Pay Attention to What People Defend

There is a difference between compassion and justification, and it vanishes fast when a story is horrifying enough.

A woman murders her children. The grief comes first, and then the arguments come. Some of those arguments are people trying to understand how a human being gets to that point. That is fair. That is what thinking people do. But some of them are not that at all. Some of them are attempts to make it acceptable.

That is the line worth watching.

You can grieve for a broken person without redrawing the map of good and evil to accommodate what they did. One of those responses looks at suffering and hurts. The other looks at murder and starts negotiating.

Scripture does not treat that negotiation as a small thing. Romans 1 ends with a list of wickedness, and then it adds something most of us read past:

“Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them.” (Romans 1:32)

Read the last line again. Approving of evil lands in the same sentence as doing it. Not as a lesser offense. Not as a footnote. It sits right there with the act itself.

That should stop us cold, because approval is the cheap version. It costs nothing. You can do it from a couch, in a comment section, in a conversation with friends, and never once feel like you have done anything wrong. That is exactly what makes it dangerous.

Isaiah 5:20 puts it plainly: “Woe to those who call evil good and good evil.”

So do not call evil compassion. Do not call wickedness mercy. Do not call murder justified because you understand the circumstances. Understanding a circumstance and excusing what came out of it are two entirely different acts.

God has already spoken on what is good and what is evil. He is not waiting on our input, and our sympathy does not move the line.

Pay attention to what people defend. What they excuse. What they celebrate. What they identify with. What they insist on calling righteous.

Not because we are appointed to judge every heart, but because what a person repeatedly defends is telling you where they are headed. Approval is not a neutral position. It is a direction. And what someone is willing to excuse today has a way of becoming what they are willing to do.

“Take no part in the unfruitful works of darkness, but instead expose them.” (Ephesians 5:11)

Have compassion on the broken. Refuse to rename the evil.