27 people dead, 20 of them children under 10, shot by a 20 year old gunman, who killed his parents and then himself.
Sandy Hook School has just joined that terrible list of places that will forever be associated with school shootings: Columbine... Virginia Tech... Sandy Hook.
When horrific acts of brutality like this occur, we react with shock. We ask: 'how could this happen?' Within the heart of even the most hardened atheist there is an instinct that says 'this is not how things were meant to be'.
This instinct comes from the fact that we were created by God to live in a perfect world, under his Lordship, in harmony with nature and each other. However because we rebelled against God, our relationship with him and each other was put out of joint.
We are broken people who live in a broken world. And the shooting at Sandy Hook is yet another grim reminder of the reality of that fact.
Writing on the Gospel Coalition website, Jen Wilkins eloquently put it like this:
'There is no spin to put on a story like this. Yes, we will hear stories of heroism begin to emerge over the next hours, and they are stories we will need to hear. But there is no way to soften the blow.
Nor should we want to.
As a mother watching someone else's horror play out on a screen, I want to feel this to the core of my being. I want it to inform my thoughts and actions in a way that leaves me changed. Because on days like today we learn just how broken sin has left us, just how bleak is our landscape without a Saviour.
Days like today give us no choice but to hate. They leave us only with a choice of where that hatred will land: Will we hate God, or will we hate sin?
I choose to hate sin. On days like today I will reflect again on the ravaging effects of rebellion against God, multiplied across millennia, manifested in a freshly printed headline. The more shocking the headline, the more I must come to grips with my minimized reckoning of the severity of sin.'
And yet, while incidents such as Sandy Hook should cause us to hate sin, we must remember that there is One who hates sin more deeply than we ever could.
God hated sin - and loved us - so much, that he sent his Son to conquer sin and redeem us. He enacted a plan of salvation that will culminate in a new heavens and a new earth, free of sin, and the heartache it brings.
And so as our hearts go out to all those who have lost children in this tragedy, we can at least draw comfort from the fact that the God we pray to knows exactly what it is like to lose a child in a brutal and unjust act of violence.
God is able to draw near to the brokenhearted, because he knows exactly what it's like be brokenhearted.
John Stott once wrote:
'I could never myself believe in God if it were not for the cross. In the real world of pain how could one worship a God who was immune to it?'
We must pray that those who are mourning will know the comfort and solace only a God who has been there himself can bring.
'The LORD is near to the brokenhearted and saves the crushed in spirit.' (Psalm 34:18)
