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“Why didn’t you just shoot the guy, or let him die?”

The deputy’s words, harsh as they were, were not his own. I sat in the debriefing meeting, listening to him relate what his neighbor had asked him, angrily, contemptuously: “Why were you saving his life—this guy who just murdered his wife and son?”

It was the day after the most traumatic call of my life as an Emergency Medical Technician. That day had started uneventfully. I was off duty, and I was hanging around the house, leaving my radio pager turned on, as I often did, to keep in touch with what was happening in our rural Minnesota community. It was a quiet day—only a few alerts for minor incidents came through. Suddenly, however, an urgent page caught my attention: not a lot of information, but there had been a stabbing with three kids involved. Although I wasn’t on duty, I felt certain the response team would need extra help, so I headed for the scene of the incident.

As I hurried to the scene, a trailer park in a small town, my radio was suddenly flooded with pages urgently calling for all available emergency crew members. The details of the emergency were still confused, but all local ambulance services were dispatched in response.

When I got there, I was assigned to help a man who was bleeding and nearly unconscious. I didn’t see other victims, but I knew there were more. Other crew members were quickly assigned to help them. I still knew little of what had happened, but I had a pretty good hunch from what I saw and what I had heard over the radio. I found myself in an ambulance, saving the life of a man who (as I later learned) had just murdered his wife and son. This man, enraged, had stabbed and shot his wife, and when his children intervened, he turned on them, too. His twelve-year-old son defended his two young sisters, keeping them from serious injury and enabling them to escape to the neighbors’ home. But the boy died of his wounds shortly afterward. The father then tried to commit suicide—and I was responsible for saving him.

In the back of the ambulance, I didn’t think much about what this man had done. I concentrated on the job at hand, working to save his life. Time to think came later, and time to talk it over, when all of us on the response team met in the debriefing group. As I listened to the deputy report his neighbor’s reaction, it seemed like a natural response. The man I had saved had done an evil thing. Most people would agree that he didn’t deserve mercy. But as I thought more deeply about it later, I found myself thinking not about him, but about all of us. Why did God come down to this world to save us, who are all sinners? He sent His Son down to this world to people who rejected Him. I knew this from the Bible:

“For when we were still without strength, in due time Christ died for the ungodly. For scarcely for a righteous man will one die; yet perhaps for a good man someone would even dare to die. But God demonstrates His own love toward us, in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us.” (Romans 5:6-8)

That’s an amazing truth, that Jesus was willing to save us right in the bad state we were in. What an amazing thought! And you know, what I did didn’t cost me much. It cost me my evening, perhaps a little more than that, to save this guy’s life. But Jesus gave His life, and not only that, He had to suffer on the cross. Crucifixion is one of the worst deaths you can die. But He suffered much, much more than the pains of crucifixion: He took all of our sins on Himself, and was punished for them by God, who is holy and hates sin. Jesus paid dearly for us.

It’s easy to compare ourselves to a person like the father from this incident and think we deserve good from God. Then why was the death of Jesus necessary? It is because we have all sinned and come up short of God’s perfect holiness. It’s not only murderers that need God’s mercy. All of us do, without exception, and none of us deserve it.

One thing I want to emphasize: the man we saved, who was semi-conscious as we worked on him, was fighting against us as much as he could in his weak condition. I don’t know if he thought we were police, or what; but we just kept telling him, “Calm down. We’re here to help you!” And I think this is what Jesus is saying to you if you are resisting Him: “I’m here to help you! I’m here to save you!” Jesus is fighting for your life.

There’s another Bible verse for anyone who is still resisting God. It’s Ezekiel 33:11:

“‘As I live,’ says the Lord GOD, ‘I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live. Turn, turn from your evil ways! For why should you die?’”

God’s pleading with you. He doesn’t want to see you die. He wants you to accept that gift of eternal life He paid so dearly for. “God loves you” are not empty words.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him should not perish but have everlasting life For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world through Him might be saved. He who believes in Him is not condemned; but he who does not believe is condemned already, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.” (John 3:16-18)

[This story is true. The events happened in rural Minnesota in 2008 and were told to the author by his nephew, an Emergency Medical Technician.]

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