Thoughts from Mark "Hat" Rackley

Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people.

• Exodus 32:12

“You shall not murder.

• Deuteronomy 5:17

So the assembly sent twelve thousand fighting men with instructions to go to Jabesh Gilead and put to the sword those living there, including the women and children. “This is what you are to do,” they said. “Kill every male and every woman who is not a virgin.” They found among the people living in Jabesh Gilead four hundred young women who had never slept with a man, and they took them to the camp at Shiloh in Canaan.

• Judges 21:10-12

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are you doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.

• Matthew 5:43-48

Dear friends, let us love one another, for love comes from God. Everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love. This is how God showed his love among us: He sent his one and only Son into the world that we might live through him. This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins. Dear friends, since God so loved us, we also ought to love one another. No one has ever seen God; but if we love one another, God lives in us and his love is made complete in us.

• 1 John 4:7-12

My son has a video game that he plays when at home.  The premise of the game is that you fight the devil.  I doubt if he has ever reached the devil.  He fights demons and mean creatures.  Everyone in the family plays it.  The game has the capability of being played over the internet.  They have friends and strangers that enter their level of play to join in the fight.  The teamwork aspect is admirable, but what is the process?  What are they doing?  They are teaming up to kill.

Sure, we are to not like evil.  We are to avoid evil.

And I can understand what my son is going through.  He teaches in an impoverished part of a city that is almost completely low income, gangs running rampant, crime out the roof, and the students and teachers have little to no hope.  He is the music teacher and often he teaches more history, math, and even science than do their regular teachers.  He likes to introduce such topics, even in kindergarten classes.  The few students that listen to him are prepared for the next school year.

But in the meantime, his principal has looked for three years for an excuse to fire my son, simply because of the color of his skin.  That is too harsh.  She hates all the teachers and wishes she could fire all of them.  But she has no clue how to read the union contract and all her teaching deficiencies and “rule violations” become union grievances due to the teachers following the union rules, in the thousands, too many to ever go before the board.  And this is only one school in a district of similar situations in a school district that is now in its second year without a superintendent.  It is one thing to have a superintendent that is incompetent, but to have an empty office?

So, yes, my son comes home and kills bad guys until he falls asleep on the couch.

But in fighting Satan, we must leave Satan up to God.  Those who are firmly in Satan’s grasp, we must love, not hate.

The old phrase applies.  “Kill them with kindness.”  (rough quote from The Taming of the Shrew by William Shakespeare – unless you are a conspiracy theorist who does not believe Shakespeare existed just because some of his sonnets have a different style).

For the younger children, they play a video game blindly.  This gives them a false impression of how to deal with others.  It is the Old West or military response, “Shoot first.  Ask questions later.”  It is the anger in the streets.  It seems everyone has a made-up excuse to be angry with everyone else.  Does that anger start with an addiction to a game that has one goal, killing?

Parents complained, with few listening 30 years ago, and the games have gotten more violent, and the streets have gotten more violent.

There are few games that teach getting along with your neighbor.  Sure, there are some where you grow crops and sell them to build bigger barns or buy another cow.  Those games exist, but the popular ones seem to be the killing games.

I sympathize with my son.  Back in the late 1980s, I developed a course that our team taught.  We were all in one huge room, in cubicles, but I managed the course and scored all the exams.  I broke down the scores by instructor and posted the scores on my cubicle wall.  In other words, if you taught only the cooling water system class, then your score was the average grade on the cooling water questions within the exam.

The signal that the grades were posted was the alarm on my submarine simulator for diving.  “Woop!  Woop!  Woop!”  And then the rest of the team came to my cubicle to see who was the top instructor of the week.  I never was.  I taught about three topics, more if someone was sick, and all three were the hardest to grasp.  One topic was nuclear physics.  Even then, I tied a couple of times for top honors over two years of teaching the class.

So, while the other instructors were high-fiving the top instructor for the week,  I was sinking Japanese aircraft carriers and destroyers in a World War II simulation.  After a week of frustration, I needed to blow something up.  But even then, it was one game at the end of the week, not every night.

And I must admit, he does not need a beer to calm down.  That is a good thing.

But I fear for the next generation and especially the one that follows.  Are we teaching love?  The command in the Ten Commandments states “do not murder.”  Going to war may be necessary.  Killing in wartime may be required, as the Judges passage above speaks of, but we have few examples of loving.  There are few among the games, and those games are rather unpopular.  There is none on the News.  And even the church misses those lessons at times.

And in some secular circles, they cannot comprehend the word “love” without equating it to sex.  It is as if the concept of friendship, companionship, family, and such are all totally lost in this world.  How about simply meeting someone without the desire to stab them in the back?!  Are we that depraved?

Jesus taught we should love our enemies.  We should treat our friends even better.  The Old Testament even speaks of getting one’s enemy’s animal out of the pit it fell into.  But these days, folks stand around ghoulishly looking at people who have lost everything in a natural disaster.  If they show any sympathy at all, they say, “That’s a shame” before they get in their car and drive away.

But a game that has an ultimate goal to kill the devil is not a good thing.  It teaches the wrong way to respond to the challenges of life and it trivializes the very real fight that each of us face each day, a cruel world where evil lurks in every shadow.

Show God’s love.  Hmm.  The game designers might not like that answer, but it is a better answer than what they try to shove down our throats.

Soli Deo Gloria.  Only to God be the Glory.