President Donald Trump said there was love in the room. The White House Correspondents’ Dinner was underway, and for at least an evening, Republicans and Democrats had shaken hands, laughed, and said warm words to one another. Then a schoolteacher from California tried to approach the room—armed with knives, a pistol and a shotgun. He started shooting.

Add the Washington Hilton, site of the wounding of President Ronald Reagan in 1981, to the list of assassination attempts: Butler, Pennsylvania; West Palm Beach, Florida; now this.

After each one, we go through the same ineffectual ritual: cable news crawls, pledges of unity, lengthy and inconclusive security post-mortems. Each time, the deeper question goes unasked: Why does this keep happening?

Spirit of Murder

The shooter’s manifesto was not the raving of a madman disconnected from the mainstream. In some ways, it was the logical result of years of deliberate, dishonest, mass-scale dehumanization of the man at the head table, largely committed by the other people in the room. Media executives and their journalists have spent years telling the world that Donald Trump is a fascist, a traitor, a rapist, a pedophile. They weaponized federal prosecutors, fabricated impeachments, and manufactured hoaxes, and when those all failed and the talking heads were exposed as liars, they just doubled down and kept on going.

It is less than bizarre that Cole Tomas Allen, one of the people who has been soaking in that hatred for years, concluded that the right and good thing to do was to shoot his way through a few agents and murder the man that his manifesto describes as “a pedophile rapist and traitor.”

That manifesto, e-mailed or messaged from inside the hotel 10 minutes before he pulled the trigger, states that he has wanted to kill the president for a long time. It also states that he was surprised by the lack of metal detectors and security he encountered when checking in the day prior. After pressing “send,” he proceeded toward the ballroom, getting within feet of it before being brought down. One Secret Service agent was shot but was protected by body armor.

Just hours after the assassination attempt, Nora O’Donnell sat down with the man who had, again, come within perhaps a few seconds of being publicly murdered. She had been in the room when the “love” was there—and when the sounds of gunshots, the frantic guests, and the SR-16-wielding Counter Assault Team agents were there.

Being part of the 60 Minutes program that has helped demonize President Trump for years, and having him willing to be interviewed so soon afterward, was O’Donnell humbled, reflective, repentant?

Not even close. Her questions:

Why do you think so many people may be trying to kill you? … Your policies are also controversial: Is that part of it? … The so-called manifesto is a stunning thing to read, Mr. President. He appears to reference a motive in it. He writes this quote: “Administration officials, they are targets.” And he also wrote this: “I am no longer willing to permit a pedophile, rapist and traitor to coat my hands with his crimes.” What’s your reaction to that?

What’s your reaction to that?

She should be ashamed of herself for amplifying the false allegations of an attempted murderer the day after the attempted murder, after people like her put those allegations in the attempted murderer’s mind!

“Well, I was waiting for you to read that, because I knew you would, because you’re horrible people,” President Trump said. “You should be ashamed of yourself for reading that because I’m not any of those things. You shouldn’t be reading that on 60 Minutes: You’re a disgrace.”

President Trump is right, yet he agreed to that interview and continued it even after that. He sat down with the very people who, as he said, haven’t changed one bit from the last few years. These people have used their skills, their resources, their distribution systems, their connections to spread the spirit of murder. But then he described the dinner with them as a room with love in it, with tremendous camaraderie. It made a big impression.

This man has been nearly killed three times by the spirit of this age that they literally record, amplify, transmit and repeat—and he called the atmosphere in the room with them beautiful. This is not strength. This is self-deception, and the Bible is plain about where it leads.

What Flows Out of the Heart of Man

Jesus Christ gave us the diagnosis. It is found in Matthew 15, and you need to read it slowly, because it does not flatter any of us:

“For out of the heart proceed evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornications, thefts, false witness, blasphemies: These are the things which defile a man …” (verses 19-20).

Murders is the first thing on the list. Not an accident. Not a rare aberration. The first fruit of the unrestrained human heart is the impulse to kill. The first human child acted on that impulse and killed his own brother.

Commentators on both left and right will spend this week diagnosing the security failures at the dinner. They will write op-eds about political polarization. They will call for civility. Some will quietly cheer the shooter as a hero, just as millions cheered Luigi Mangione after he publicly gunned down an executive on a New York City street.

This culture has been cultivating the spirit of murder for years. It dressed it up in the language of justice. It gave it a manifesto. It ran the manifesto on national television.

President Trump noted that “they go after consequential presidents.” He is thinking politically. But the issue is not political. The issue is spiritual. It is moral. And every analysis that omits that dimension, no matter how sophisticated the commentator, will be useless.

No Truth in the Land

The Prophet Hosea wrote this verdict on ancient Israel. It fits our moment with terrible precision. “Hear the word of the Lord, ye children of Israel: for the Lord hath a controversy with the inhabitants of the land, because there is no truth, nor mercy, nor knowledge of God in the land: By swearing, and lying, and killing, and stealing, and committing adultery, they break out, and blood toucheth blood” (Hosea 4:1-2).

“Blood toucheth blood.” That is what we are watching. The lies of a decade of anti-Trump hysteria did not stay in the op-ed pages. They seeped into the hearts of people like the Butler shooter, the West Palm Beach shooter, and now this man, a self-described Christian whose murderous intent was nourished for a long time until he acted on it. He failed, but deceitful, wily journalists who claim to deal with facts and truth are carrying his cause forward in how they “frame the narrative,” even the narrative of the actual murder attempt itself.

God has a controversy with this land! Why? There is no truth, no mercy, no knowledge of God.

Herbert W. Armstrong, speaking decades ago with a prophetic clarity that has not dimmed, warned: “Unless God Almighty does exist … unless there is a God whose eyes are on this world and who sees and knows what’s going on and is about to intervene … nothing will be restrained from men until they have blasted human life from off the face of this Earth.”

Nothing will be restrained. That is an arresting phrase.

The shooter went unrestrained. He checked into the hotel. He was carrying the weapons. He had the will. What stopped him? The lax security that he scorned just before getting within 100 feet of his would-be victims? President Trump’s team credited their own rapid response. But after Butler, West Palm Beach, and now this, are we really not willing to acknowledge what is plainly at work here? God arrested the progress of that shooter. God restrained him. God—again—saved Donald Trump.

Reconciliation Without Repentance

There is a spiritual law as reliable as gravity. You cannot have reconciliation without repentance. President Trump is reaching for unity, attending the correspondents’ dinner in the first place, calling the attitudes of the people there beautiful, sitting down with 60 Minutes. But the enemies surrounding him have not repented. They have not acknowledged the Russia hoax. They have not apologized for the fraudulent impeachments. They have not answered for the election interference, the silencing of his voice, the weaponization of the justice system against him, the demonization of him as a pervert, criminal, Nazi.

You cannot make peace with people who are promoting your murder. Yet, in one of the most jarring contradictions of our age, a president who has now survived three assassination attempts described the mood at the dinner as one of tremendous camaraderie. Within the same hour, the would-be assassin, motivated by what he saw on television from those people, was moving through the hotel corridors with his shotgun.

Notice what 2 Timothy 3 tells us to expect in the last days: “[E]vil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived” (verse 13).

Worse and worse. It hasn’t leveled off. The hatred Barack Obama voiced toward Trump, at that same dinner, at that same hotel in 2011, grew worse when Trump descended the escalator in 2015 and announced his campaign. It has grown worse and worse.

How much worse will it get?

The Warning We Must Heed

God’s Word tells us where this is all leading. Matthew 24:21-22 speak of “great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world to this time, no, nor ever shall be.” That is not an abstraction. It is the logical terminus of a civilization that has abandoned God, that has exchanged His laws for its own, that has called good evil and evil good, that motivates murderers, that even celebrates murderers as heroes.

Hosea 4:6 says: “My people are destroyed for lack of knowledge ….” Not ignorance of technology. Not ignorance of policy. Lack of the knowledge of God. That is the root diagnosis. The security failures, the media incitement, the political violence, the spirit of murder are merely symptoms of that cause.

President Trump survived—again. Do not mistake survival for safety. Do not mistake surface camaraderie for real unity. There is no unity without truth. There is no peace without repentance. And there is no solution to the murderous spirit that flows from the human heart apart from the intervention of Almighty God.

That intervention is coming. The prophets have told us so. In the meantime, the events unfolding before us—the assassinations attempted, the hatred unmasked, the love performed for cameras while the shooter loads his weapons—are not surprises to those who have read their Bible.

They are warnings. The only question is whether we have ears to hear them.

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