I don’t really even know how to express it. Crestfallen. Numbed. A deep sadness. I’m not generally a TPUSA rabid supporter, but lately I have been increasingly encouraged by watching some of Charlie Kirk’s interactions with progressives, especially his defense of Christianity and conservative values. He was formidable and unafraid. Many of his personal attributes are worthy of emulation by the young people he regularly was reaching. And in a moment he has been assassinated. We don’t know who did it yet or why, but at some level it is precisely because Charlie Kirk was such an effective proponent of ideas that some person decided to kill him in a cowardly deed. It just seems so senseless. This is indeed a dark day. But it also comes on the heels of a very dark murder in Charlotte. This young Ukrainian girl, senselessly stabbed to her death by a deranged man without any provocation. I fear where this could escalate. We saw just a glimpse of the recriminations on the House floor this afternoon. Yet when we see this, especially together, this has to be a wake up call. The Sovereign Lord is still on His throne, and He is allowing the outgrowth of our wickedness to permeate out our land. Will we not collectively repent and ask for His mercy?

The book of Judges recounts a time like our own, “when there was no king in Israel, and everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” Our collective culture is now embracing the radical individualism that each of us is effectively our own god; we can decide what is right and wrong. But God is not mocked, and we reap what we sow. At the end of the book of judges, there is the horrible story of a Levite and his concubine, where drunken men rape the man’s concubine and kill her (after demanding to sodomize the Levite himself). The Levite cuts her body in pieces and send one part to each of the 12 tribes as his protest of the evil that had been done. The tribes then unite to go to war against the tribe of Benjamin who allowed it. You can read the whole sordid story here. The story of judges is a downward spiral of wickedness as the nation refuses to repent and turn to God. Yet this wickedness was finally too much and they acted as one to confront evil.

What will it take in our country to be outraged? To say enough? When this young Ukrainian girl with her whole life in front of her is senselessly murdered, when Charlie Kirk, with his two young children and surviving wife, is assassinated because someone doesn’t like his ideas, when will we say enough? The left will say it’s time to say enough–pass more gun control laws. The right will say it’s time to say enough, get rid of soft-on-crime judges and vitriol from the left. I say it’s time for us to weep and to repent for our country. As C.S. Lewis reminds us, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pain: it is His megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” And the pain we are collectively feeling is a megaphone screaming one thing: repent from our wicked ways. I encourage each of us–we cannot wait for our leaders to do this–to be crying out to God for mercy and forgiveness of our sin. And we need to be part of the collective that owns this sin, even as Daniel did in his day. We cannot let it be said “In those days there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.”

May God have mercy on this land.

For any comments (although I’m not sure any are needed on this one), please try to stay away from thinking horizontally and instead think vertically. It would be so easy to just be angry at the other side (regardless of which side you’re on). We need to dig deeper. Pray for our leaders. Pray for the other side. Pray for the families of all involved. Pray that both God’s justice and mercy be on full display here. Remember the Cross. And rejoice that Charlie Kirk regularly remembered the cross and kept his hope on a risen Savior.