Imagine That

"Santa Barbara Massacre Defies Gun Control, Mental Health Proposals: 4 Blunt Points"

I don't mean to disparage Paul M. Barrett, author of this article. While he does a pretty good job taking a position the media rarely takes, he still misses the mark. Maybe he places a great deal of blame on the fact the Santa Barbara shooter had access to a gun, because that's what we do -- we look for some way to fix things, even things we cannot fix, even things that have already been fixed. Need I remind anyone, that significant damage has been done by all manner of psycho with box cutters, pipe bombs, fertilizer, and aircraft? This guy in California was as self-absorbed, egotistical, twisted as the rest of them. To put it even more simply, the guy was sinful, and had given himself over to that sin. No one ever wants to talk about the elephant in the room. Sin is what people do when their whole lives are designed to glorify themselves. "I'll show them." "Who do they think they are?" "They can't do that to me."

And all of us standing by, watching the carnage look for someone to blame. If you have someone to blame, you have a cause; if you have a cause, you can formulate a solution. Right? Wrong. We can't solve sin. We can't solve self-gratification. There is nothing we can do to fix ourselves much less one another. Besides, we don't have to even try -- it was done almost 2000 years ago on a hill called Calvary. Jesus paid the price that day.

This past Sunday, someone at church said, "God doesn't send people to hell because they have rejected Jesus as their savior. God sends people to hell because of their sin." Jesus is the way out of getting what we deserve -- the ONLY WAY. He paid the debt we all owed. No amount of gun control, mental health reform, or anything else is going to save us from the consequences of sin, but Jesus has fixed it. If the world lived the kind of life that demonstrated a genuine belief in that, imagine the world it would be.