Hello everyone and welcome back to Deeper Waters where we are diving into the ocean of truth. At the request of my Mrs. today, I’m going to forgo a blogpost on Inerrancy and instead write a little bit about the story of Junko Furuta, a story that greatly troubled my wife yesterday and still some today. I found the story hard to believe at first, but after doing some checking, this story does not seem to be disputed and seems to be one of the greatest examples of human evil that there is.
The source I’ll be using is this one:
My wife mainly filled me in on all the grisly details last night and how unfortunately, the culprits got away with but a slap on the wrist. (I do personally hold to the death penalty and do believe that such a punishment should have been inflicted on the criminals.)
The Mrs. was telling me last night about how she thought about this girl just going about her day planning on her future and probably with hopes of getting married and having children one day and then all of a sudden, all of that is taken from her by four men who one can only wonder what their motive for such acts was.
Of course, this gets us wondering about the problem of evil some. Where was God in all of this? Was she a Christian? Did she have a future hope? Did these criminals get away entirely? Why doesn’t God intervene more times when things like this happen? These are all difficult questions.
To be frank, in the specific, we cannot answer entirely. We do not know the mind of God and I think it is perfectly natural to want to cry out in our anguish about why this kind of thing happens. In fact, this is done regularly in the Psalms and in the prophets. Where is God when the worst kinds of evils seem to take place?
Of course, it would lead to questions as well if God intervened every time. Is that the kind of world we live in as well? For what degree of evil is it that God must intervene? Is there a certain point where if He does not intervene, then He does not exist? Biblically, God is under no obligation to us and He does not have to intervene. Any time he does so, it is grace.
Where is justice? Justice delayed is not justice denied. Because these men got away essentially in the earthly courts does not mean that they do so in the heavenly courts. A constant problem we have in our lives is that we take temporary situation and make them eternal and in turn deny the eternal realities and treat them as if they are temporal. Let us remember what Paul said in 2 Corinthians 4:18 on that which is unseen.
while we look not at the things which are seen, but at the things which are not seen; for the things which are seen are temporal, but the things which are not seen are eternal.
The problem for us in this situation is that we are emotional people as well as rational and we have to make sure that our emotions do not override our reason. At the same time, when we feel emotions like anger and sadness and have a desire for justice, there is a place for that and I believe that it is God-given.
We must also make sure we do not become the evil we hate. Were it not for the grace of God, there would be no reason why any one of us would not be one of those boys that committed the crime. We all have the evil inside of us and as soon as we start saying we do not, we’ve already fallen for the evil of pride.
What are we to do with this? Let’s not let her death be in vain. Let us see to it that such evils around the world are stopped. I’m not telling us to be vigilantes, but agents of righteousness that regularly condemn such activities and that have strict standards in place for condemning evil when we see it. Let our court systems not grow lax with their usage of the sword.
The problem of evil is the problem of us. It is our fallen nature and the one we keep giving into. If there is any evil we need to deal with most directly, it is the evil that we see when we look in the mirror everyday. Let us go to bed every night and ask ourselves how we are growing in virtue.
If we are doing such, if we are keeping up the good fight against evil in our own day and age, then the evil that this girl underwent will not be in vain for us. The best way to honor her memory would be to work to bring about good in the world, that which the gospel of Christ requires.
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