The bold front page headline of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Wednesday forced a question upon us. In the wake of “the deadliest shooting rampage in modern U.S. history” our nation is stunned and searching for answers to the question, “How safe are our students?” Is there any way such a diabolical deed can be prevented?

But there is another question that clamors for attention. “Why did the 23-year-old gunman do it?” Is it the violent entertainment culture? Is it the lack of stricter gun-control? Do we need metal detectors on high school and college campuses? Should not mentally troubled students be profiled? Have college-age young people become reluctant to identify and confront aberrant and dangerous behavior?

Hundreds of grieving parents will be gathering in sorrowful funeral services within the coming week. There is no greater pain than having one’s son or daughter precede them in death. The school year was coming to an end. Graduation was not far away and families were looking forward to the rituals and celebration of the commencement season.

Faculty members and underclassmen will not be alive to continue their work of teaching, research, and educational pursuits. The curtain of death has dropped. Aspirations and hopes for the future have been felled by a killer’s bullets.

What will be said at the memorial services? Too often the suffering of the bereaved is accompanied by blows struck at the truth about life and death. The Protestant spokesman at the Tuesday convocation on the Virginia Tech campus failed to declare the unique Christian message of Christ’s triumph over death. Hopefully, there will be Bible-believing pastors who will stand in the gap and say words of healing and hope at this troublous time.

Yet in all of this there remains that nagging question about the safety of our students. School shootings have a way of exposing our society’s deficiency in moral clarity. Listen carefully and you will hear some very unsettling nonsense as various world- and life-views attempt to grapple with the reality of evil.

A criminologist was interviewed on a major cable network and wanted us to believe that the way to understand a mass murderer is in terms of “sickness.” Did the murderer of 32 people have a brain tumor? Was there a chemical imbalance?

It has become quite fashionable to speak of people who do really bad things as sick. But this kind of language only makes the suffering worse. If someone is merely sick (having a disease) or is so-called mentally ill, then are they responsible for their actions?

We can’t quite seem to bring ourselves to admit that people do wrong things because they choose to and they choose to because they want to. Something is wrong with the human heart.

It was one of the prophets of ancient Israel who said that “The heart is more deceitful than all else and is desperately sick; who can understand it?”(Jer. 17:10). If we say that the doer of evil is sick in the prophet’s sense of the word, then we are on to something.

The heart of man is deceitful and incurably ill. It is infected by the disease of sin. We sin because we are sinners, the whole lot of us, not just mass murderers and serial killers. A society that insists on avoiding this fact is deceiving itself as it marches on to its own moral disintegration.

Some moral clarity can be found in what has been called the ugliest story in the Bible. It is found in Judges 19-21. It is a gruesome episode of immorality, rape, and murder. The reason it is recorded is to demonstrate the degree to which Israel, God’s covenant people in the Old Testament, had slipped into moral anarchy.

A nation’s descent into moral decay occurs when God’s moral law is set aside and replaced by consensus morality (the opinion of the majority of the people). The Christian world-view says that there is an absolute moral standard by which all moral standards are measured. There is a standard of right and wrong that is determined, not by the tyranny of the 51 percent but by God’s moral law.

How safe are our students? They are not safe to the degree that moral decay continues unabated in our society. But in the story of murder and mayhem in the Book of Judges are two glimmers of light that can help us.

Even though Israel had lost much of its moral conscience there was still room for some moral outrage. The tribes of Israel came together to make war against the perpetrators of wickedness. This is not to suggest that Christians should engage in violence in order to correct moral ills.

Such a method was acceptable within a theocracy. Our nation is not a theocracy, but God is sovereign over the battle against moral evil and can raise up men and women who will say enough is enough. The weapons “we fight with are not the weapons of the world. They have divine power to demolish strongholds. We demolish arguments and every pretension that sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Cor. 10:4, 5).

We cannot do anything to guarantee that evil will not be visited upon high school and college campuses or any public gathering places. Until the weight of sin is removed from this world there will be more Columbines, Virginia Techs, and New York Trade Towers. This doesn’t mean that we do not work at prevention. But there are underlying conditions in our nation and in our world that will lead to other mass killings, suicide bombers, and wars.

When everyone does what is right in his own eyes moral chaos will only expand exponentially. Only if the God of the Bible is our refuge is there any safe place.

In that unrivaled psalm of trust, Psalm 91, we are assured that “He who dwells in the shelter of the Most High will abide in the shadow of the Almighty.”

God is the Christian’s shelter. His all-wise, loving hand guards the gate to all the circumstances of our lives.

Can awful things happen to a child of God? They can. There are other psalms that help us with the frown of God’s providence. We know this. Nothing can separate us from the love of God (Rom. 8:28). We are to know that “it’s all right, even when everything is all wrong.”

The truly tragic thing is that those whose lives are ended by a crazed killer’s bullet and have not experienced God’s forgiveness through reliance on Jesus’ death and resurrection will never be safe.

Dr. Howard E. Dial, pastor

Berachah Bible Church

Fayette County, Ga.