations, began swirling. It’s normal for us to immediately seek for an answer – some human deficiency or sinister evil that caused a man to do such a heinous thing. Pundits have been fighting for the ‘high moral ground,’ claiming that if our laws were different, or our political policies were changed, this wouldn’t happen.

But deep down, we suspect that try as we might, there is no ‘fix’ for this increasingly violent and amoral world. We’ll blame it on politics, the economy, the media, the entertainment industry, a ‘lack of social justice,’ or even ‘climate change.’ But in so doing, we betray a lack of serious self-examination. What will it take before we stop looking outside ourselves for the cause of evil, and look within?

Sin. It’s the cancer of the world. The one spreading this killer virus is Satan, who introduced it into the human atmosphere in the Garden of Eden. Since then, history records an endless succession of sinful pursuits, spreading misery and suffering, sometimes killing millions, sometimes 59. But Satan’s ‘fingerprints’ are all over this, and until we recognize it, we’ll keep putting a ‘Band-Aid’ of human solutions on a spiritual problem.

The reason mankind resists the “sin diagnosis” is that it indicts us all – we’re all guilty. Scripture is clear: The best of us is still a hopeless sinner. And this drives us to the one-and-only solution to sin, the God who loved us enough to dispatch His Son to take our sin and its punishment – the worst it could inflict, death – on Himself. But if this be our need, then man is not the master of his fate, and we are beholden to our God.

The logic of our agony in the wake of Las Vegas is not that complicated. A society rejects God, and therefore His solution to the sin problem. We posit a world where ‘the fittest survive,’ and since we’ve survived, we must be the fittest! Everything happens because it happens, there’s no meaning or direction in life, we’re just space dust passing through time on our way to nowhere. It’s all dumb luck…or not. In Las Vegas, not.

This ‘creed’ gets us into a hopeless vacuum. We made our “god” a mindless, heartless, ‘force,’ and now we are left wondering who to blame. Poet Steve Turner captured precisely the conundrum of our despair:

If chance be the Father of all flesh,
disaster is his rainbow in the sky,
and when you hear

State of Emergency!
Sniper Kills Ten!
Troops on Rampage!
Whites go Looting!
Bomb Blasts School!

It is but the sound of man worshiping his maker.

We often underestimate the significance of our gospel as Christians – after all, most people don’t seem to want to hear about God’s love, Jesus’ death on the cross for our sin, then rising from the dead. They’re too busy for that…places to go, people to see. Perhaps going to a concert – like thousands on Sunday night. Then evil, sin, rears its ugly head, and we wonder ‘Why?’

I hope you will never apologize for sharing the good news of the gospel with someone. It’s God’s priceless gift of His Son to the world, and by believing in Him, a life is changed from eternal death (and hell) to eternal life (and heaven), and beyond this, delivered in this life from the hopeless meaninglessness of the ‘god of chance,’ to the joy of knowing God, who sent His Son that we might live, and live abundantly (Jn. 10.10).

The search for meaning in the Las Vegas killings will continue. Perhaps some connection with ISIS, or some financial pressure, or a lover’s betrayal, or some other unseen ‘reason.’ But if someone asks you, “What do you think caused Las Vegas?”, don’t fumble for some temporal solution – “If only…”  Instead, expose the ugly reality of sin, and the Solution to it: And if someone asks about your hope as a believer, always be ready to explain it (1 Peter 3.15, NLT).