Street Violence and the Father

In the last several weeks, our attention has been drawn, through several high profile murder cases, to the kind of violence that fatherlessness engenders. The violence is senseless, just as the condition of fatherlessness is itself senseless. God created us to live in a particular way, and when we refuse to do so, more and more things start to go drastically wrong.

As servants of Christ, we are servants of the gospel, and the gospel is the message that, through Christ, brings us to the Father. The shed blood of Jesus and His resurrection from the dead bring us to the Father. Having been brought to the Father, we together undertake to learn how to preach this wonderful reconciliation in microcosm. We preach it in microcosm through husbands loving their wives as Christ loved the church, through wives honoring and respecting their husbands as the church does Christ, and children growing up in the security and grace of gospel-saturated home.

Social pundits descry the violence in our streets, and they note that something must be done about the “young men.” This is absolutely true—something must be done for the young men, and what must be done is to give them fathers. But we cannot give them fathers. We have no fathers. We don’t know what fathers are. We don’t know what fathers are supposed to do. In short, we cannot be saved by an arbitrary restoration of middle-class values.

Those values came from somewhere. They had to be built on a foundation. You cannot simply have social engineers wave their hands to summon up beneficial results. This is just another way of saying that we, as a nation, must return to Jesus, who will in turn bring us to His Father. There is no salvation without a Savior. There never has been, and there never will be.