Paying the Price for Chasing God Out of Schools

Nena Arias | February 26, 20018

Why do the nations rage and the peoples plot in vain? The kings of the earth set themselves, and the rulers take counsel together, against the Lord and against his Anointed, saying, “Let us burst their bonds apart and cast away their cords from us.” Psalms 2:1-3

There is no doubt that our culture is paying a very high price for chasing God out of our public schools. Tragically, there continue to be more school shootings in America, and these incidents are increasing since the first of its kind in 1999 in Columbine High School. At Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, two teens went on a shooting spree on April 20, 1999, killing 13 people and wounding more than 20 others before turning their guns on themselves and committing suicide. At the time, the massacre was the worst high school shooting in U.S. history and prompted a national debate on gun control and school safety, as well as a major investigation to determine what motivated the gunmen, Eric Harris, 18, and Dylan Klebold, 17. That incident is no longer the largest of its kind, other school shootings have superseded the number of deaths.

Have you asked yourself, why is this not happening in other nations around the world? Have you heard of any? I haven’t. I have asked myself this question.

When these tragedies happen, many people immediately cry out for gun control as if that would solve the problem.

In America, there have been guns at school—long before there were school shootings. A Baptist minister in Oklahoma writes, “In the school parking lot, every fourth car was a pickup truck, most of which had a rifle rack in the back window, a deer rifle hung on the rack and the windows rolled down. We never heard of such a thing as a school shooting. We knew right from wrong. We knew morality. Most of the students went to church as did most of our teachers.”

Of course, we know that guns in the wrong hands can cause grave damage. But guns and accessibility to them is never the problem the real issue gets back to the sinful heart of people. The real problem with all sinful acts is the sinful heart of mankind.

A person or a nation that excludes God out of their life and culture should not expect law and order to prevail because there is no other real force to restrain sin from manifesting. No amount of laws and their enforcement can curb sin in sinful human beings. It is common sense that when you take God out of the picture the only thing that is left is sinful, corrupt and depraved individuals. Society as a whole will never admit this now but there was a time in America when all people knew this.   

In a series of three decisions by the Supreme Court in 1962 and 1963 –to remove Bible and prayer from our public schools– was a deadly decision of spiritual significance in our nation’s history over the last 55 to 56 years.

In America, humanism was allowed to creep in and many of the humanists’ goals have been accomplished in the public school arena. But banning the Bible in public schools has not produced the result they imagined. Any way you look at it, our public schools are a mess, and the repudiation of our rich biblical-Christian heritage in the schools has everything to do with it. So what we really need is heart control and not gun control.

You can take away anything that can be used as a weapon such as cars, planes, baseball bats, knives, axes, etc. but without a change of heart by the power of God people will find something to use as a weapon when their heart is bent on doing harm. The first murder recorded in human history of Cain killing his brother Abel is a prime example of this (Genesis 4).

What can we expect from our young people when they have been told all their life that there is no God or that he doesn’t matter and that they are no better than animals or inanimate objects, yet the image of God within them alerts them to just the opposite conclusion. So the confusion is too much for many of them to bear.

By the way, brace yourselves because we have not yet seen the full impact of humanism in our country. We are still coasting on the values derived from our Christian heritage—without them, we will continue to see the tragic results.

William McGuffey, the 19th-century author of the best-selling McGuffey Readers, predicted: “Erase all thought and fear of God from a community, and selfishness and sensuality would absorb the whole man….Virtue, duty, principle, would be mocked and spurned as unmeaning sounds. A sordid self-interest would supplant every other feeling; and man would become, in fact, what the theory of atheism declares him to be—a companion for brutes.”

Rest assured that more laws and more regulations will not solve the problem not even if they were properly enforced.

We have a toxic poison called sin running through our society that has been allowed to run rampant, and the only solution has not been allowed to be applied which is biblical morality. We must pray for a biblical reformation. I believe it is America’s only real hope. Meanwhile, we are reaping what we have sown by essentially chasing God out of our schools and our national life.

“Now therefore, O kings, be wise; be warned, O rulers of the earth. Serve the Lord with fear, and rejoice with trembling. Kiss the Son, lest he be angry, and you perish in the way, for his wrath is quickly kindled. Blessed are all who take refuge in him.” Psalms 2:10-12

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