On November 5, we had a brutal demonstration of human evil in a little Baptist church on the outskirts of San Antonio, TX. Devin Kelly entered the church intending to kill his ex-wife’s grandmother. In the course of events, he slaughtered a total of 26 people including the pastor’s kids. Kelly killed women and children because of his blurry hate. Evil is latent in the heart of man.
The root of bitterness finds fertile and welcome soil in the hearts of so many people. Kelly nursed his hatred, fed it, and cared for it. The root of bitterness prospered in his heart. It poisoned everything about the young man.
I have read only a few details of Devin Kelly’s life. He was kicked out of the Air Force. He was convicted of animal cruelty because he closed fist punched a dog, picked it up, and choked it. Worse yet, he beat his wife and child. It seems that his ex-wife’s grandma, Lulu White, urged Kelly’s wife to get away from him before he killed her someday. Grandma was right on.
But Kelly blamed Lulu White’s interference, rather than his own violence. Kelly had a diseased and fallen soul, but he refused to agree with God about that it was in fact fallen. He did not repent, rather he justified himself, like so many do.
The anger deepened, and he began to console himself, like Esau did, with the thought of murder. It didn’t happen overnight, but eventually the hateful roots spread their wicked tendrils throughout his entire heart until it was completely consumed. It began to express itself in the afore mentioned criminal acts. After his bitter lust for revenge conceived, it gave birth to death.
Just shooting his former grandmother-in-law did not satisfy his evil. He had to kill 26 people. Women. Little children! And finally, like a coward, he shot himself. “Then when lust has conceived, it brings forth sin; and sin, when it is finished, brings forth death” (James 1:15).
My nephew is taking a psychology class in college, so you can imagine he has a lot of questions. Right now, he is knee deep in Freud and Skinner. Recently he asked me to summarize Freud’s and Skinner’s philosophical basis and then contrast it with Christianity. I just wanted him to help me clean out my barn, but instead I got a Psych 101 exam.
But please, constant reader, allow me to offer you the briefest sketch of what I told him, because all Christians need to see the contrast for ourselves.
Freud was committed to philosophical materialism; that is, he interpreted life from an evolutionary framework. Those who believe the Bible, on the contrary, believe that God made everything and that we were created as human beings in the image of God.
According to Freud, the id is a hold-over from a lower stage of evolution of human beings, through which humanity was rewarded by its ability to procreate and fight off competitors. The id perhaps should have been discarded after an earlier stage in the evolutionary path to humanity. Freud defined the id as the pleasure center of the brain. It motivates a human being by lust for sex and violence, demanding fulfillment, but often by sabotaging our best intentions in modernity.
Evolutionists and Christians look at the same characteristics in human beings and posit explanations which account for the data and their preconceived philosophical commitments. What Freud has to call the id, a holdover from evolution, we Christians call the fallen nature.
Christians know that at the Fall, humanity changed into desperate sinners. Human nature corrupted into the cruel image we now see every day in the news. Even Freud could see the effects of the Fall, even if he completely failed to discern their origin.
Christianity has a deep understanding of the human heart. We have been studying the soul for thousands of years now, in contrast to evolutionists like Freud’s paltry century.
Excuse my use of Greek, but the New Testament teaches that humanity’s basic problem comes from the Pathos — the diseased state of the mind, will, and emotions. The diseased soul. From the diseased soul the various lusts (epithumea) surge out—the hot passions of anger, rage, malice, and lust, which spring like the tentacles of an octopus from the pathos. Like Hercules’ hydra, cutting off the tentacles does little to kill the beast. So cutting of various sins does not change the diseased state of the soul—only Christ can do that!
The Bible teaches that at the Fall, our nature was twisted. Like a blacksmith trying to make a knife out of the spring from a truck, no matter how many times the steel is hammered flat, it still wants to curl back up because it can’t forget it was once a spring. It is forever distorted. The only remedy is to melt it down and recast it. (See Romans 6.)
Why do human beings choose to do evil when the path to the good is apparent? Is it because we still have monkey-genes swirling around in our DNA? No, human beings have not evolved from lower forms of life. We come from the dirt and the hand of God. Then our creator blew the breath of life into us: A living spirit. Like Him. And we became alive—forever.
The Bible clearly describes the source of all human evil and its cure. Evil began when human beings sought to live independently from God, but the cure is found in the perfect obedience of Christ. Jesus has made reconciliation with God possible through his sacrifice on the cross. Friend, don’t justify yourself. Agree with God that you are a sinner and receive His cure. You need a new heart. Jesus makes that possible. Till next week. Blessings.
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