Last night, an Indy traffic reporter thought this was a good take on the good guy with a gun who just stopped a mass shooting yesterday:
Well, that's definitely a thought right there.
And maybe you agree with him. After all, Jesus' parable isn't about a Samaritan who went full Rambo on the robbers who beat up a man and left him for dead along the road.
The young reporter then invoked Luke 22:49, where Jesus rebukes Peter for cutting off the ear of the high priest's servant.
In Matthew 26:52, Jesus even says that people "who live by the sword will die by the sword," which means we should be pacifists at all costs, right?
Let me point out super fast that the Bible offers numerous passages for self defense (see Exodus 22:2-3 as an example). Earlier in Luke 22:38, Jesus told his disciples that his time had come and that they would face many perils, noting that it would be wise for "the one who has no sword sell his cloak and buy one" as a means of defending himself.
The disciples misinterpreted this as a call to arms, so they grabbed two swords (one of which was likely the sword Peter used).
And they said, "Look, Lord, here are two swords." And he said to them, "It is enough."
Beyond this, let me point out the obvious: Jesus himself had the right to self defense. in John 10:17-18, he says "no one takes" his life from him, but that he "lays it down" of his own accord. In Matthew 26:53, right after Peter uses his sword, Jesus specifically notes that God the Father could send tens of thousands of angels to be at his disposal.
However, Jesus notes in the next verse that if he were to use an army of supernatural beings to rid the earth of his enemies, "how then would the Scriptures be fulfilled that say it must happen in this way?"
Jesus did not shun the use of self-defense because it is morally wrong; he did it because he had come to earth to willingly die for our sins and fulfill the entirety of Scripture's law and prophecies.
But the internet doesn't want to talk about that. They just want to create socialist Jesus accounts:
Now back to the parable of the Good Samaritan:
In the parable, the Good Samaritan comes to the injured man on the road after he is beaten to a pulp by robbers.
In the modern woke version, I suppose he safely hid behind a rock and watched the beatdown, then looked both ways to make sure he was safe before rushing over to help the man. When he saw the man was alive, he made sure to take him into town to virtue signal.
Heck no!
If the Good Samaritan had been strapped and he came upon a burglary in broad daylight that would make San Francisco blush, he would have kept the victim from being left for dead by ending the threat.
To do otherwise is not only cowardly, but a rejection of the command to love your neighbor.
So are you required to carry a bazooka everywhere you go to stop modern-day evildoers? No, of course not. But you need to understand something: a good guy carrying a gun is often laying down his own right to self defense when he engages a bad guy. That man could have simply run. He didn't. He faced the dragon knowing full well it could be the end of him. If the greatest love is to lay down one's life for one's friends, what about laying down your life for strangers in a food court? To me, that aspires (on a very small scale, granted) to the love of Christ outlined in Romans 5:6-8.
So if the Good Samaritan at the mall food court was willing to take a bullet to stop his neighbors from being gunned down by a psychopath, then you should at least be willing to do the same, gun or no gun. If there's one thing a Good Samaritan is not, it's a Uvalde police officer.
After all, as Justin Kollar points out, anything less than brave personal sacrifice would be contrary to Luke 22:49!
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