Today is May 17th, and over at worldmag.com, a new poem of yours was published, Pastor John. It's a serious poem titled "Grace Forfeited, Adam, Tamerlan, and the Lady." It's a poem about justice in regard to the school shooting in Newtown and the death of the first suspect in the Boston Marathon bombing.

Explain the background of this poem for us and the biblical categories you explore in it. On the 6th of December, 14, Adam Lanza shot and killed 22 six-year-old, eight-year-old children. And then he shot himself. And that was that. And Tamerlan Chaniyev bombed the marathon with his brother. He killed three people, ripped the legs off a dozen others whose lives are forever changed, and then he was killed in a rain of bullets and some head trauma by the police.

But that was that. I mean, there goes Tamerlan. And here's the question I've been asking. Has justice been done because they're dead? Can you hatefully, wantonly slaughter people created in the image of God and then get away with it through suicide? A millisecond, a millisecond of pain. Can you thumb your nose at the punishment of the state or at God and end it your own way?

Can you rob—this is one of the characters in the poem—can you rob Lady Justice of her perfect rectitude in your case? And the poem answers, no, you cannot. This world is not one long injustice ending in nothingness. Lady Justice, you know, if you see the picture of her with her scales, she's always blindfolded, and that's to show impartiality.

But one of the paradoxes in the poem is, though blindfolded, none of her people that she has assigned justice to ever escapes her final decrees. That last pop of the gun to your own head is heard on the other side of hope like a slamming door, and the guilty who have spurned the grace of God all their lives suddenly realize, "I am not dead." And there she stands with perfect recompense in her hand.

And so that was my effort to try to capture and wrestle with whether suicide really can be viewed as a just end for a killer of 22 children. Thank you, Pastor John. The text of the new poem, "Grace Forfeited, Adam, Tamerlane, and the Lady," was posted at DesiringGod.org today, along with the audio of Pastor John reading the poem recently in the DG Studio, and I'll add that reading to the end of this Ask Pastor John episode.

Thanks for listening. Was Adam Lance's bullet to the head with all its millisecond length of dread and suffering a fitting recompense for 20 children dead? And the events of Boston's bloody marathon, is one hour's bullet riddle dying how it's done? Is that the penalty for killing three and ripping off our legs as if a knee could run?

Can Tamerlane and Adam rob so easily the state of its last job of punishing these crimes? Perhaps. But not the Lady Justice. No. In truth, she got her verdict, firm. And she is not so blind that any criminal by her consigned to suffer suitably could ever slip away through merest mortal stings or skip her perfect rectitude through suicide.

Nor is her ladyship so dignified among the cynical elite that she would bow to their philosophy and lose her right to judge, her sacred breath, by not at last existing after death. As if this bloody universe were one long empty triumph of injustice, done by no one, leaping into nothingness from dreams where there is nothing to transgress.

No. Those last pistol pops in Sandy Hook and Watertown pursued and overtook their prey and echoed like a slamming door heard on the other side of time and tore away the fatal hope that they were dead. They were not dead. Nor she. And flaming dread. In her right hand the Lady held the chains and in her left the everlasting pains.

you you you