An Avatar of the Hand of God

The Significance of Nia Glassie

We live in a Fallen world. Sin and evil are resident in every human heart, ordinarily restrained by the wise hand of the Living God, but resident nonetheless. No-one, however, is without sin.

As a culture turns away from God, the restraint of the Lord upon sin in the heart is deliberately lessened. This is an act of Divine judgment. The usual transmission mechanism which indicates the restraining hand of God is being removed from human hearts is the wider society and its institutions of government and education. When a culture turns not to God to deal with its sin, but to its own devices, it ends up creating an enormous edifice to attempt to remove the influence of sin. Poverty, injustice, theft, oppression, envy, hate—all these are real enough. To remove them requires a herculean effort to build a fabric of laws, governments, schools, bureaucracies, rules, regulations, conditioning institutions—and so on.

But a terrible irony emerges. As society makes its rebellion against God institutional, replacing God with Man-as-saviour, restraints upon evil within individuals melt away. The more man tries to redeem and perfect, the more evil grows in strength within the human heart. Because man has no power to deal with the sin and evil resident in the human heart, the removal of the fear and dread of God, and replacing it with Man-as-saviour simply pours petrol on the flickering flames of wickedness in every human heart. The strength of evil grows, and people do evil more naturally. Acts of evil become normal and ordinary.

At first the culture rejoices in its emerging freedom. Energised by the opportunity to shuffle off the shackles of former generations, a new era beckons—one of self-determination, sophistication, freedom, and autonomy. But within a generation a different picture begins to emerge: minatory, intimidating, and dreadful. As society's constraints crumble the superman of Nietzsche emerges, thrusting forth his chest, asserting his self-will and autonomy. “I will do what pleases me. No-one will tell me what to do. I am responsible to me alone.” The emphatic rejection of God by our leaders and governments has inevitably morphed into an emphatic rejection of men by man. The modern Nietzschean slogan “Fuck you! And fuck off!” is now so deeply ingrained, so institutionalised, so much part of everyday human existence, so typical of human relationships in so many houses and streets, that evil is rapidly becoming regnant. Society is tearing itself apart from the inside out. People turn upon others with a brutish insensitivity that at first glance appears to be beyond human. But it is not. It is what a human being actually is, without the restraining and redeeming hand of God.

The country has been shocked by the murder of Nia Glassie. How could five adults in modern New Zealand effectively torture a three year old child, for whom they were responsible, to death? This question has two dimensions. The first dimension is to focus upon the guilty. Brute evil is never attractive. It is horrific. The community is shocked, horrified, and angered that four people could be so callous, so brutish, and so wicked. The inhumanness of the act appalls.

Yet there is something disturbingly familiar about these young people. They look normal! They are. They look like everyone of us! Correct. They look like they could be our young people! Right again! We desperately want to demonise them, but we struggle because they are so ordinary and every day. They are so human! So people throw up their hands in despair and ask, “What on earth is going on?” Our answer is clear: it is a sign of God's wrath upon our culture. Evil, gross evil, is being allowed to become normal. Ordinary people are doing grotesque and depraved things. We are being given an initial glimpse of Hell upon earth, an initial glimpse of what awaits us.

The second dimension to the question of how such things could happen, is to deflect attention away from the guilty to societal causes. Here we are on much more familiar and comfortable ground. Firstly, society takes a deep measure of guilt upon itself (it is sort of like sharing the horror around, thereby lessening it). “If only we (that is society, aka the government, aka CYFS) had done a better job this would never have happened.” This has to be the perpetual response in a world which arrogates to itself the role of being saviour and redeemer. Secondly, true moral guilt is diverted from the guilty. Yes, they are going to be incarcerated, but deep down society believes it is not really their fault. The responsibility for this outrage really belongs to the society as a whole in which these young criminals were raised. We, that is, collective Man has failed to redeem and save.

Thirdly, atonement and an opportunity for penance is at hand. Society must firstly confess its sins—we have collectively sinned in that we have created a society in which such horrors can transpire—and then we must atone by redoubling our efforts to ensure that we change the social environment so that such things do not happen any more. The transmission of the atonement mechanism is being willing to be taxed more so that the redeemer-government to spend more money on the health, educational, and welfare agencies to ensure that such things do not happen again.

Society feels much more comfortable with the second dimension. It is our stock in trade. It is utterly consistent with our rejection of God. Like all confessions and atonements, it has the facility of appearing not to cover over sin, yet it provides a measure of redemption and hope—of a way forward, so to speak. So within a short time, Nia will fade from memory, the horror will pass, and life will go on. Until the next time. But next time, we will have grown a little more accepting, a little more used to such things happening. The outrage will be less. The collective shoulder shrug will be a bit more noticeable. Evil will become just that little bit more ordinary and normal.

Where will it all end? A student sensitive to Divine providence and the patterns of Divine judgment knows that it will not end any time soon. It is not that there is no hope. Rather, it is that society is a long, long way away from taking hold of the hope that is there. The hand of Christ is stretched out to a disobedient and rebellious people. But it remains ignored. The back is turned. The hands are firmly pressed to the ears. The cacophony of the stamped chant drowns out the divine call. “We will not have you King over us,” is the cry. “We will not! We will not! We will not!”

“As you sow, so shall you reap” is a Divine principle of government. Since we find God's yoke too harsh, He will condemn us to live under our own. The cruelty, the horror, the harshness, and the devastation is just beginning. The “Nia incident” is but a sign and a harbinger.