God Weeps with Parents of Dunblane

By John Macleod

The following article was originally published in the March 19, 1996 Glasgow (Scotland) Herald following the slaughter of 16 kindergarten age children in the small Scotland town of Dunblane.

I believe in a God of pure and utter righteousness; I believe in a God of absolute power and might. So why, last week, did he permit the slaughter of 16 tiny children in a school gymnasium?

This dilemma -- philosophers know it as the problem of evil -- has tormented thinkers almost throughout human history. Ghastly as the outrage in Dunblane was, of course, the issue is raised daily in our experience. Christians often feel overwhelmed by the weight of wickedness, mishap, and suffering encountered in this world. The Dunblane atrocity, certainly, has shaken the land as no other event in my lifetime. But other parents in Scotland, and beyond, lost children last week -- to incurable disease, to road accidents, to crime. No pain pierces like that pain. No pat answer can quiet that agony.

Why?

God, of course, did not murder these children. A wicked man killed the little ones, possessed by his own desires, reduced to a blazing and irrational lump of ego. Why did God, then, allow him to do it? We do not know. These things are too deep for us. Anguish shrieks in the heart of mothers; fathers sit benumbed and bewildered; but we can only say -- trembling -- that we know this God. We know that he does all things well, for our lasting good and for his greater glory. It is, somehow, for the furtherance of his cause. You do not argue with God. Where were you when he laid the foundations of the earth?

Yet we cannot decry God as a remote, detached, disinterested figure, as a scientist in charge of an experiment, suffering dreadful deeds to be wrought in order to view their interesting consequences. Did he not offer up his only son? Mothers and fathers weep in Dunblane, and God weeps with them.

Into our sick, broken, alienated world God sent his son. Christ came to redeem a people, a multitude which no man can number. This Christ was -- and remains -- God and man, human and divine, in two distinct natures, and for ever. For three decades he moved in this evil, groaning sphere, knowing all the afflictions and trials we must face ourselves. We turned on him at length, in hatred and violence. We crucified him. Yet he did no sin. He lived the life that his people could never live. He died the death that they deserved to die. And in death he dying slew. He rose from the grave, and the sting of death is spent in him, and his people know no sting in their death.

All the evil in our world, all its suffering, all its bondage and all its tears, point to this Saviour. Calvary's bloody tree is the key to our broken universe. There, and there alone, is our salvation.

Christ came to convince the world of sin. Sin is the wickedness and folly in the heart of man, our full-blown war against God and his law. How readily we demonise the killer of Dunblane! And yet he was but ourselves in extreme. We may be strangers to his crimes, but we are partner in his drives and lusts. We each, by nature, live for ourselves. We are all, by instinct and by inclination, enemies of God. None of us -- not even the tiniest child -- is innocent of rebellion against him. And though, by restraining grace, very few of us kill or rape or lose ourselves in gross sin, we are partners with this man. We, too, cherish our monstrous egos. We, too, are slaves to our lust. We, too, at times surge with thoughts of violence and hatred.

Was not this man the logical end of our age? Our world glorifies sex, and our culture urges us to sate our lust, and at every turn pornography, innuendo, and titillation confront us. We deplore paedophilia, and yet we wink at homosexuality: and once the one unnatural thing is condoned, why should others be barred? We condemn violence, supposedly, and yet our culture glorifies it. Television, film, and comics echo to gunfire and drip with blood. Our very public discourse grows violent. Political opponents, like Michael Forsyth, are vilified and demonised. Someone advances views with which we do not agree, and we turn in snarling rage.

And still -- even after Dunblane -- there are those who mock God and His people, who fill columns of print with their inanities and their blasphemies. But when we have as a people turned our backs on God, ridiculed his word, defiled his day, deserted his church, chosen to live and labour without him -- how dare we then denounce him when he grants us our desire, and leaves society to cope alone? We have had decades of practical atheism. Where has it brought us?

This man wrought great wickedness: yet he only acted out, in extreme form, the fantasies and loathings that fill us all. But Christ came, too, to convince the world of righteousness. He exemplified, in his life and ministry -- as he exemplifies in the hearts of his people today -- a pure and better way. There is a path for men and women that is a shining light. There is a glory and a serenity, in reconciliation to our God, that can remake our lives and renew our world. Have there not been signs of a yearning for this, as our land has reeled in recent days? Something is far wrong with our world, our society, ourselves: this we sense, and we grope and fumble for a better way.

That way is through Christ, proclaimed in the everlasting Gospel. If our eyes are opened, we see perfect righteousness in Him. We seek to be bound up with him in his salvation, to be washed in his blood, robed in his righteousness, renewed by the Spirit of God.

And there is judgment. There are those who say that when we are dead, we rot, and that death is the end of all existence. But if that were so, then we might all kill and ravage to our heart's content: we would have then only other people to fear, and human law can be outwitted, human authority evaded -- in extremis, we could, as he did, end our own lives. Then there are those who say that there is a happy afterlife, and that all men and women are bound for it, however they may live.

We are made in the image of God. Our souls are thus immortal. But, if we reject him in life, he will reject us forever. Eternally the wicked and godless live, apart from him, conscious, tormented. Was oblivion not expected when that wicked man put the smoking gun to his own head? But he is now, for sure, in untold torment. He will be there forever, abandoned to himself and to his hate and to his darkness.

The blood of the little ones cries to Heaven from Dunblane. And it cries to us as a people, to turn from our ways, to seek after our God.