Incident in Binghamton

"You are the sons of the Lord your God. You shall not cut yourselves. . . ." (Deuteronomy 14:1)

I remember the first time I ever heard of a person deliberately cutting herself. It did not compute. Pain is something we naturally flinch from. So completely assumed is it that a man will avoid his own harm that Jesus presupposes the fact in his command that a man love his wife: "For no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it" (Ephesians 5:28-29).

The unnaturalness of it should be the first clue that "it is no longer I who do it, but sin that dwells within me" (Romans 7:16-17). Something---or someone---is out to get us. Cutting is in a class with the self-destructive doings of Romans 1:26-27, whereby "their women exchanged natural relations for those that are contrary to nature." So counterintuitive are these practices, so disadvantageous to the species, that one must pity rather than despise the sufferers, abhorring the maniacal design that has been perpetrated on them.

We are not speculating to say that these acts are set on fire by hell. Cutting was an ancient pagan cultic practice for the dead. And God has told us plainly that pagans worship demons. Lurking behind every false god is a demon: "They sacrificed to demons that were no gods" (Deuteronomy 32:17). A demon's chief end is to destroy the apple of God's eye. He takes an Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold to wipe out 12 kids at Columbine, and then turns the gun on his disposable agents. He uses the same neat and clinical method in Binghamton, N.Y., to pick off 13 plus one.

We moderns are, of course, too clever by half. We invoke demons in our speech only ironically and superciliously. In C.S. Lewis' The Last Battle, the despicable ape Shift exploits the fiction of a god Tash for his own ends, only to discover in one terrifying moment that Tash is real. The man Jesus met in the tombs, who "was always . . . cutting himself with stones" (Mark 5:5), had a legion of demons in him (v. 9). Jesus cast them out and put him "in his right mind" (v. 15). For he came "to destroy the works of the devil" (1 John 3:8).

Now will come the media posthumous postulations on Binghamton. They will never get it right while they insist on ignoring one major piece of the puzzle.

To hear commentaries by Andrée Seu, click here.