HARDNESS OF HEART

"We no longer have a moral compass," Hartford Police Chief Daryl Roberts lamented.

The city’s leading newspaper read, "SO INHUMANE" in its front-page cover. The chief added, “We have no regard for each other…”

The chief had released a surveillance tape of a horrific hit-and-run victim; according to media reports, a 78-year-old man is tossed like a rag doll and lies motionless on a busy city street as car after car goes by. Pedestrians gawk but do nothing. One driver stops briefly but then pulls back into traffic. A man on a scooter slowly circles the victim before zipping away. The chilling scene—captured on video by a streetlight surveillance camera—has touched off a round of soul-searching in Hartford.
Chief Roberts, who released the video this week in hopes of making an arrest in the daylight accident last Friday that left Angel Arce Torres in critical condition. The chief also told The Hartford Courant that he was unsure whether anyone called 911.
The incident happened on the early evening, about 5:45 p. m., May 30^th, in a working-class neighborhood close to downtown in this city of 125,000.

Several cars pass Torres as a few people stare from the sidewalk. Some approach Torres, but most stay put until a police cruiser responding to an unrelated call arrives on the scene after about a minute and a half.

We don’t usually think of history as being shaped by silence, but, as English philosopher Edmund Burke said, ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph [of evil] is for good men to do nothing.’

What is hardness of heart? Answer—the language is often used to designate an unfeeling state of the sensibility. But this is not the meaning of hardness of heart when it is spoken of as a crime, as a sin against God. When hardness of heart is spoken of as a sin, the terms designate the committal of the will to a false position; stubbornness in regard to the claims of God; an attitude of disobedience and self-will. In this sense we often use such language.

Lamentably and regrettably, what happened in Hartford is not an isolated case in our modern, contemporary society. The same thing just happened here in L.A.; this time the innocent victim was a nine-year old boy from Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles.

Our civilization, our society as a whole, and its godless-culture and world-view are experiencing a breakdown, a moral-collapse, if I may. As long as the atheist propaganda prospers, and there’s a deliberate attack against the Creator and His Divine Laws, society will never be able to stabilize and nourish the moral-compass that’s within all of His creation. What we’re witnessing all over our nation is the consequences, the direct consequence of the negligence of acknowledging God, His Laws and Statues and Commandments.

A similar account, an eerie parallel occurred during the time of the Jewish prophet Isaiah.

The nation, as a whole was ‘ill.’ “The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faints. From the sole of the foot even to the head, there is no soundness in it, but wounds and bruises and putrefying sores; they have not been closed or bound up, or soothed with ointment. Your country is desolate; your cities are burned with fire…” Isaiah 1:5-7

In another passage, as the seer was speaking for God, he uttered, “The earth mourns and fades away, the world languishes and fades away; the haughty people of the earth languish. The earth is also defiled under its inhabitants (Why?) because they have transgressed the laws, changed the ordinance, and broken the everlasting covenant. Therefore the curse has devoured the earth, and those who dwell in it are desolate. Therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men are left. (Isaiah 24:4-6).

I wondered outloud, ‘What would I have done, if I was in that despairing day in Hartford?' Plenty! As I watched the video footage I was shocked, but not surprised by the lack of concern and human-compassion. I know too much! God is Love. God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God and God in him. And I have known and believed the love that God has for us. But whoever has this world's goods, and sees his brother in need, and shuts up his heart from him, how does the love of God abide in him?

Go to Church this coming Sunday!

“…exhort one another daily, while it is called "Today," lest any of you be hardened through the deceitfulness of sin. Hebrews 3:13