The Lindsay Clancey murder trial has captured the attention of the world for obvious reasons. That a mother could murder her very young children is among the most horrific and unconscionable manifestations of depravity. After all, the principle mark of motherhood is that a mother has been called to fill the role of nurturing little eternal beings that the Lord has entrusted to her care. When seeking to encourage His people with the promise of His unfailing love and care, the Lord does so against the backdrop of the unthinkable––namely, a mother abandoning her children. In Isaiah 49:15, the Lord says to Israel, "Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you." 

As I have been reflecting on the various sentences passed in the court of public opinion, I have again turned my mind to principles of biblical justice. Divine justice declares, "Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image." (Gen. 9:6). The just penalty of murder is death, precisely because man was made in the image of God. When we downplay the justice of God in light of murder, we  inevitably downplay the dignity and function of man as the image of God; and, when we downplay the dignity and function of man as the image of God, we inevitably pervert justice in relation to acts of evil. The victims of Lindsay Clancey's unconscionable act were not simply her children––they were image bearers of God. As such, they deserve all the justice due them as victims of this horrific act. 

I have also been reflecting on the intersection of  justice and empathy in light of the Clancey trial. Those vying for leniency toward Lindsay Clancey on the grounds of her mental state are minimizing her egregious act from a place of unqualified empathy. This is a clear example of the dangers of unchecked empathy at work in our society in the dismissal of evil. It should not surprise us that a society that justifies the slaughter of the unborn on the grounds of being empathetic toward the circumstances of the mother should now be dismissive of the evil act of a mother toward her young children. It should not surprise us; but it should dismay us. 

This morning, I stumbled across a profound sociological observation in David F. Wells’ book, Above All Earthly Powers. Reflecting on the implications of a society that has adopted a view of the self as supreme, Wells notes, 

[We live in]“a world of technique not of truth, a world where reality contracts into the self, and the self into feelings and intuition, [where] evil is often just a bad day.” 

Wells’ closing  statement has occupied my mind all morning. When self is ultimate, then feelings and intuition are the supreme determiner of reality. When feelings take center stage in the societal consciousness, people embraces the notion that “evil is often just a bad day.” 

What Lindsay Clancey did was evil because it was a violation of God’s law and the desecration of the image of God. When we do evil, it is no different. None of us has a right to dismiss our sinful acts as “just being a bad day.” None of us gets to blame our evil on external factors or circumstances. Rather, Scripture is clear that we will all “appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil” (Ecclesiastes 12:14; 2 Cor. 5:10).

When we refuse to view  evil as “just another bad day,” and acknowledge that every evil deed deserves the judgment of God, we will confess our own need for the mercy that is only found in Christ crucified. Biblical mercy is far greater than unqualified empathy because in the gospel God is “just and the justifier of those who gave faith in Jesus” (Rom. 3:26).God’s justice was satisfied by the substitutionary death of the Son in our place on the tree. Jesus fell under the wrath and judgment of God when he was subjected to the death penalty for the sins of His people (Deut. 21:22–23; Gal. 3:13). We do not simply deserve temporal judgment for our evil acts––we deserve eternal punishment. As Anselm famously explained, one sin against the eternal God deserves eternal justice. Eternal justice can only be satisfied by an object of eternal value. This is what makes the sinless soul of Jesus a suitable sacrifice to satisfy divine justice. The eternal Son took the eternal judgment we deserve to satisfy eternal justice and grant eternal life. The cross does not allow empathy to reduce our evil to “just a bad day.” No, it does something better. It provides true mercy to those who trust in him. 

We so desperately need to hold fast to the intrinsic value of the imago Dei, divine justice, and the nature of biblical mercy if we are going to faithfully navigate life in a society that dismisses evil. We must resist any empathetic minimization of evil as if it were “just a bad day.” This is all the more vital if we are to hold out the hope of the gospel for sinners so that they might come to know the mercy of God in Christ and escape eternal judgment due to their evil acts. When evil is just a bad day, the cross is no longer good news. Let's resist the urge to be dismissive of evil for the sake of the good news of the gospel.