It's a parent's worst nightmare.  A student gunman stalks the campus, aiming, firing, and killing kids who are doing nothing more than walking inside what should be a safe haven, the cloistered halls of academia.  From that Tower in Austin, Texas in the 1960's to those halls in Blacksburg, Virginia, in the 21st century, bullets fly, kids die.  Students with guns appear in the halls of middle schools, high schools, and colleges, firing at anyone and everyone.  Kids, teachers, and staff die in a scholastic bloodbath.

Enter the Massachusetts solution.  Two men from the Bay State are manufacturing and selling a bulletproof backpack. For $175, your student can walk the halls and grounds of the school in safety; tests prove the backpack will stop a bullet.  For this to happen, he's got to be wearing it.  When some parents have objected, the Massachusetts men point out: "This is reality. This is the world in which we live."  Requests are coming in from around the world.

In Liverpool, England, Rhys Jones is an 11-year old boy doing what British boys love to do - he's kicking a soccer ball with his friends.  Rhys's favorite team is the one from Everton; their colors are white and blue.  Toss out a ball and boys around the world hit it, throw it, catch it, dribble it, or kick it.  It's in the genes. It's a rare and refreshing sight these days, to see kids outside in the sun playing, doing what Rhys was doing that Wednesday.

Two youths ride by on their BMX bikes.  Rhys Jones feels something horrible hit the back of his neck and crumples to the ground.  The next morning, England stands stunned as it views the pictures of Rhys and his tear-stained mother.  Rhys lies dead, shot in the neck by someone either 14 or 16 or 18; the police don't know whom just yet. There's a $200,000 reward.  Authorities say, "We don't know why it happened." Mistaken identity?  Gang violence? Thrill kill?  A show-off?

Rhys isn't the only one.  In London alone, eleven kids have been stabbed to death this year, while seven have died by bullets.  On Friday in Liverpool, children, neighbors, and parents stream to the pub parking lot where he died, leaving cards, some with only one word: "Why?"

Why?  Melonie, Rhys's mother, asks in the newspapers, "What in the world has gone wrong with this country?"  Home Secretary Jacqui Smith chokes back the tears and declares that the government is looking for answers to youth crime.  The British conclusion: it's the guns.  Get rid of the guns.

AIDS is rampant, they say.  Educators, health professionals, and politicians fill conference halls around the world looking for a solution and the cure.  They give us solutions, but from what we hear, it's only getting worse.  It's the same with sexually transmitted diseases, now so common we use the standard abbreviation - STDs and everybody knows what we're talking about.

Are band-aids the best we can do? There's the Massachusetts bullet-proof backpack band-aid; in England, there's the ban the gun band-aid; with regard to the STDs, there's the "Be careful" band-aid.

Anyone who points out that the Emperor's band-aids aren't stemming the infection is quickly marginalized and hooted out of the think tank as being unrealistic, hateful, and out of touch.

It never occurs to the thinkers-that-be to look at Romans 1.  In that chapter, Paul says that all of the above are symptoms of a deeper problem.  When the symptoms start showing up in a culture they are just that, symptoms of something sinister.  Paul points out one symptom that comes with the rise of homosexuality in a culture - "men receiving in themselves the due penalty for their perversion."  The STDs are the penalty due for the perversions.

Paul goes to other symptoms - being filled with every kind of wickedness, murder, inventing ways of doing evil.

If those are the symptoms, what is the cause?  Romans 1:18-23 tells the reader that, although they know God exists, they suppress that knowledge and make an exchange: they exchange the one true God of the Bible for their own gods. They dress up as gods and goddesses, invent band-aids, and dispense their advice-laden aspirin.  But neither the fever nor the infection will go away. What Romans 1 is saying is that we choose this.

The societal gods and goddesses are saying, "We'd rather have thousands around the world die young and in agony from AIDS while we spend billions looking for a vaccine than accept God's (the Bible's) solution:  one man, one woman, married and faithful for life before and after marriage.  No thank you."

And, thanks, but no thanks; we'd rather spend $175 for the Massachusetts solution rather than getting the gospel and Bibles to kids.  Put my kid in full body armor, rest secure in the fact that she's lugging around and constantly wearing a bulletproof backpack, anything but letting her know about the "full armor of God" (Eph. 6:1).

The Brits say, "It just has to be the guns."  God says, "It just has to be the human heart."  Laws to get rid of the guns are aspirin laws.  The solution is the gospel and discipleship to transform the corruption on the inside.  But far be it.  America and Britain have declared, "That's the last thing we want."  And in so doing, more and more, aren't we living in a society created by fools, by men and women "whose foolish hearts are darkened." God says we are.

But isn't that the way we want it? We want the Massachusetts solutions.

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