20. THE FACE OF EVIL. - What does evil look like?

Colson p.185 

When Colson went to a women’s prison to speak for Prison Fellowship to the inmates he wanted to see Susan  Smith. She had drowned her two small sons by letting her car slide into a lake with them still strapped into their car seats. Her new date said that these two children would be a hindrance to her marrying him. She turned out to be an ordinary woman sitting on the front row. The face of evil is frighteningly ordinary.

 What about the 11 year old and thirteen year old who pulled the school fire alarm, assumed sniper positions and then start shooting the students as they file out. They kill four students and a teacher and wounded eleven others.

There are freckled faced teenage killers. There are killers on the streets and in the suburbs. What does evil look like? Just like the murderers with ‘Survival of the Fittest’ tee shirts at Columbine High School in Colorado.

“Columbine High School was the site of one of the deadliest mass shootings in modern United States history.^[8] The shootings occurred on April 20, 1999, when senior students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold killed twelve students and a teacher, and wounded 24 others, before they both committed suicide. The massacre made headlines both nationally and internationally, making Columbine a household name, and causing a moral panic in U.S. high schools.

These heinous crimes are explained away by’ the problem is the poverty. But most of these killers come from middle class families. Or the problem is race- but most of the perpetrators were white. Or there is a Dysfunctional childhood. This is the normal explanation for all crime these days. Millions of kids from difficult backgrounds never commit a crime.

Most commentators don’t want to the S-word.....sin. It is sin that unleashes the capacity for raw evil in our society. Sin blinds us to everything beyond our own selfish desires.

The judge said to Amy Grossberg  during her sentencing “ if there is a disturbing aspect to your character,...... it was an egocentricity that blinded you to the need to seek help, and to the intrinsic value of the life of this little child.” She and her boyfriend had cross the state border, checked into a hotel, given birth, murdered her child and thrown the dead body into a rubbish bin.

SIN is choosing what we know is wrong and doing it. All evildoers ‘have a choice between good and evil; and they know that they are doing wrong when they do it.’ We rarely hear people admit that they have committed a serious crime.

WE HAVE A CHOICE AND WHEN WE SIN, WE CHOOSE TO DO EVIL.

After a Prison term the late Chuck Colson was ministering in prisons all over the world.

Children are no longer taught moral truths in school. The Bible was read daily and teachers believed that part of their role was to encourage virtue and instil restraints against the lurking sin within us.

All this self-esteem teaching when children have to be taught to like themselves. Where “guilt” is something hazardous to mental well-being, an artificial restraint from which they must be liberated
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