Why You Gotta Be a Hatuh?

"From the time Cain slew his brother, man has perpetrated violence on his fellow man." -from the novel Field of Blood

They say Osama Bin Laden is dead. Some would say that the violence he espoused had at last come back upon him. Some would even say that the nature of his religion made him a violent and bloody man.

I wonder. The same thing has been said about the practitioners of Christianity.

Seems to me that out of our fallen nature comes the propensity to turn even the most beautiful things into something hateful and ugly.

Even "love" can be twisted into a degenerate cycle of abusive fighting and passionate making-up.

I am thinking of Fred Phelps and his unfortunate, misled family. How we Christians abhor the thought of this "minister" taking the name of Christ in vain.

But let me speak of this person of "Reformed" persuasion. I embraced the notion of God's sovereignty grudgingly, reluctantly. Even now sometimes I wonder, "God, why don't you save everybody?"

I already know the answer. I know lots of things, not because of my own native intelligence, but because God loved me and had mercy on me:

Nothing can for sin atone,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.
Naught of good that I have done,
Nothing but the blood of Jesus.

I know this. Sometimes I forget how I came to know this. So I become arrogant. I "get it." The Bible is explicitly clear. So why don't you "get it?" Are you SURE you're a Christian?

See what I mean? There's more than enough hate in the human heart to go around. The Greeks had a twenty-five cent word for it: xenophobia: hatred of the "other." It's the natural state of man.

Who will rescue me from this body of death? Thanks be to God-through Jesus Christ our Lord!