The next day, the Dallas Morning News carried a short story providing analysis of why shoppers turned into killers.
- Fear of being unable to afford gifts drives shoppers to shop competitively
- The urge to snap up discounts can cause people to abandon their normal behavior
- When people are jostled in a crowd, their personal space is shattered, resulting in loss of individual judgment
- Individual identity can become erased, and one becomes part of the crowd
- People's frustration at things like linecutting and being denied access to a big sale flares into rage
Sin. And the nasty ugliness of unfettered flesh.
God has His own explanation:
Where do the conflicts and where do the quarrels among you come from? Is it not from this, from your passions that battle inside you? You desire and you do not have; you murder and envy and you cannot obtain; you quarrel and fight. You do not have because you do not ask; you ask and do not receive because you ask wrongly, so you can spend it on your passions. (James 4:1-3)
And perhaps the scariest part of that horrendous killer stampede at the Walmart is that every single one of us is equipped with the same nasty, ugly, unredeemable flesh. But for the grace of God, those shoppers could have been us.
Could have been me.
Which is why we all need a Savior.
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Thanks, guys, for your responses. I think incidents like this reveal how truly disgusting and ugly our flesh is, and they show the wisdom of the scriptures about it: why Paul says that in his flesh dwells no good thing, that the flesh profits nothing and that when we are "in the flesh" we cannot please God, and that we are to make no provision for the flesh.
It's unredeemable. We can snuggle into it, so comfortable and familiar and downright precious to us, but God says to HIs children, "That part of you was crucified because it needed to DIE!!!"
This incident makes my heart ache, but I am also thankful for the reminder of why my flesh is a particularly insidious idol.
The Walmart incident was a horrifying example of how lust makes its twisted work complete. And how self-centered desire destroys.
And that just because everybody's doing the same thing (i.e., shoving, pushing, and trampling), doesn't mean it's right.
Scares me what I'm capable of without the hedge of the Holy Spirit (or when I choose to ignore His prompting).
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