"Turn on the TV," came my wife's voice over the phone. "There's been a shooting at one of the high schools near here."

Her anxiety came through loud and clear in her voice.

All the Denver stations were broadcasting reports from near Columbine High School in a Denver suburb. Over the following hours a parade of surreal images painted a ghastly and horrifying story: Two students, aged 17 and 18, brought an arsenal of four guns and some 30 homemade bombs to the school at lunchtime, then indiscriminately opened fire on students and faculty members who crossed their paths.

A final tally wasn't available until the next day. The gunmen had killed 12 of their fellow students and a teacher-coach and wounded 23 others before taking their own lives. Authorities hadn't been able to release a definite count of casualties—initial estimates ranged as high as 25—simply because the carnage was so great. Victims had to be dispersed among six hospitals.

In a parting touch of madness, the teenage gunmen scattered bombs around the school and among the bodies, some with timers set to go off several hours after the shooting stopped. Some grief-stricken families had to wait more than a day for the removal of their children's bodies while officers painstakingly searched for and disarmed unexploded bombs.

One of the dead was the girls' volleyball-team captain, a senior many thought would be the class valedictorian at graduation a few weeks later. The teacher was shot as he tried to help others escape to safety.

Media and Memorials

When I visited the area the next day, black-uniformed SWAT teams and other officers were keeping visitors and the press several hundred yards from the battered school. An officer told me it would take at least several days to investigate and clear the building before visitors would be allowed in; law enforcers feared other undetonated bombs might have been stashed in other students' cars in the school parking lot. (The next day authorities found a powerful bomb in the school kitchen; apparently the pair intended to blow up the cafeteria and burn down the 2,000-student school.)

Members of the news media, unable to get near the school, swarmed over the huge adjacent public park. The tragedy had entranced the world. A forest of satellite dishes and antennas sprouted from a growing thicket of news vans and trucks. Technicians strung cables and phone lines. Several carpenters hammered away, building a small sound stage for one of the major news networks. Around me I heard reporters speaking in Spanish, German, French and other languages.

Students were everywhere, some crying, some sobbing, many simply dazed. Hundreds brought flowers, cards and the occasional stuffed animal for several makeshift memorials springing up in the park. Many students embraced, holding hands and clinging to each other as though afraid of losing another friend. Students from other area schools, reaching out in the only way they knew how, added cards and posters to the growing mounds of flowers.

Baseball to Bombs

Slowly, details of the background of the suspected killers leaked out. Both were from outwardly stable homes; one family was noticeably wealthy. The boys, both seniors, were described as bright and intelligent. One had played baseball in Little League. The other had been a Boy Scout.

But somewhere along the way something happened. Their interests changed from baseball and Boy Scouts to homemade bombs and Adolf Hitler. They became part of a school clique known as the Trench Coat Mafia, whose members wore long, black coats and sometimes exchanged stiff-armed salutes and decorated their clothing with Nazi symbols.

Some of the group's members said they prided themselves on being social outcasts. In the 1998 school yearbook, the caption accompanying a photo of the black-garbed group reads: "Who says we're different? Insanity's healthy!"

Other warning signs were evident. The pair developed a passion for violent video and computer games. One reportedly created his own Web site on which he discussed how to formulate napalm, construct pipe bombs and store explosives. A hand-drawn image on the site showed a gun-and-sword-wielding figure atop a mound of burning skulls and another figure gunning down a bloody victim.

The duo had juvenile criminal records for having broken into and stolen electronic equipment and tools from a van. One had been suspended from school for hacking into a school computer. One had been reported to authorities for threatening to kill another student. A classmate in a video-production class reported that the two made a video in which they fantasized about walking down the school's hallways firing weapons at other students.

A neighbor heard the pair breaking glass in one's garage the morning before the massacre. "I assumed it was some weird art project," he said. Police later told him the two were likely creating deadly glass shrapnel for their bombs.

Why Such Horror?

When confronted with such horror, we naturally wonder what could lead to two teenage boys cold-heartedly and calculatingly inflicting such suffering on others.

It's also natural for us to ask why God, who tells us He is both almighty and all-loving, would allow such a tragedy to take place.

Both questions have the same answer, but our thinking is so much more limited than our Creator's view that we have difficulty understanding the answer, much less accepting it. His perspective is much different from ours. "For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways," He tells us. "For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts" (Isaiah 55:8-9).

Our problem is that we simply fail to understand God's purpose, plan, method and timetable for dealing with humanity's shortcomings. Without that understanding, we are at a loss to understand why such horror exists and why God doesn't intervene to stop it. Many become so bewildered by what they perceive as inexplicable contradictions that they lose faith in God.

For example, the horror of two world wars, in which two generations of European manhood and countless civilians were slaughtered in the trenches, battlefields and death camps, eroded religious faith throughout Europe. Belief and confidence in God perished along with millions of young fighting men. To this day much of the Continent is agnostic, unsure whether God exists or whether He cares what happens among His children. Therefore it is crucial that we come to understand why God allows human carnage and suffering to continue.

A Matter of Choice

Certainly God could intervene to prevent such tragedies. "The Lord's arm is not too short to save nor his ear too dull to hear," He tells us (Isaiah 59:1, Revised English Bible).

Why, then, doesn't He intervene to put an end to misery? In the next verse He points out the reason: "... It is your iniquities that raise a barrier between you and your God; it is your sins that veil his face, so that he does not hear" (REB). There is a wall between humans and God. He didn't create the barrier. We did—individually and collectively. We've been adding to it, brick by brick, for thousands of years.

God, you see, gives us all freedom of choice. He has dealt with mankind this way from the beginning. He offered Adam and Eve a paradise in which to live and an opportunity to build a relationship with Him that would lead to eternal life. But He didn't force them to make that choice.

Given this opportunity, what decision did they make? Rejecting God's explicit instruction regarding the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they opted to do things their own way. They believed they could find a better way, that they could, through experimentation and human reasoning, choose for themselves the best way to live.

They set a pattern that all but a handful have followed ever since.

A History of Wrong Choices

Within a few generations after Adam and Eve, conditions had so degenerated that God decided to start over with Noah and his family. For a time, after the great flood, the world experienced peace through this righteous man. But it was not to last. Man again descended into barbarism.

Later God chose an entire nation, the Israelites, and brought them out of slavery to establish them as a role model for the nations around them. Concerning the laws God gave them, Moses told them: "Observe them carefully, for thereby you will display your wisdom and understanding to other peoples. When they hear about all these statutes, they will say, 'What a wise and understanding people this great nation is!' ...

"What great nation is there whose statutes and laws are so just, as is all this code of laws which I am setting before you today? ... Do not let them pass from your minds as long as you live, but teach them to your children and to your children's children" (Deuteronomy 4:6-9, REB).

God urged Israel to make the right choice, to "choose life, that both you and your descendants may live" (Deuteronomy 30:19). But, like Adam and Eve and like Noah's descendants, Israel also chose its own way.

God tells us: "... I gave them my rules and made clear to them my orders, which, if a man keeps them, will be life to him ... But the children would not be controlled by me; they were not guided by my rules, and they did not keep and do my orders" (Ezekiel 20:11, 21, REB). They brought on themselves devastating consequences: invaders, massacres and exile into faraway lands.

Later God sent His own Son, Jesus of Nazareth, the Messiah. What did those who heard Him choose to do? They murdered not only Him, but many of His followers. Christ warned His disciples that the world would hate them because it hated Him (John 15:18-19). God's way would never be easy or popular (Matthew 7:13-14).

The Bible shows that God rarely interferes with man's ability to make choices, and mankind has a long history of making bad decisions. Truly, as God's Word tells us, "there is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death" (Proverbs 14:12; 16:25).

Choices Bring Consequences

Tragically, humanity has lost sight of the connection between choices and actions and their consequences. God told ancient Israel—and by extension the people of all nations—of the consequences and benefits of obeying and disobeying His laws (Leviticus 26; Deuteronomy 28). He tells us plainly, "Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also reap" (Galatians 6:7).

What kind of seed have we as a society sown?

Today's teenagers have easy access to glorified depictions of murder and mayhem—and sadly what is on the screen is beginning to spill over into reality. All too often the entertainment industry glorifies guns and gore in movies such as Natural Born Killers and The Basketball Diaries—the latter in which a black-coated teen brutally shoots down students in a classroom with a shotgun.

Studies indicate that, by the time the average American teen graduates from high school, he will have seen some 16,000 violent deaths and thousands more illicit sexual scenes on television. The music industry chips in with songs that glorify masochism, violence, premarital and perverted sex and, at times, even the murder of policemen.

The teenage gunmen in Colorado reportedly were enthralled with Doom, a computer game. Notice how Doom and its variations are advertised on its manufacturers' Internet Web site: "The ever addictive and frighteningly realistic world of Doom is back. It's bloodier. And it's deadlier than ever ... You're a space marine armed with a mere pistol. Your mission is to locate more substantial firepower [and] blow your way through an onslaught of undead marines and mutant demons from hell ..."

When teens—and even preteens—feed on such a diet of violence and filth, what should we expect? Why should we think they will react differently when they encounter conflicts with others?

We find it convenient to blame youths for bad decisions and choices they make. But adults—even national leaders—shoulder a big share of the blame. After all, it is often leaders—including our legislators and judges—who have initiated and upheld such actions as banning prayer from schools and firing teachers for keeping a Bible openly displayed in the classroom.

Little wonder that the biblical prophet Hosea spoke of a universal principle applicable to all societies, and especially to one whose motto "In God We Trust" is found on its national coinage. Well over 2,500 years ago He was inspired to render God's assessment of the national condition. "There is no truth or mercy or knowledge of God in the land. By swearing and lying, killing and stealing and committing adultery, they break all restraint, with bloodshed upon bloodshed" (Hosea 4:1-2, emphasis added).

Does this passage not describe much of our Western world today? Just a few verses later this Hebrew prophet goes on to sum up our national plight. "My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge. Because you have rejected knowledge, I also will reject you ... Because you have forgotten the law of your God, I also will forget your children" (verse 6).

Apparently willingly ignorant of the knowledge of God and His way of life, we are the ones who set the moral tone and direction of our societies. Then we wonder why things can go so horribly wrong at a quiet suburban school. We need to face our own contribution to such problems. We need to see what we need to change.

An End to Sorrow and Suffering

God gives us the freedom to make choices—and to make decisions that often are an affront to Him. He allows us to build our societies and civilizations, write our laws and choose for ourselves what we consider to be good and what we think is evil.

But He also allows us to suffer the consequences when our choices turn out to be horribly wrong. Regrettably, bad decisions have a way of devastating innocent bystanders, as happened to the dozens of victims and hundreds of family members and friends affected by the Columbine High School shooting.

But with little regard for—if not outright rejection of—the biblical principles that gave our nation a sound moral foundation, our generation is choosing a path that inevitably leads to such heartbreaking tragedies.

Yet God is not an unconcerned bystander. The world will not always be this way. God reveals that He plans to intervene to stop the horrors that bring so much pain and sorrow.

The time is drawing nearer when people's decisions will bring mankind to the brink of annihilation (Matthew 24:21-22). Like the teenage gunmen who shattered the lives of dozens of families, world leaders will seek to solve their problems through a chain of events that will bring unparalleled anguish, violence and destruction (Revelation 9, 13, 17). That is the time God has chosen to send Jesus Christ to intervene on a global scale to save us from ourselves (Revelation 19:11-16; Matthew 24:21-33).

The Word of God makes it plain that it will take such earth-shattering events to humble humans to the point they will look to Him for solutions to their problems. Mankind will repent of their love affair with self-determination only when forced to admit that thousands of years of going our own way has brought us only face to face with our own extinction.

The Scriptures contain the promise that Jesus Christ will return to usher in a new world and establish the Kingdom of God. Then and only then will mankind find lasting peace and safety. "They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain," God promises, "for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord as the waters cover the sea" (Isaiah 11:9).

In a transformed world the grief and pain those affected by the shootings at Columbine High, and others who have experienced similar tragedies, will become a distant and fading memory. No wonder Christ tells us to earnestly pray for the time when that kingdom will become a reality (Matthew 6:9-10). GN