Advanced Civilization, But Apart from God

I want to invite you to take out your Bibles and turn with me to Genesis chapter 4 and hold your place in verse 17. We're continuing with our verse-by-verse study of the book of Genesis this morning.

Last week we did verses 1 to 16, so today the hope is that we will do verses 17 to 26. A few years ago the Chicago Tribune carried a brief news article that began with these words. A Texas mother was so intent on making sure her daughter made the cheerleading squad that she was willing to hire a hitman to kill a competitor's mother.

Police said the woman's hope was that her daughter's 13-year-old competitor would be so overwhelmed with grief by her mother's death that she would drop out of the competition for the cheerleading spot.

Detectives said that the first plan of the woman was to have both the mother and the daughter killed, but when she found out that would be too expensive she thought she could do just the mother and it was going to cost her $2 ,500.

That was all she could afford. We live in arguably the most advanced civilization in human history. We have conditioned air, space travel, and seedless watermelons, which to me is amazing. Yet stories like the one I just cited are not really all that uncommon.

There are terrible things that happen in our...