It is 50 years on since US President John F Kennedy's assassination, yet people are still captivated by the event.
The bottom line, when it comes to terrible deeds perpetrated by humans on their fellows, is human nature itself. Tragedy happens most frequently because humanity is a victim of itself; human kind has an inbuilt desire to do wrong. Simply put, its name is sin. And sin in our-self is a problem with which every one of us must contend, no matter how good we look in our own eyes.
There have been many famous assassinations in history: Brutus'stabbing of Caesar, the shooting of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand (1914), Indra Ghandi of India (1984) and Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan (2007), each with far reaching consequences. But there is one assassination in which we're all complicit. And that's the killing of Jesus Christ of Nazareth, in around 33 AD.
But he wasn't just any political or religious leader. Rather, he was the son of God, who lay down his life for we sinful humans. Christ the Messiah absorbed all our moral failings in his own body. And offers to exchange them with his own blameless, perfect life.
After his assassination, despite such a short time in office, JFK became quite the presidential hero. But he wasn't perfect of-course. He couldn't even remain faithful to the one he should have held dearest, his wife, Jacqueline, who moments after the fateful shot was seen clambering onto the boot lid of the limousine, imploring help from a hapless secret service agent, then nursing JFK's head in her lap, as they accelerated out of the danger zone.
In contrast, Jesus Christ was the perfect victim. As the messiah, the sacrificial lamb without any blemish of sin in him, His death, rather than the marking of any a conflict, as that in Vietnam, heralded the end of one - the millennial - long controversy between Christ and Satan. His death sealed the fate of the devil, forever removing death's sting (1 Corinthians 15: 55,56) . His death gave us life.
