A third of mankind slain, yet the rest "did not repent of the works of their hands" (Revelation 9:20–21).

Judgment has been severe, but hardness of heart still remains.

I wonder if we understand that psychology of this situation?

The psychology in Revelation 9 is not mainly "they didn’t have enough information." It is that judgment can land on a people and still leave the will unmoved.

John lists what they refused to abandon:

The works of their hands, demons, idols that cannot see or hear or walk, and then murders, sorceries, sexual immorality, and thefts (9:20–21). The problem is not ignorance of pain. It is attachment to a way of seeing the world that must not be surrendered. Scripture names these attachments in several overlapping ways.

Idolatry first, then the rest. The murders and the rest sit downstream of "the works of their hands." When a culture remakes the human persons value according to its own usefulness or desires, killing them or sexually abusing them becomes easier to justify and harder to repent of, because repentance would require admitting that the idol was false in the first place.

Pharaoh saw plague after plague and still asked, "Who is the Lord?" Hardness of heart is not the absence of consequence; it is the refusal to let consequence dethrone the self.

Romans 1 describes people who "knew God" yet "did not honor him as God," so their thinking became futile and their hearts darkened. They exchange the truth for a lie and then need a story that makes the exchange feel moral and makes them out to be good people in the end.

We've seen this painfully clearly before us these past few weeks as our society witnessed the worst of this hardness of heart played out in the Lindsey Clancy trial and the subsequent revelations about the jurors and how they became a hung jury.

What Revelation 9 describes is a people who can look at death and still keep the story that lets them remain the righteous ones. Two things can be true at once, and a culture under pressure to find justification for doing unjust harm to the truth, will try to make only one of them true. The jury was charged with judging the merits of the evidence presented in the case, not make determinations based upon personal preferences, experiences, world-views, ideological differences, or facts not given into evidence. They are there to consider reasonable doubt on the grounds of the evidence, not on what might have been the case or what others have experienced in similar cases.

A jury is not asked to be a representative sample of the nation’s feelings. It is asked to judge this evidence under this oath. That distinction matters for Revelation 9, because hardness of heart often does not announce itself as rebellion. It announces itself as a better, kinder way of seeing things.

In the subsequent interviews following the mistrial, the mood of the 11 jurors was that they were righteous and the one hold-out juror was unreasonable and maybe even unlawful. It was apparent that if they could they would have found him criminally responsible for harming the defendants chances at being safe and finding treatment.

Reasonable doubt is a narrow thing. It is not a mood, a cause, or a group identity. It is a decision as to whether the evidence in this record left a conscientious person unable to say, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she was criminally responsible when she clearly and methodically used the exercise bands on little Cora, Dawson, and Callan to strangle them to death. To chase down one child that had ran away in horror of what her mother had just done to her brother. To manage the situation with planning and forethought. To even go so far as to research the internet to plan the timing of the murders using Apple Maps to track her husband's absence from the home.

The record the jury was given was not a fog. Prosecutors put in the timing work on her phone; Apple Maps, not a vague wander through the internet, to measure how long Patrick would be gone if he drove to ThreeV, a restaurant farther than their usual places.

They put in the sequence of three separate strangulations with exercise bands, each requiring continued pressure after a child lost consciousness.

They put in her (Clancy's) own later account that she took Dawson down first, then returned for Cora, then went back up for Callan. They put in minutes, not a single flash. That is what "methodical" means in a courtroom. Not a theory about other mothers suffering from undiagnosed mental illness, but acts that take time, order, and the overcoming of a small body that does not die on contact.

A juror is free to conclude that psychosis can coexist with maps and minutes, and horrific crimes against innocent defenseless children. The law does not require illness to look like chaos in every gesture. What the law does not permit is to set the maps and minutes aside because they spoil a kinder gentler story that speaks to a society at large. The law does not permit the need for reform in the medical profession to take precedence over the facts at hand.

What the law does not allow for is to treat the facts as optional once they threaten a story the wider culture needs to have a conversation about.

"She was ill"can be evidence.

However, "therefore the planning does not count" is not evidence.

The "medical system failed her" can be a later public argument, but it's not evidence that should be calculated into reasonable doubt. It cannot become the verdict’s substitute for what really happened in the basement to those poor kids.

Reform of doctors, pharmacies, and postpartum care may be urgent. But it is not the question written on the verdict slip. Yet in every subsequent interview with the 11 jurors and in multitudes of "conversations" in the media spaces, the principal was only those social concerns about women's rights and health concerns and choices. Instantly lost, or never making a showing at all in these "conversations" is the wellbeing of the kids.

Which brings us back to where we began.

How does society witness the destruction of a third of all humanity, wild and destructive demonic creatures, vast cosmic and geological alterations to the known universe; and yet still hold-out on kneeling in repentance to the King of the Universe.

A people can watch a basement and still talk as if the main subject were women’s health, systems, and choices. The children become the missing term. Not because anyone stands up and says they did not matter, but because the conversation that follows their death has already chosen its new center of cultural significance. Once the center is the living adult and the reforms she represents, Cora, Dawson, and Callan can be named and still not govern the total meaning of the event. That is how a culture keeps itself righteous even with tiny corpses in the courtroom.

Fire, smoke, brimstone and sulfur. A demonic cavalry on the march. The cosmos itself is already coming undone under the earlier trumpets. And yet the survivors do not kneel.

They keep the works of their hands.

They keep the demons and their deaf and dumb idols.

They keep the murders of innocent babies, born and unborn.

The judgement against them has been severe yet they are not moved. Because they can't. They're too invested in what drove their self-righteousness for so long.

Not because they lacked spectacle. They had more spectacle than any jury, any news cycle, any medical panel. They lacked surrender.

The idol is the story that must not be dethroned. The idol is them. They are still the ones who see things truly; they are still the good people; the real problem is elsewhere. A hung jury can watch three small bodies explained in open court and still make the lone holdout the problem.

God help us all!

🙏🏼 Amen