Much like Cain, the [Nashville] shooter was on a hunt for self-expression on her terms rather than God’s. Whereas Cain despised God in his heart and by his outward worship, she despised God in her heart and by her outward “gender identity.” There is no divine approbation for false worship, and there is no divine approbation for self-delusion, especially when it is imposed upon others. Without any sure foundation for her identity, she—like Cain—resorted to murderous terroristic violence.

Tragedy in Nashville
Recent horrors in Nashville, Tennessee have left Christians around the world brokenhearted, grieving with the families of the children, schoolteachers, and staff who were slain. At the same time, media pundits from across the social and political spectrum have sought for an explanation, appealing to various (and predictable) issues: the availability of guns, speculations about the shooter’s childhood experiences, the failure of pharmaceutical medical intervention, the violent anti-Christian register of transgender political rhetoric, and so on down the list.
The truth is that some of these factors—and many more besides—may be part of the eventual explanation for what transpired, serving either as a necessary condition or as a contributing cause. But the root cause is much bigger and goes much deeper than any one of these considerations. At root in this horrific tragedy is sin’s corrupting influence expressing itself in the killers’s three-dimensional hatred: hatred of self, hatred of God, and hatred of neighbor.
By the killer’s own admission to a former classmate immediately before her assault on the Covenant School, she was on a self-loathing suicide mission.1 In relation to God, her self-expression and identification as a man was a rejection of her Creator and how He designed her in her mother’s womb (Ps. 139:13), a hatred of God expressed in her destruction of six of His image-bearers. But most obviously, her massacre of innocent Christian children and adults was indicative of her hatred of neighbor spilling over into what some commentators have labeled an act of “transgender terrorism.”
With her Manifesto and plans currently kept under wraps during the Metro Nashville Police Department (MNPD) investigation, there is little that can be said about the incremental steps she took in the ideation, conception, planning, and execution of Monday’s attack. In the analysis of the killer’s act of heinous sin, her Manifesto may reveal either a clearly expressed motive or a fog of mental derangement impossible to decipher. The eventual release of the shooter’s Manifesto is pending close inspection by experts in criminal profiling at the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s Behavioral Analysis Unit.2
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Written by Steve Karp, M.D. |
Wednesday, December 29, 2021
All things COVID will eventually pass.  Few things last forever. But at some point, physicians may pay a price for their poor judgment in suspending critical thinking.  The question is, who will judge them?

In “normal” times, the practice of medicine has many challenges, some from within and some from outside the profession.  If you let it, much of your daily practice follows specialty guidelines, insurance company criteria, hospital formularies, and other annoyances.  None of those entities have any liability when it comes to our patients.  For the most part, liability lies with the treating physician.
Each specialty plays a particular role in a patient’s care and specialists often view issues from different angles while wearing their tunnel-vision glasses.  For instance, some physicians view elevated cholesterol as an indicator to assess other potential underlying medical issues, while a cardiologist will just write a prescription for a statin drug, just as a cat reflexively chases a mouse.
What changed overnight and across the board, was an anti-science attitude across all specialties to everything related to COVID.  A viral infection is not something requiring government management, rather, its encounter is part of a physician’s daily medical practice.  The government has seemingly accomplished what medical insurers, medical boards, and hospitals tried, but had not yet succeeded at: complete mind control of physicians.  And with that, the last vestige of respect I had for my profession died.
I’m often in attendance at medical meetings where the fine points of immunotherapy and monoclonal antibodies are discussed as part of the treatment for cancer patients.  For physicians, it is their version of science in regard to a drug’s indications, mechanisms of action, dosing, management of side effects, and the studies justifying one drug or combination over another, the latter often supported by questionable statistical analysis.
After the science-lite discussion ends, the personal chitchat begins regarding COVID and vaccines, and the point is reached where any remaining rationality becomes akin to that heard among nursery school attendees.
The tone becomes one of acceptance of the government line, all medical knowledge and cognitive abilities having vaporized.  There is no talk about the fine points of the various PCR tests, the science of personal isolation or masking, the appropriate use of indoor ventilation systems and their management, the changing of standard and long-extant medical definitions, the introduction of gene therapy used as vaccines.
Expecting any discussion regarding electron microscopy’s effect on clinical medicine, techniques of viral isolation and culturing, or the number of Nobel Prize-winning ideas now scientifically abused is not within anyone’s ken. Instead, the conversation becomes who got their booster, when they are next due, how they interact, or not, with those around them so as to stay safe, how they worry about their child being exposed, and much other utterly time and life-sucking conversational trivia.
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“What God has joined together” implies that marriage is not merely a human agreement but a relationship in which God changes the status of a man and a woman from being single (they are no longer two) to being married (one flesh). From the moment they are married, they are unified in a mysterious way that belongs to no other human relationship, having all the God-given rights and responsibilities of marriage that they did not have before. Being “one flesh” includes the sexual union of a husband and wife (see Gen. 2:24), but it is more than that because it means that they have left their parents’ household (“a man shall leave his father and his mother,” Gen. 2:24) and have established a new family, such that their primary human loyalty is now to each other, before anyone else.

All commentary sections adapted from the ESV Study Bible.
1. Ephesians 5:22–27
Wives, submit to your own husbands, as to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife even as Christ is the head of the church, his body, and is himself its Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit in everything to their husbands. Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, having cleansed her by the washing of water with the word, so that he might present the church to himself in splendor, without spot or wrinkle or any such thing, that she might be holy and without blemish. Read More
The first example of general submission (Eph. 5:21) is illustrated as Paul exhorts wives to submit to their husbands (Eph. 5:22–24, 33). Husbands, on the other hand, are not told to submit to their wives but to love them (Eph. 5:25–33). Paul’s first example of general submission from Eph. 5:21 is the right ordering of the marriage relationship (see also Col. 3:18; 1 Pet. 3:1–7). The submission of wives is not like the obedience children owe parents, nor does this text command all women to submit to all men (to your own husbands, not to all husbands!). Both genders are equally created in God’s image (Gen. 1:26–28) and heirs together of eternal life (Gal. 3:28–29). This submission is in deference to the ultimate leadership of the husband for the health and harmonious working of the marriage relationship.
The focus in these verses is on Christ, for husbands do not “sanctify” their wives or “wash” them of their sins, though they are to do all in their power to promote their wives’ holiness. “Sanctify” here means “to consecrate into the Lord’s service through cleansing, washing of water.” This might be a reference to baptism, since it is common in the Bible to speak of invisible, spiritual things (in this case, spiritual cleansing) by pointing to an outward physical sign of them (see Rom. 6:3–4). There may also be a link here to Ezek. 16:1–13, where the Lord washes infant Israel, raises her, and eventually elevates her to royalty and marries her, which would correspond to presenting the church to himself in splendor at his marriage supper (see also Ezek. 36:25; Rev. 19:7–9; 21:2, 9–11). without blemish. The church’s utter holiness and moral perfection will be consummated in resurrection glory, but is derived from the consecrating sacrifice of Christ on the cross.
2. Genesis 2:18
Then the LORD God said, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper fit for him.” Read More
“Not good” is a jarring contrast to Gen. 1:31; clearly, the situation here has not yet arrived to “very good.” “I will make him” can also be translated “I will make for him,” which explains Paul’s statement in 1 Cor. 11:9. In order to find the man a helper fit for him, God brings to him all the livestock, birds, and beasts of the field. None of these, however, proves to be “fit for” the man. “Helper” (Hb. ‘ezer’) is one who supplies strength in the area that is lacking in “the helped.” The term does not imply that the helper is either stronger or weaker than the one helped. “Fit for him” or “matching him” (cf. ESV footnote) is not the same as “like him”: a wife is not her husband’s clone but complements him.

3. Matthew 19:4–6
“Have you not read that he who created them from the beginning made them male and female, and said, ‘Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man separate.” Read More
“What God has joined together” implies that marriage is not merely a human agreement but a relationship in which God changes the status of a man and a woman from being single (they are no longer two) to being married (one flesh). From the moment they are married, they are unified in a mysterious way that belongs to no other human relationship, having all the God-given rights and responsibilities of marriage that they did not have before. Being “one flesh” includes the sexual union of a husband and wife (see Gen. 2:24), but it is more than that because it means that they have left their parents’ household (“a man shall leave his father and his mother,” Gen. 2:24) and have established a new family, such that their primary human loyalty is now to each other, before anyone else. Jesus avoids the Pharisaic argument about reasons for divorce and goes back to the beginning of creation to demonstrate God’s intention for the institution of marriage. It is to be a permanent bond between a man and a woman that joins them into one new union that is consecrated by physical intercourse (Gen. 2:24).
4. Colossians 3:18
Wives, submit to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives, and do not be harsh with them. Read More
Instead of telling wives to “obey” (Gk. hypakouō), as was typical in Roman households, Paul appeals to them to “submit” (Gk. hypotassō), based on his conviction that men have a God-given leadership role in the family. The term suggests an ordering of society in which wives should align themselves with and respect the leadership of their husbands (see Eph. 5:22–33).
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