“Now the works of the flesh are obvious: sexual immorality, moral impurity, promiscuity, idolatry, sorcery, hatreds, strife, jealousy, outbursts of anger, selfish ambitions, dissensions, factions, envy, drunkenness, carousing, and anything similar. I am warning you about these things – as I warned you before – that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God.” (CSB – Read the chapter)

Our culture’s relationship with violence is an interesting one. On the one hand, the movies and streaming series we produce are increasingly gory. Long gone are the days when violent releases merely hinted at the really gruesome stuff. Now directors seem to delight in finding more and more creative ways for people to be killed or otherwise mutilated, and also in showing us all of the details. Horror films used to rely on scaring audiences. Now they mostly rely on overwhelming their senses with senseless gore. On the other hand, the barbarity of Hamas’ recent attack on Israel was a shock to our senses. We hear the stories or see the videos and ask how one person could possibly do that kind of thing to another person. The answer is almost certainly not that they were just desensitized by watching recent Western horror films. The answer is that this is how people have always been. Let’s talk about why we struggle to understand that, and just what it means for us.

I have never been a huge fan of the horror genre. Maybe it’s because I’m just that much of a control freak that I don’t want to give power over my emotions that fully to a person with whom I am not in a relationship. I don’t mind some of it. M. Night Shyamalan’s psychological thriller, Signs, is still one of my favorite movies. There was no gore in the movie. Or sex. Or language. And it was terrifying the first time I watched it. I loved it. But the recent trend of movies that present gore simply for the sake of gore just don’t do it for me. I like to think of myself as having a pretty strong stomach for violence, but even reading the plot descriptions of some of the latest horror films makes my stomach churn and my skin crawl.

I struggle with seeing the point of that. While the special effects folks who are designing all of the set pieces are certainly talented, I simply don’t see anything artistically redeeming to it. Watching another person be graphically torn apart or mutilated in some gruesome fashion shouldn’t be entertaining. To anyone. I am fully of the opinion that movies and TV shows should entertain us. They should be an escape from the brokenness of the world that transport us to a better place. Even if the path they use to get there is a broken one, hope or some note of optimism should be the final word.

Lately, though, most of the stories we tell are dark. They are dark at the start, dark in the middle, and dark at the end. They feed a growing sense of hopelessness and despair. They are essentially nihilistic in their moral outlook. Well, if you feed on a diet of that kind of stuff for very long, eventually it starts to make you sick. It starts to make our culture sick. Or perhaps it is all a reflection of sickness that was already there. Either way, the echo chamber effect it creates is not accomplishing anything positive for us in the long run.

Let me offer one more observation here. It could be that filling our stories with such gory violence is intended to be a hopeful escape from the world. How? Because by imaging the most horrible situations we can possibly conceive, we can pat ourselves on the back that at least we’re not that bad. When we flood our sense with the most grotesque, demonic, awful scenes we can paint, then when we turn our eyes away from the screen, the world seems just a little bit brighter. Things may be dark, but they’re not that dark. The trouble is, though, if there is anything to this last suggestion, the fact that our stories have had to turn as dark and troublesome as they have in order to make the world seem a little bit brighter does not offer a good commentary on how dark we feel the real world has become.

Hamas’ terrorist attack on Israel helps to prove this point. The Hamas terrorists poured across the Gaza-Israel border and unleashed a taste of Hell on the world, but particularly on Israel. They used rape as weapon of war. One father tearfully expressed his sincere relief on learning that his teenage daughter taken by Hamas had been killed. He knew what those vile men would have done to her if they had taken her alive. They butchered the elderly. They killed 40 babies, beheading many of them.

And the world heard about this and many thought, “How?’ How could something like this happen? How could a person have a mental category that rendered something like cutting the head off of a baby simply because he was born to Jewish parents as acceptable to do in any context? Just how dark and violent do we have to make our stories to distract ourselves from something like that?

You’re probably not going to like the answer. The answer is that we can’t make our stories dark enough. We can’t make our stories dark enough because the depths of evil of which we are capable as human beings have no end. When sin is unleashed, anything is possible. When the restraining limits of God’s goodness are rejected and thrown off, there is no lower limit to what we are capable of doing. And the thing is, none of this is new. What Hamas did wasn’t new. It was shocking, yes, but only because we’re not accustomed to it anymore.

The truth is that what Hamas did is what people have been doing to one another going as far back as we can imagine. That kind of violence is normal in situations of warfare or tribal conflict across human history. As Roald Dhal noted in the context of a conversation between Sophie and the Big Friendly Giant in his classic book, The BFG, human beans is better at killing one another than any other species of animals. We do it when we have to. We do it when we don’t. We do it in ways that are designed to send a message to the people around us: don’t mess with us, or this same thing will happen to you. This is all simply what sin does.

The reason it is shocking to us is not because we managed to get ourselves to the higher moral plane of evolution that Darwin and his ideological predecessors imagined we could achieve, but because Christians were so incredibly successful (with God’s help) at advancing the Christian worldview across the globe and seeing it become the moral and intellectual framework for nearly every human culture that has been developed in the last 2,000 years. Things like kindness and generosity and self-sacrifice were not assumed to be noble virtues worth pursuing prior to the proliferation of Christianity across the world. No one imagined it was a good thing to treat others the way you wanted to be treated before Jesus. Yes, there were moral teachers who taught that we shouldn’t do to others what we didn’t want them to do to us, but this was just a means of restraining our more destructive impulses, not an active call to do good for those around us.

No, the truth about the world we live in right now is that we are seeing in more and more places and with more and more consistency what the world looked like before Christianity exploded onto the scene. It wasn’t pretty. It still isn’t. You pick the big and complicated and destructive problem facing the world today. Violence. Human trafficking and exploitation. Sexual insanity of all kinds. Economic inequality. War. Poverty. Loneliness. Hopelessness. Despair. Ignorance and illiteracy. Tribalism. There is not a single one of these issues and more for which the Christian worldview, properly applied, is not the solution.

The world is starting to slowly wake up to just how bad it really is. And at least some people don’t like it. At all. What all this means is that the church has the opportunity to shine in ways it hasn’t been able to do for quite some time. A world squinting in darkness will lash out at us for being so bright, hollering at us in all kinds of different ways to turn down – or better yet, off – the light just like your teenagers do when you wake them up in the morning. But dwelling in darkness gets old quickly. When we patiently, humbly, gently, lovingly, boldly, consistently shine the light of Christ as we go through the world around us, people who want to leave their darkness behind will come. Today, find a way to shine the light of Christ through your life and see what kind of a blessing you can be. In the meantime, pray for those who are in the darkness. They need it.