The Horror of Stolen Life

By Toby Jennings

Published September 11, 2025

Iryna Zarutska
Charlie Kirk

The mere act of writing those two names literally brings tears to my eyes. Why? The reasons are plenty.

The Psalmist effused, “My heart overflows with a pleasing theme; I address my verses to the king; my tongue is like the pen of a ready scribe” (Psalms 45:1). While my heart, too, overflows, presently, it is not with a pleasing theme, but with a profoundly deeply lamenting one. I address my verses to both my King and his subjects (both the joyful and the rebellious, for “the earth is the LORD’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein” [Psalm 24:1a]).

Jesus wept (John 11:35). Why? Not primarily, as some mistakenly presumed, because his friend was dead (John 11:36). The incarnate Son of God wept tears of fury (as the Greek word used twice in the immediate context indicates; vv. 33, 38) over his creation’s faithless rebellion against his gift of nourishing goodness and the present consequence of that rebellion that he was now beholding firsthand . . . as one of them. Yes, Jesus wept, knowing that his divine, righteous fury alone could effect the only remedy to the hopeless situation—life from the dead.

The horror of the stolen life of one eternally irreplaceable individual is sufficient reason for tears. Deeper—one might even say unfathomable—sorrow, however, is compelled when one considers the state of a species that can regard one another in the way unfolding before us firsthand. The depths to which a sentient species must sink not only to occasion such evil but also even to countenance celebrating the calculated, cold-blooded murder of “a neighbor who dwells trustingly beside you” (Proverbs 3:29–30; cf. Deuteronomy 19:11–13) brings tears to the omnibenevolent Creator who created that species for the express purpose of imaging and basking in His own multifaceted, life-generating splendor. It also brings tears to anyone who concordantly cheers for that splendor only to see it willfully dashed by evil . . . again and again by that very species.

EACH AND EVERY image bearer of God possesses literally priceless dignity! Why? Because humanity was not even first ours. In eternity past, the eternal Son imagined, designed, and sovereignly willed to add to his own eternal Person a nature—one that he would know (in the biblical sense) as his very own for eternity. He then sovereignly fashioned that nature from the dust of the ground that he had made and then breathed into it the breath of life and it became a living being (Genesis 2:7). When that perfect creation corrupted itself, the eternal Son again created that nature anew in the womb of one of those creatures. He took that nature to himself to dwell among us, irrevocably stamping upon that nature irremovable dignity for all time.

For this reason, He judicially charges, “And for your lifeblood I will require a reckoning: from every beast I will require it and from man. From his fellow man I will require a reckoning for the life of man. ‘Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image'” (Genesis 9:5–6; cf. James 3:7–10). Anyone who could so cavalierly disregard the priceless dignity of any human being by destroying this cosmically unparalleled reflection of creation’s Creator, is, himself, worthy of nothing less than the sovereign revocation of that same gift extended to him (Romans 13:1–10).

John 3:16 heralds not against a backdrop of splendid creatures worthy of God’s love. Rather, “while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly”—the UNGODLY (Romans 5:6). That is, the God who IS love did not secure rescue from indescribable, eternal wrath for creatures to whom it was due, but instead for vile, willful rebels against His flourishing gift.

The two deaths—no, two cold-blooded, evil murders—that we have witnessed within a month among us who imagine that we are a civilized community of homo sapiens betrays that assessment. (Further evidence testifies against us in the equally senseless murder of children praying or otherwise learning how to be adults.) This is behavior that characterized barbarous peoples we study in history books. Any society that countenances this kind of barbarism can escape neither the identification due it nor the further judgement of an abundantly pardoning Creator who painstakingly and perpetually calls us away from such evil and to his rescuing grace, if we were only willing.

Kyrie eleison! Hosanna! Maranatha!