The dreadful shooting deaths of three young children and three adults in Nashville has captured the attention of the America once again. As with so many other tragedies, reporting and reactions fell roughly along partisan lines. Everyone retreated to their priors with Democrats and their associated media blaming Republican’s stance on guns while GOP Reps once again pitched arming teachers and ending gun-free zones in schools. 

However, this tragedy has a new edge to it. The shooter, as many would know by now, was a woman, who had begun identifying as a man. It is reported she was being treated for a mental illness and emotional distress. Despite this history, she owned legally-purchased guns, which she hid from her disapproving parents with whom she lived. 

As details about the shooting were coming to light, progressive media and politicians were in a bit of a quandary. The choice between denouncing a trans-identifying murderer or mourning white, Christian kids seemed a difficult one for them. In an unsettling display, talking heads could not bring themselves to outright condemn the shooter but quickly mustered an apology for “misgendering” her. 

Such moral equivocation is a jarring reminder of the muck we’re in. We really have reached a point where some people believe the shooter was as much a victim as the children and adults whom she killed. It really wasn’t her fault – if the haters would just let her live her delusion, then everyone would still be alive. Actually, for preaching that God created male and female, Christian, the blame is yours. 

But how many lies do you need to believe before it’s your own fault? Does this latitude apply to disaffected young white men or radicalized black men? Are they just victims of fatherlessness, drug culture, faults in the justice system or radical elements on dark web? You know the answer.

We live in a society that no longer believes that the devil is the father of lies, that sin is real and that judgement is coming. Even when it is before their eyes and on their screens, they don’t believe and they don’t care. Their foolish minds are darkened and they are at ease calling good evil and evil good. The lies may be getting stronger, trapping unstable minds and those who love this world in a diabolical net, yet God does not change. As Romans 1 tells us: men are without excuse. 

While much of conservative social media and commentators were quite breathless in their dire warnings for Christians to arm up against transgender revolutionaries, it is not clear that the shooter was deliberately targeting the faithful. Presbyterian Covenant School was a less protected than others she considered.

But let’s be sober-minded about the enemy’s schemes – he is still seeking whom he may devour.  By all means, consider how you will protect your family and your congregation, and pray that days of peace may return. The wickedness seems formidable, praised by all around us, like a beast out of the sea. But as Joy Pullman writes at The Federalist, this tragedy is a call to repentance and a reminder that we do not struggle against flesh and blood but against the host of hell.

The message of Easter time could not be more timely. Despite our culture’s arbitrary morality, all men stand guilty before God and tormented by sin. Yet Christ died that we may be forgiven. More than that, He has disarmed the real evil which sent him to the cross, making a public spectacle of it, triumphing over it by his death. So, whether we live or die, we must be faithful to him who paid our debt. We commend ourselves to our faithful Savior, who is risen and coming back soon.