Oregon Massacre, Part Three: Things to Remember When You Are Face to Face With Evil.

We are beginning to get a sense of the shooter in the Oregon Massacre and it seems to me to be as clear a case of demonic possession as you are likely to find. The little pissant who couldn't get a date lived with his momma and craved attention, saying "The more people you kill, the more you're in the limelight." He reportedly was "filled with hate" and executed Christians after identifying them with shots to the head.

We also now know that all his weapons were purchased legally and that he wrote that he would be "welcomed in Hell and embraced by the devil." Additionally, we know that despite claims of heroic intervention by the cops to save the situation, in fact he died by suicide when they arrived. and that, predictably, the massacre took place in the laughably cruel confines of what the collectivists are pleased to call a "gun free zone." We also have the statement from the college leadership that they have no intention of changing and that the welcome mat is still out for any mass murderer who wishes to take advantage of such a "death zone."

The talking head shows are filled with discussions about "mental illness" and the need to disarm the citizenry a la Australia and Britain in some sort of Soviet psychiatry meets the Department of Pre-Crime scheme to make us all "safe." Of course such safety is illusory and merely a con job to rob the rest of us of our God-given and inalienable liberty. For just as with every collectivist tyranny, mere opposition to the regime is accepted as an obvious case of lunacy. Why do you think they call us "gun nuts" and "religious fanatics?"

Yet as Jack Kerwick wrote at the time of the last slaughter of Christians in Charleston,

"Either a person is evil or he is 'mentally ill.' He can’t be both. Either his actions are evil, or they are symptoms of an illness. They can’t be both."

(A)llusions to “gun violence” and “mental health” are especially pernicious inasmuch as they obscure the evil nature of the deed being explained. To see just how egregious an offense this is, consider some analogies. Imagine if, while discussing the Holocaust, we spoke about “gas chamber violence,” or while discussing Islamic State mass beheadings, we talked instead of “machete violence.” Or suppose that discussions of the lynching of blacks were peppered with references to “rope violence.” None of this would sit well with decent human beings, for it is clear, or at least it is thought that it should be clear, that such descriptions miss entirely that which is fundamental to the phenomena being described—the perpetrators responsible for these wicked deeds.

As I wrote then, commenting upon Kerwick:

(A)dmitting that there is unrelenting evil in the world leads back to the Devil which leads back to God, and overarching moral authority other than their (the collectivists') own cannot be conceded or tolerated. It was not accidentally that Obama criticized people who "cling to their Bibles and their guns." Collectivists view both as deadly dangers to their appetites.

And here I arrive at the central point that many folks who approach this problem from a mere secular point of view not only fail to grasp but reject out of hand. You cannot successfully confront evil without considering where it comes from and recognizing this basic truth: evils in all their forms are merely permutations of the eternal struggle between good and evil, between God and Satan, and you cannot win against it on your own. You must rely upon faith in God to win the battle against evil, which is both within and without you. Indeed, as Christians the rest of us understand that the final battle of this war will be won by God alone, no matter how successful we are in the skirmishes leading up to it. God doesn't command us to win in these fights, but he does command us to fight. He commands us to stand. Both in our daily activities in the world and in our own internal struggle against the "powers and principalities" that seek to corrupt us to the Devil's purposes.

As Ephesians 6:10–12 says:

“Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

These are crucial truths, for we can only stand strong in the Lord’s power not our own alone, that it is God’s armor that protects us, and that our battle is ultimately against spiritual forces of evil in the world.

This is indeed spiritual warfare on all its fronts. For those of you who are put off by the task of seeking answers directly from the Bible, I would commend to all of you a slim volume recently published that explains this in detail: A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18.

Together, Tolkien and Lewis took their shattering experiences of the evils of the "Great War" and charted out a middle ground between the unremitting nihilistic despair of many of others and the collectivist errors of Bolshevism, Nazism, eugenics and a plethora of other collectivisms that some turned to. What is central to both the Narnia and Middle Earth tales is the understanding that only with the overarching power of God to help us take up the battle can we win the many fights against evil both within and without. Only within this framework can true peace and liberty be achieved. In both tales we see that it is the inner struggle against the corrupting influence of evil that makes even tactical success against in our day-to-day external lives possible.

This is not a call for a theocratic state. I am, as I have said many times before publicly and privately, a Christian libertarian. With all my faults I trust my own faith to inform and protect me, not to dictate to others (particularly with the force of government) how they must believe. But what I'm saying is that like Tolkien and Lewis, I have come to understand true happiness and liberty only comes from accepting that you can't do it on your own, that you must allow God to shoulder the burden.

So what are we to do when confronted by evil face-to-face as the Christian martyrs of Charleston and Roseburg were? The first and most immediate task is to kill the evildoer with any tool at your disposal in order to protect the innocent. Secondly, it is vital not to let your reaction to such evil corrupt you to do evil yourself.