Whatever happened to all the fire-and-brimstone preachers? You know, the ones that used to preach about sin, the devil and people dying and going to an eternal hell? I guess the prosperity ministry has drowned them out. Truthfully, we could use a few of them right now. Wouldn’t it be amazing if all the religious leaders throughout the country would all preach a similar sermon during the month of September? The subject? Killers in the family.
Sadly, we have a group of young people who have been raised on a diet of video games like Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. They have taken the fantasy of those games and applied it to reality. They are even now using the military terms “ops” to label their enemies. They are so emboldened that the current trend is to do mass shootings at people hanging on the corners, on front porches, in the park, and everywhere else. They don’t care about old people. They don’t give a damn about young children. These individuals are murderous and on a mission.
Even worse are the adults in those young people’s lives who are in complete denial of the young people’s criminality. Take for example, the recent guilty verdict in the case of Nathaniel Rowland. He is the young man who was driving his car around a popular nightspot area in South Carolina. A young woman got into his car mistaking it for her Uber ride. Some of the evidence used to find him guilty included: his car captured on video showing Samantha Josephson getting into it; their cellphones continuously pinging off the same cellphone together; her body being found over 60 miles away from where she was, yet found about two miles from Rowland’s family home; he was identified as the one who tried to sell her cellphone and attempted to use her ATM card; her blood was found in his car and on his clothing; her 120 stab wounds matched the pattern of a special utility knife that he was known to carry; and lastly, law enforcement found that knife and clothes with the victim’s blood on it in a dumpster behind Rowland’s girlfriend’s house which the girlfriend testified she saw him cleaning.
So even with all the damning evidence against him, and even after the guilty verdict by a jury, when his mother spoke to the court, she was in complete denial of her son’s culpability. She proclaimed his innocence and spoke on how she was a good mother and had raised her child right. She knew her child and refused to believe him guilty. And when Rowland spoke after his sentencing of life in prison, he gave the “OJ speech” and spoke of how the court should be looking for the “real killer.”
This case is a classic example of the major problem in far too many households. Folks are in denial about the killers living there. Imagine if the entire country got to hear sermons about how God will one day judge their denial. These church-going, God-fearing folks go home and ignore the fact that the young people living in their households are murderous, killing thugs. We need fire-and-brimstone type of preachers to remind people that they, and the killers in their family, will have their own day of reckoning.
