Just a few weeks ago, a man, opened fire on a group of unsuspecting and unprotected concert goers in Las Vegas Nevada. At least 59 died and hundreds were wounded. The nation is now in the period between the attack and the facts.

How many guns did he have? How many did he use? Did he buy them all? Did someone give them to him? Where did he learn to shoot? How did he get the guns to the room undetected? And Why, Why, Why?

We are in the period between the event and the facts. After the facts come out people will use them, or abuse them to fit their preconceived ideas of how the world works.

The left will blame the right. The right will blame the left. Coastal Elites will blame middle American flat earthers. Folks from the middle will blame the establishment for letting things get out of control. Gun owners will talk self-defense. Gun controllers will talk risk reduction. You will find people on all sides invoking God as their ally.  People’s opinions will harden even more. Self-assured that theirs is the way of salvation they will demonize those who disagree with them.

They will do all this, and more because it allows them to feel safe. Or at least safer. It allows them to put the attack in a box. A box they “know” how to handle. All it takes to be “safe” is more laws, more freedom, less poverty, more tolerance, less open borders, etc.

So in this in-between time, between the event and the facts, before our stories harden, let me speak to our fundamental problem.

Las Vegas happened because evil is real. Las Vegas happened because moral evil is an objective reality.

Las Vegas happened because people, left to their own devices, can’t choose right from wrong. At least we find it ridiculously hard to choose the right thing when we know that choosing the right thing is going to cost us something we value.

We have become masters at avoiding the reality that we are, on any given day, too weak, too selfish, too afraid, to choose to do the right thing. We develop rationalizations. Oh, what I did was not really evil. You have to understand the greater context. I had to do it. It wasn’t my fault. No one ever taught me better. I’m sick. It was the only way to get what I am due. We make moral choices relative. In order to justify our actions we call evil good and good evil.

As a society we have lost our way. Lost our moral compass. Lost sight of what it means to live moral lives. Behaving decently towards each other as we seek to grow in the capacity to live virtuous, godly lives.

This is nothing new. Scripture teaches us over and over again how easy it is for the people of god to rationalize their less than godly behavior. And it teaches us over and over again, how bad behavior creates ground fertile for outbreaks of terrible evil.

Into this darkness of our feeble excuses God speaks. He sees us as lost sheep. He sees us as blind to the truth, leading each other to destruction. He sees us as children in need of a fathers gracious help.

So He does for us, that which we seem incapable of doing for ourselves. He declares to us what is good. He declares to us what is good and invites us to participate in it. In the fullness of time He sent His only Begotten Son to die on the cross so that God Himself might live within us to help us on the way.

Whatever “facts” come out about Las Vegas will not change the singular fact that it was an act of evil.  No excuse, no understanding, no rationalization will ever take away the pain of that day.

Only God can point us to the light and bring us through the dark.