Shortly after the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA) dinner began Saturday evening, a thirty-one-year-old man approached, running past a Secret Service security checkpoint. Guests heard shots outside the ballroom. President Trump said later that he initially thought a tray had been dropped on the floor, but his wife worried that it was more serious.

A moment later, the president was pulled off the stage by law enforcement officials, a huddle of agents forming around him as he was removed. Vice President JD Vance was ushered away in the opposite direction, and others on the stage were taken into the wings.

Agents spread out across the ballroom, standing on tables and holding weapons. Agents with long guns and helmets stationed themselves on the stage. Cabinet secretaries were rushed out of the room. Attendees hid under tables; wine spilled and serving trays clattered to the ground. People screamed and sobbed.

A waitress cried out in Spanish, “I don’t want to die here. I don’t want to die in this room.”

An assassination every other year

The suspect is expected to be arraigned in federal court today. He identified himself in a message sent to family members minutes before the attack as a “Friendly Federal Assassin.” Authorities uncovered what one official described as numerous anti-Trump social media posts. According to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, the man was trying to “assassinate” President Trump.

This is tragically unsurprising; the list of United States presidential assassination attempts and plots includes every recent chief executive. Eight out of forty-five presidents, more than one in six, have died on the job, four by assassination.

This is by no means a uniquely American phenomenon. The list of heads of state and government across history who were assassinated or executed, beginning in 2270 BC and continuing to the present, is shockingly long. One study reported that, between 1875 and 2004, there were fifty-nine assassinations of primary national leaders, averaging approximately one every other year.

It’s hard to see how such attacks can be fully anticipated and thus prevented. The suspect in the shooting outside the WHCA dinner is a graduate of Caltech, one of the most academically rigorous schools in the country, and recently won a “teacher of the month” award. He appears to have legally purchased two guns he had on him Saturday.

Motives behind previous assassination attempts have been widely disparate. Among them:

• Ryan Routh attempted to shoot President Trump in September 2024, reportedly because he wanted to ensure that Mr. Trump would not be reelected that fall.
• John Hinckley Jr. shot President Ronald Reagan in 1981 to impress the actress Jodie Foster.
• Theodore Roosevelt was shot in 1912 by a man who said William McKinley visited him in a dream and told him to avenge his assassination by killing Mr. Roosevelt.
• James A. Garfield was shot and killed by a man who was angry at being passed over for appointment as Ambassador to France.

Nor are the rest of us immune from mortality. For example, five people were injured in a shooting early Sunday morning near Indiana University. The gunfire apparently resulted from a fight between two women at the event.

An American millionaire died on a hunting trip in Africa when he was charged by an elephant herd. A film portraying the life of Michael Jackson was on pace to collect more than $200 million in its opening weekend; the movie does not tell how he died of a drug overdose at the age of fifty.

“The safest road to hell is the gradual one”

And yet, there’s something in us that doesn’t want to admit that we could be next. Of course we know we are mortal, at least in a logical sense. None of us has any plausible hope that we will be the first humans to escape death forever.

But dying somehow doesn’t feel as real as all that.

Perhaps we’ve been desensitized by violence in movies and on television and by video games in which we die only to start another game. Hospitals and hospices, rather than homes and bedrooms, are often where people die these days. I’ve only witnessed the actual death of one person, an elderly man in my first pastorate who died in his bed as we prayed for him. My mother died while I was in her hospice room, but I did not see her last breath.

Even though we know someday will be our dying day (unless the Lord returns first), we don’t really believe it could be this day. We would have been shocked if President Trump had been killed Saturday night but not truly surprised, given the frequency of assassination attempts we’ve been discussing. But most of us would be both shocked and surprised if death were to meet us today.

In one sense, such denial is necessary to insulate us from anxiety that would otherwise paralyze us. Who could go through their day if they were in perpetual mortal fear of their pending demise?

In another, however, our unwillingness to admit our personal mortality is a ruse of the enemy intended to keep us from being ready when death comes. The chief tempter in C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters advises his understudy, “The safest road to hell is the gradual one—the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts.”

“It’s closer to my house than to yours”

The antidote is to walk so closely with the living Lord Jesus that we are ready to step into his eternal presence today, secure in the knowledge that death is but the door to a life more blessed than we can possibly imagine (1 Corinthians 2:9).

The days when death is most disconcerting to me are the days when, quite frankly, I don’t feel prepared to stand before my holy Lord (2 Corinthians 5:10). They are also the days when I don’t think my work is yet done and grieve the separation from my loved ones that death would entail.

The days I’m truly walking with Jesus, by contrast, are days when I sense his grace and know I would be welcomed into his paradise. They are days when I know he will not call me home until my work is complete, so I can trust that his timing is perfect. And they are days when I feel deeply his love for those I love and know I can trust them into his omnipotent hands.

In Genesis 5 we read that “Enoch walked with God, and he was not, for God took him” (v. 24). A pastor preaching on this text imagined it this way: “As Enoch and God were walking along, the day drew to a close and the Lord said, ‘Enoch, it’s closer to my house than to yours. Come on home with me.’”

So it can be for any of us today.

This is the promise, and the invitation, of God.

Quote for the day:

“He whose head is in heaven need not fear to put his feet into the grave.” —Matthew Henry

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A government affairs attorney and Christian apologist named Jay Atkins recently asked a popular AI engine to evaluate the world’s major belief systems and determine which one makes the most sense. He used a two-step framework: which worldview best explains reality, and which one does so while requiring the fewest unsupported assumptions.

In other words, which has the highest explanatory power with the lowest evidentiary burden?

The worldviews in question were atheism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, and Christianity. In seconds, the AI engine concluded that Christianity offers the most reasonable view of the world. Atkins explained the AI’s reasoning:

[Christianity] offers a comprehensive explanation of reality, why the universe exists, why it is ordered, why we are rational and moral beings, and why we long for meaning. At the same time, it concentrates its evidentiary burden into a relatively small number of claims, most notably the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. That matters because a worldview that explains everything but requires you to believe a thousand fragile claims is not rational. The most reasonable worldview is the one that explains the most while assuming the least.

On that metric, Christianity wins.

As the “America Reads the Bible” emphasis has continued across the week in Washington, DC, we’ve been thinking about relating God’s word to our secularized culture. We’ve discussed the power of Scripture to change hearts and lives when we submit to its truth in accountable community. Yesterday we focused on that truth in the context of our gravest moral challenge.

Let’s close by exploring the urgency of biblical truth for eternal souls, including the next one you meet today.

“There is salvation in no one else”

The New Testament consistently states that salvation comes only by God’s grace through faith in Jesus Christ. The apostles declared to the religious leaders of their day, “There is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved” (Acts 4:12). Our salvation “is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast” (Ephesians 2:9).

This is only logical. Our sins separate us from our holy God, the only source of eternal life (cf. Psalm 36:9; Acts 17:28; John 14:6), and thus lead to eternal death (Romans 6:23). Only a sinless person who has no sin debt to pay can pay ours vicariously by dying in our place. And there has been only one sinless person in all of human history. Muslims do not claim this for Muhammad, or Buddhists for Buddha, or Jews for their rabbis.

Jesus alone is our sinless Savior (Hebrews 4:15), the “good shepherd” who “lays down his life for the sheep” (John 10:11).

In addition, Jesus is the only person in history to die and rise from the grave, never to die again. This is also a claim Muslims do not make for Muhammad, or Buddhists for Buddha, or Jews for their rabbis. Of all the great religious leaders of history, only Jesus is alive and active in our world today.

If only Jesus has died to pay for our sins and risen from the grave, only Jesus can forgive our sins and grant us salvation (Ephesians 2:4–5). No matter how fervent Iranians might be in their Shiite Islam, or Buddhists in their Buddhism, or Hindus in their Hinduism, their faith and works cannot save their souls (cf. Romans 8:9).

Scripture also teaches that only those saved by Christ are included in the “book of life of the Lamb who was slain” (Revelation 13:8), and that “if anyone’s name was not found written in the book of life, he was thrown into the lake of fire” (Revelation 20:15).

All this to say, we must be “born again” (John 3:7). The most urgent need in all humanity is the need for humans to turn to Christ as Savior. Stated bluntly, every non-Christian you and I know is in danger of eternal separation from God in hell.

“Every way of a man is right in his own eyes”

Here’s the problem: most lost people don’t know they are lost. Unlike those who are lost with regard to directions, they are convinced that they are on the right path, or they would change.

A woman died mid-flight recently when she suffered a medical episode and lost consciousness. Members of the panicked cabin crew connected an oxygen mask to her face but failed to connect the mask to the oxygen tank. They sincerely thought they were saving her life, but they were sincerely wrong.

Through many conversations with lost people over the years, I have found that convincing them that they are lost is often the hardest part of the process. They have attached their “mask” and are certain it is working for them.

This is not only because our postmodern culture convinces secularists that their “truth” is just as valid as any other. It is also because “the god of this world has blinded the minds of the unbelievers, to keep them from seeing the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God” (2 Corinthians 4:4).

Solomon observed, “Every way of a man is right in his own eyes” (Proverbs 21:2). As a result, the sinner “makes a pit, digging it out, and falls into the hole that he has made” (Psalm 7:15) and now cannot get out.

As Oswald Chambers warned, “The penalty of sin is confirmation in sin. It is not only God who punishes for sin; sin confirms itself in the sinner and gives back full pay. . . . the penalty of sin is that you get used to it and do not know that it is sin.”

What we owe “every lost person”

The good news is that the Holy Spirit can do what you and I cannot by convicting the lost of their sin and drawing them to salvation. Our part is to share the gospel with them and pray for them (Acts 1:8; cf. Leviticus 5:1).

In her latest blog, my wife writes: “Pray for the opportunities to be an evangelist this week. God wants to answer that prayer and use your life for his kingdom purpose.” As has been said, “Salvation is the work of the Holy Spirit. Sharing God’s word is the work of every Christian.”

I’ll conclude our weeklong discussion of Scripture and secular culture with a statement by David Platt I often quote:

“Every saved person on this side of heaven owes the gospel to every lost person on this side of hell.”

Do you agree?

Quote for the day:

“If sinners be damned, at least let them leap to hell over our bodies. If they will perish, let them perish with our arms about their knees. Let no one go there unwarned and unprayed for.” —Charles Spurgeon

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