Why murder is at hand...

Many of us often assume that murderers are terrible people. But what about when the murderer is a thirteen-year-old boy trying to save his dear mother from his abusive father?

Hunter, a young boy who loved to draw action figures and look out into the stars from his telescope, hated whenever his father, Marc, got drunk. Each time, he could almost guarantee his parents would end up in an argument.

After his dad lost his job as a lead sales engineer, their arguments got worse. What used to be only words eventually escalated into physical altercations, which caused Hunter to become very uneasy. One argument was so bad that after Hunter heard things falling and his mother screaming, he ran outside of his room to see what was going on and found his mom on the floor bawling and bloody.

This made Hunter angry, and he vowed to protect his mom. So, when his dad stumbled home one night drunk and violent, Hunter retrieved the gun he’d gotten from a friend and shot his dad to death.

What Hunter never knew was that his grandfather, Gilbert, his dad’s dad, had also murdered someone. Gilbert found out that his wife was cheating on him and confronted the man outside of a barber shop. After a few words were exchanged, Gilbert punched the guy. The guy flew backwards, his head catching the edge of the building before hitting the ground. The man died almost instantly!

When we have children, we don’t just pass down to them our pug noses and pointy ears. Along with our image, they also inherit our likenesses; the ways in which we tend to handle things.

In the example above, Gilbert, Hunter’s grandfather, wasn’t really looking to murder his wife’s lover. He most likely thought he would slam the guy around a bit to make himself feel better. However, things didn’t go the way he thought it would and the event led his grandfather in prison for 15 years.

Most people who murder don’t mean to murder. For those of us who believe, though, we know that there is a force working behind the scenes that’s always looking for a foothold; that is, an opportunity to steal, kill, and destroy something.

Rock with me, now…

During Hunter’s grandfather’s lifetime, men were honored and respected for what they did in life. Gilbert was a college professor and was honored and respected by everyone in town. In his mind, he was the perfect catch. He was handsome, successful, and was proud of the life he provided for his family. So, when he discovered his wife had been cheating on him, not only was he embarrassed, but the thought of it made him feel weak and inadequate.

To make matters worse, when he confronted the guy, the guy insulted him saying that he may be a big shot around town, but that he wasn’t so big at home in bed. This provoked Gilbert to rage, which is what inevitably drove Gilbert to punch the guy. However, his actions led to murder!

Hunter’s father, Marc, inherited from his father, Gilbert, an extreme sense of pride in what he did for a living. So, losing his job as the lead sales engineer made him feel less than a man. This feeling stirred up in Marc what was already in him, to use his hands to express how he felt when he got angry. And although Hunter’s mom may not have provoked anything in Marc, his feelings did. They made him feel inadequate and disrespected, so, with his hands he abused his wife. Murder, however, was expressed through the hands of his son, who was simply trying to defend his fearful mother.

Most would probably look at these stories and conclude that murder just runs in their family. But I would like to argue that the seed of murder is in all of our families since we all come from Adam and Eve; Cain, being the first of all of us to display the behavior.

According to Roman’s 7, as Believer’s in Christ, when we’re truly walking the right way we wrestle between two natures: our natural, sinful nature and our new, spiritual Christ-like one.

In the fifth verse of this passage, it addresses our sinful nature as passions…passions aroused by the law that works in our members to bear fruit for death. Simply put, there is something in our deep desires that can be provoked by memories programmed in us through ways we inherited that drive us to kill.

For mor context, let’s embellish on Gilbert’s story a bit:

It’s Friday and it’s payday. Gilbert is looking at his bank book, proud that he’s able to make such an awesome income. He’s thinking to himself, “your wife is so lucky to have a provider like you”. On the way home he stops to buy her chocolates. He gets home, hands them to her and she tells him thank you, adding to it how wonderful he is…all the words and phrases she’s practiced over the years that feed his ego.

Gilbert goes to his room and smells an unfamiliar scent. It was the scent of another man’s cologne. He then goes over to the nightstand and notices a man’s watch and it is not his. Finally, he concludes that his wife has had another man in the house while he’s at work providing for her.

After much interrogation, Gilbert’s wife confesses who the man is. Gilbert heads around town looking for the guy and confronts him as he’s leaving the local barber shop. While he is having words with the guy, this is going on in Gilbert’s head:

“You thought your money made you man enough for her? She cheated on you with a plumber. And he doesn’t even look that great, which proves that you’re still a nothing like your father was. You’re exactly what your mother said you were, a loser!”

Gilbert’s deep desire was to be ‘good enough’. Satan, who’s the one instigating the event by provoking Gilbert’s thoughts, knows this because he has strategically planted this desire throughout his blood line.

What Satan is trying to do is to put as many of us as he can on a Judas suicide mission. Through betrayal, or the implication of it, his goal is to use as many of us as possible to destroy each other. Then, once he’s used us up, he’ll attempt to drive us to kill ourselves with the spirit of guilt.

So, Gilbert goes to jail and leaves his son, Marc, with a chip on his shoulder about women. Then Marc, who has the same desire as his father, to be ‘good enough’, and the way he has learned to accomplish that is through what he does for a living, loses his job, then drinks himself to violence, abusing his wife and almost killing her. However, his son, Hunter, kills him instead. And the cycle just goes on and on and on until someone in the family discovers and believes the truth!

We know that murder is at hand when we are angry and provoked by circumstances that fuel our anger. That means, we need to stop and switch minds. We do this by remembering what Christ would do, his instructions through the word of God. This is what ‘putting on the mind of Christ’ means.

The word instructs us to put away our anger and remember that we aren’t really fighting flesh and blood. To believe that there is a world that we cannot see with our naked eyes with an enemy that can’t kill us without a body, so he sets up traps for us to do the work for him on each other.

To kill is one of Satan’s main missions. He has studied us humans for centuries and knows exactly what our desires are, and the unrealistic ways we believe as truth in order for us to accomplish them. He knows these things because he strategically put them there.

What he also knows is how anger works; how just the right amount of it mixed with fear or self-pity, or jealousy, or embarrassment will be exactly what he needs to produce the spirit of rage, which works like a canon; the force he uses to drive us from anger to murder!