Death to Misery

I realize I have been off the blogging scene for quite some time, but there's nothing that will break loose an avalanche of words like unanswered questions.  And I have a question.  A few actually.

Why do (some) people feel the need to regularly inform anyone who will listen of the most morbid, depressing, tragic news items that you could possibly imagine?  Actually, I would never even imagine the kind of things I'm talking about.  If I did I'd be writing the script for Saw XIII.  These masters of misery will call you just to ask "Did you hear about that guy who killed his whole family on Thanksgiving?"  Thanks for the update.  I'm just gonna go hang out in the garage.  With the car running. You know, for the tunes.

But seriously.  Am I crazy to be a happy person?  Sometimes I feel like it, as though it would make much more sense to sit in a dimly lit room somewhere and weep while looking at pictures of murder victims and starving children.  Am I heartless or cold for not wanting to know every time another little girl has been decapitated and thrown in a dumpster?  Am I ignorant or uninformed for not reading the kind of nightmarish news stories that keep you up at night and make you not want to take a walk by yourself?

Let me be clear.  I have no desire to pretend that there is not evil in the world.  I do not want to bury my head in the sand, and we should certainly have compassion for people.  But my feeling is that of course  there is evil in the world, but I don't need the details of the latest grizzly crime to know that.  I don't understand how the same people are continually shocked each time they hear a news story about another twisted pedophile trolling playgrounds or a deranged mother abusing her children.

A lot of people like to cite man's capacity to do evil as evidence that there either is no God, or that God simply cannot be good.  I see it as profound evidence of man's need for a Savior.  Jeremiah 17:9 says "The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked; who can know it?"  We cannot fix ourselves.  We need more than a proper upbringing or self-help books that instruct us on how to reach our "full potential."  Apart from Christ we don't have any potential.  It is only through his death on the cross that we can be free from sin and the utter depravity that is our nature.

I guess I do know the answer to one of my questions.  I am not crazy to be happy, because my hope is in Christ and the knowledge that while I was once completely dead in my sins, by grace I am now alive in Christ.  In James 4, this life is described as "a mist that appears for a little time and then vanishes."  Let's use this "little time" sharing the Gospel with spiritually dead men rather than perpetually mourning for physically dead ones.

"I tell you this, brothers: flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God, nor does the perishable inherit the imperishable. Behold! I tell you a mystery. We shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trumpet. For the trumpet will sound, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.  For this perishable body must put on the imperishable, and this mortal body must put on immortality.  When the perishable puts on the imperishable, and the mortal puts on immortality, then shall come to pass the saying that is written:

'Death is swallowed up in victory.'
'O death, where is your victory?
O death, where is your sting?'"

1 Corinthians 15:50-55