The three works of the devil. 2 - Murder

The second of the devil's works is murder. In John 8 Jesus calls him 'a murderer from the beginning'. Whatever he can do to promote the shedding of blood, he will. He loves violence, and he loves that we love violence. He stirs up hatred and strife even between people who have the best of intentions to do good.

In this work he is again successful: the fraternal struggles that are a feature of our recent history bear witness to his activity. Certainly greater enlightenment and civilisation has not brought greater peacefulness: but rather has meant the discovery of new means to kill. We have invented a technology of murder and a bureaucracy of killing upon which we in the suburban west depend for our security. Our fear of the murderous fanaticism of Islam is entirely disproportionate to the much more effective killing machine that is provided by the secular state.

This was the insight of that movie ‘A Few Good Men’. When Jack Nicholson's character the marine colonel sat in the dock and shouted 'you can't handle the truth' the truth he was speaking of was that the peace and comfort and clean hands of the west depends on the murderous dirty work of a few good men patrolling the frontiers away from our gaze. We would be appalled if we knew, so we look the other way. Unless they are prepared to accept guilt, the rest of us cannot imagine we are innocent.

In 1 John 3:12 we are directed again back to the earliest episodes of the human story. John says:

we must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother's righteous...

Cain, the first born son of humankind, was also the first murderer. From the beginning, he did the devil's work and shed his brother's innocent blood. The human story, in other words, is steeped in blood, the fruit of the rising tide of envy and hatred.