Princess Diana's Unlawful Death?

It has been more than ten years since her tragic death, and finally blame is being placed.

A court has found that Princess Diana’s death in France back in August of 1997 was ‘unlawful’. The unlawful killing verdict was placed on the driver of the vehicle and the paparazzi who hounded the princess until her Mercedes crashed at 60 mph ending her young life and shocking the world.

The jury deliberated and came to their decision after hearing six months of testimony from more than 240 witnesses during the 6 million-dollar inquest. They also traveled to Paris to see the scene of the 1997 crash.

It seems that questions and suspicions will always plague the bizarre death of Princess Diana. But the Bible speaks about another death and one that is, without question, the single most wrongful in human history. It was the unjust torture and hideous execution of God’s Son, Jesus Christ. Hebrews 4:15 relates His total innocence and flawless life despite the unfair treatment He received. “For we do not have a High Priest who cannot sympathize with our weaknesses, but was in all points tempted as we are, yet without sin.”

The unjust killing of the Lord violated countless laws of His day. But the upside is that His fate was no accident. It was literally pre-determined. The Lord Himself revealed this to His disciples following His resurrection in Luke 24:7. He stated there, “The Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men, and be crucified, and the third day rise again.” It all fit precisely into God’s amazing plan of saving sinful man through the sinless “Son of Man”.

In the Book of Acts the author made this even more clear through the recording of Peter’s powerful sermon in chapter 2. Verse 22 reveals, "Men of Israel, hear these words: Jesus of Nazareth, a Man attested by God to you by miracles, wonders, and signs which God did through Him in your midst, as you yourselves also know - Him, being delivered by the determined purpose and foreknowledge of God, you have taken by lawless hands, have crucified, and put to death; whom God raised up, having loosed the pains of death, because it was not possible that He should be held by it.”

Then the Apostle Paul, in 2 Corinthians 5, reaffirmed the concept of the Savior’s blameless life along with God’s marvelous plan to save the lost. Verse 21 reads, “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.”

Perhaps Peter said it best in just one concise and potent sentence in the 3rd chapter of his first epistle. Verse 18 begins. “For Christ also suffered once for sins, the just for the unjust, that He might bring us to God…”

It goes without saying that the unjust killing of the innocent is wrong and beyond awful. But all death, natural or otherwise, can be fully prepared for through saving faith in the one whose own unjust death can make any soul just before God.

Bill Breckenridge