Do you tend to be numb to it or shocked by it? Dennis Haack writes:
I want to suggest that faithfulness to Christ and his gospel does not include either option. We should not be shocked by what we encounter in a fallen world, and we dare not be numb in the face of suffering. “Bible believing Christians,” Francis Schaeffer always insisted, “should never have the reaction designated by the term ‘shocked.’” He means that if we are, we have failed to understand what we claim to believe, namely that we live in a fallen world. Satan’s temptation to our first parents was to underestimate the power and nature of evil, and we sons of Adam and daughters of Eve have believed the same lie ever since. Underestimating it, we are shocked when it appears, and by the havoc it wrecks. On the other hand, to feel numb, unmoved in the face of raw evil and unimaginable suffering is a prospect that should frighten us. A danger we must guard against if we are followers of the One who howled aloud in grief and anger at the death of his friend, and who so loved the marginalized and lost that he embraced their death for himself.
It’s easy to assert that we can not afford to be either shocked or numbed; it’s quite another to sort out what faithfulness looks like in our media-saturated and pain-soaked world. The topic is something discerning Christians might want to consider together in light of Scripture.
--Dennis Haack writes & runs the awesome rag called Critique
