[Darris McNeely] Last week in the studio, Gary, Steve, and I taped a program for a future airing on Beyond Today. We entitled the program, "When Evil Walks In." We did it to set in context and to help our viewers understand the terrible, tragic shootings that too often occur in our society. We were working off the most recent one in Colorado where a gunman walked into a movie theater. We made the comment in last week's taping that these occur all too often and will again happen. We didn't know at the time that another one would be just a few days away.

Last Sunday a gunman walked into a religious temple, a Sikh temple in suburban Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and shot six people dead in a violent display once again showing unfortunately just what our society has come to and the reality of how brutal and how violent many aspects of our world and our society is today and how every so often someone is overcome by their urges and by evil. And evil punctures through the veneer of our society in such a way to create such tragic occurrences of mass shootings like this.

We were going through the Scripture last week in 2 Timothy chapter 3 that describes exactly the times in which we live. The Apostle Paul said in 2 Timothy 3:1-5, he talked about perilous times will come in the end days. Men would be lovers of themselves, proud, boastful, blasphemers. One of the things that is said there in this section as well is that there would be a brutality. Men would be brutal. And I don't think - I can't think of any other word really that describes so much of what happens to help understand these types of incidents like the temple shooting and the theater shooting of recent days.

We do live in a very brutal, desensitized world where human life and the fabric of life and culture in our society is so easily rent by such activities like this - violence against life occurs on a regular basis. Abortions go unnoticed. Peoples' sensitivities toward people who are different from them in either religion or race or ethnicity create these prejudices that in the case of the Sikh shooting came through as this gunman was so enraged by what he viewed about the problems of society that he took it out upon a religious group that is essentially non-violent. When these things happen, it's important that we understand exactly where evil comes from, that there is such a thing in society, and to do our part to stay away from that.

There's a quote that we used in the program last week that I'll just share with you again that I think really helps to understand this. It was given by a man named Herbert London off the internet, we pulled it off, he said that, "We cannot, we can't admit to ourselves that such evil is in the air we breathe. We have allowed it to be unleashed. We cannot admit that mass murderers do the devil's work reducing sin to religious mythology. The radical secularists want to unfetter the limits of liberation and alas they have been successful. Now we reap the results."

This individual I think nailed it right there. We reap the results of a society that we have created by so many different factors and the choices that have been made.

It's important that we discern the times. It's important that we understand how our own personal behavior can help us to be shielded from such effects as that and at the very least keep us aware of a way to live, a way that prevents that type of evil from hopefully impacting our life so much, and at least in that way being a light to the world based on God's law and on God's commandments.

That understanding is what we endeavor to put through the program "When Evil Walks In" that we did last week. It will be airing on Beyond Today in a few weeks to put such incidents and tragic occurrences as these recent shootings into the proper context of God's word to help us understand why they occur and what you and I can do to shield ourselves and to keep them from impacting our lives as much as we humanly possible could do and ultimately with God's help and His protection.

That's Beyond Today. That's BT Daily. Join us next time.