What happens to people who commit what may appear to be a horrible act but years later are turned into folk heroes by historians who say that the country or world is now a better place because these people made the sacrifice that others refused to make.
The end does not justify the means. No amount of evil committed against me justifies even the tiniest sin. NOTHING justifies sin - not even ‘historians’ calling you a hero.
Can you name three of these ‘folk heroes’ who have made the world a better place by committing a horrible act?
Any historian who says, ‘The world would be a worse place today if they had not done this horrible act’ is a bad historian. A historian only knows about the past; he cannot predict the future. And he certainly cannot say ‘what the world would have been like’ had this or that event not happened.
The only one who knows the entire history of humanity - down to every thought and every motive in every human heart - from the beginning through the present moment until the consummation of the universe, is GOD. ONLY GOD can possibly know ‘what would have happened if…’ some person had taken or not taken this or that action. Any human being who tries to say, ‘I’m making the world a better place’ or ‘the future will be better because of what I plan to do’ (whether he plans good or evil) risks playing God. No individual human is responsible for ‘the world’ or ‘the future’ or ‘future generations.’ God did not put that responsibility on man; it’s not a demand he makes of you.
We must inform our consciences very carefully and discern well whether what we propose to do is morally acceptable or not. We know that prayer and forgiveness are morally acceptable; we know that loving the sinner while hating the sin are morally acceptable; we know that agression or violence is morally unacceptable except in the case of a direct threat to life, when NO OTHER recourse is possible (for example, a police officer shooting a terrorist who is holding children hostage and strangling them one after another, and who cannot be stopped in any other way). Most of the time there are other ways to deal with evil than to meet evil with evil. That’s why we are taught not to return evil for evil.
Don’t forget that God can bring - and does bring - good out of evil. WE may not be able to see the good or make sense of it; the good may not appear in our lives (if an evil happened to us personally) for many years; it may not appear in human history for many centuries. But we can be SURE, that ‘after great sin comes great grace.’ When we are too zealous to nip OTHER PEOPLE’S sins in the bud (instead of concentrating on our own), we forget that GOD is in charge, and He stands ready and WILL bring grace to every situation that is truly evil.
Each individual has enough to do just trying to be good, to avoid sin today, this hour, this minute, with these people who are around me right now, without imagining that we have responsibility for making some pie-in-the-sky utopia for future generations.
To go back to my original question: name a few of those people who are heroes today, who committed horrible acts - I mean morally indefensible acts. And when you’ve done that, look around at today’s world and tell me precisely how today’s world is ‘a better place’ than it was before they committed those ‘horrible’ acts.
'Cause it sure looks like it’s headed towards vigilantism!