We saw a tragedy. God sees cosmic rebellion.
When a society makes sin small, evil becomes normal, and we are seeing that in real time. What was once unthinkable, a man rebelling against his nature, rejecting his God-given identity as male, walking into a worship service and slaughtering children, has become just another data point in our political debates. The response is no longer sackcloth and ash, but political talking points and campaign fodder.
You see, the shooter didn’t just reject God’s Word, he was discipled by the liturgy of the age.
From Sin to Syndrome
The moment evil is reduced to “a mental health episode,” we’ve traded the moral for the medical, sin for syndrome, and guilt for disorder. The shooter, in a sense, becomes a victim of broken systems, not a rebel against a holy God or a defacer of His image.
“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” — Genesis 9:6
To name evil is to imply a moral law, and to imply a moral law demands the existence of a Lawgiver who will judge righteous judgment. When society removes God from its moral framework, it loses the ability to name evil for what it is. In turn, there’s a shift from moral accountability to therapeutic explanation.
We are watching, in real time, the collapse of evil into mere dysfunction. And without the Lawgiver, justice becomes impossible, and meaning disintegrates.
A World Without the Vertical
When a man walks into a church and slaughters children, and the world and the church respond with words like “mental health,” “system failure,” and “policy review,” we are witnessing not only a tragedy, but a collapse of meaning. It is the fruit of a society that has lost connection to the vertical.
This is not just a moral crisis, it is a theological one that brings about slavery and further moral confusion.
When the vertical disappears, when God is “dead,” (as Nietzsche warned and secular society ignored) we become lost and crushed under the burden of meaning, identity, and morality. In the absence of God, sanity must rest on the self, but the self cannot carry the burden. Without a transcendent reference point, meaning, identity, and morality collapse inward.
“Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools…” — Romans 1:22
God Gave Them Over
This is not merely mental illness; it is divine judgment according to Romans 1. God giving them over to the impurity they desired, the passions they embraced, and the delusions they chose.
“Therefore God gave them over in the lusts of their hearts to impurity…
For this reason God gave them over to degrading passions…
God gave them over to a debased mind…” — Romans 1:24–28 (selected)
And the list of vice that follows knows no bounds (Romans 1:24–32). This is rebellion with divine permission, and a release of divine restraint upon the wicked and unrepentant conscience. It is judgment in real time.
A Debased Mind in View
But the debased mind does not begin with this kind of horror. It begins with a quiet exchange:
“Because they did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a debased mind…” — Romans 1:28
How can we identify a debased mind?
• A debased mind calls evil good and good evil.
• A debased mind celebrates mutilation.
• A debased mind slaughters children in a worship service.
• A debased mind calls it “a tragedy of mental health.”
False worship leads to false identity, and false identity leads to real destruction and death.
But let us not imagine that this debased mind dwells only in the world out there. The exchange of truth for a lie begins in every human heart, including ours. Idolatry is not just cultural, it’s in our bones (Jer. 17:1; Rom. 2:15).
Rebellion Disguised as Freedom
We told people to be their own gods, to define their truth, to express their desires with unmitigated freedom, and to assert their identities without question. And then we act shocked when some do so in ways that end in destruction and death. Hence, modern man is bloated with rights, but hollow in righteousness and starved of responsibility.
The trans movement is the most extreme expression of this collapse of moral categories. After all, it is the complete rejection of the givenness of nature, the beauty of the created order, and even one’s own body.
“You formed my inward parts; You knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.” — Psalm 139:13–14
Rebellion against God always ends in violence, first against nature, then against neighbor.
When the Church Speaks Again
The Church now finds itself in a missionary context in the West. We must speak the truth about sin again with the moral clarity that only comes from biblical literacy. We must recover the reality of evil, the cosmic rebellion of sin, the justice of God, the wrath to come, the cross that saves, and the blood that speaks a better word than any therapist or psychoanalyst ever could.
“Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins.” — Hebrews 9:22
“The blood of Jesus Christ cleanses us from all sin.” — 1 John 1:7
Let us not diagnose sin with psychology when it demands theology. Let us not coddle evil when Christ came to crush it. Christ came not only to crush sin, but to redeem sinners. Yes, even those lost in the deepest lies of the age. The shooter also bore the image of God, however marred. His need was not therapy, but grace. God is not dead. He is risen. And He will return to judge the living and the dead
