To Encourage You

Romans 3:18 “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”

Have you been troubled by the continual occurrence of mass shootings in the news? It seems every day there is a new one – or two!  Every time this happens there seems to be several reactions.  The first is a search for a motive. Why in the world would someone just walk into a FedEx facility and murder eight people and then kill himself?  Why, in 2017, would a shooter rain bullets on a crowd of concert goers in Las Vegas and kill 58?  Authorities have no idea.   Why such bloodshed? Why such evil everywhere we look?  In the frustration of it all we see human reactions that, in the end, seem so frustratingly ineffective – e.g., mass protests, calls for gun control and the reactions in opposition to it, “thoughts and prayers” for the victims. Yet it all continues.  Man’s inhumanity to man goes on and on.  Why is this? Is there any hope?  Is there anyone who really understands what the problem is? Does anyone really have an answer? 

Well, if we look only to man, we have no answers.  That should be so frustratingly obvious if we just look around.  That’s why, as with anything else, we must look above to gain wisdom.  We need to look outside of ourselves. We need to look to God, where all true wisdom resides.  So, what does HE have to say about all this?  What’s HIS perspective on the matter? What does He say in His Word? 

Well, in Romans 3 we have mention of the exact problem referenced above.  In verses 14-17 of this chapter it talks about those whose “feet are swift to shed blood; in their paths are ruin and misery, and the way of peace they have not known.” Then in the next verse, the verse written above, we see a statement that is true of such people: “There is no fear of God before their eyes.”  That’s why so many people do such evil.  They think they’ll have no one to answer to for their actions.  They don’t fear authority in this world, and they don’t fear authority in the next.  They’ve turned a deaf ear to their own conscience, to the law of the land, and above all, to God.  They rain mayhem on others, and then think they can flee all the consequences by killing themselves. 

But then so many of the government authorities that are grappling with these problems have no fear of God either.  They are like Pharaoh who faced one calamity after another because of his own sin, yet Moses would warn him that more woe was coming because “I know that you and your officials still do not fear the Lord God” (Exodus 9:30).  They are just like the criminals in the sense that they could care less what God has said about anything, and so they search in vain for ways to address the problems without Him. And so, they muddle on in their folly and rush headlong into the destruction to which their foolishness leads them.

You see, the God Who has made us has told us that “The fear of the LORD is the beginning of wisdom” (Proverbs 9:10). Do you hear that? It’s the very starting point. Without it there IS no wisdom. Without it the answers will NEVER come.  The person who doesn’t fear God will not take Him seriously. He or she will not give a second thought to anything He has said. And yet, it is His Word that they need more than they need their daily food. Without the light of His counsel, they will wander in darkness until their end. 

You see, there are consequences to our behavior, if not in this life, then most definitely in the next.  But if we don’t believe this, if there is no fear and reverence for the counsel of God, there is no hope in this world, and there is certain eternal destruction coming in the next.  It’s as Jesus said to his apostles as they faced a hateful world, a world that would try to kill them as they spoke the truth of the Word of God: “do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul. Rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell” (Matthew 10:28).  But do men believe this warning? Do men give it a second thought?  If they do, they would think twice before they did evil to others, as would the government authorities who keep wandering in circles to find a reason why.