“WHAT’S WRONG WITH OUR WORLD?” I SOMETIMES THINK TO MYSELF.
Maybe you ask yourself the same question. It seems that I can’t open the morning newspaper or turn on the evening news without reading or hearing about war and the threat of war, civil unrest, ethnic violence, crime, acts of terrorism and a hundred other terrible things. We live in a world of sickness, sorrow, suffering, pain and death. So what…morphed it from the perfect world God created at the beginning to what it is today? It must have been catastrophic. And indeed, it was. In a beautiful garden, a man and his wife, believing a lie, committed an act of willful disobedience against the explicit command of God. And the rest is history–a very painful, destructive, and deadly history–for the human race and for this world in which we live.
Once sin entered into our once perfect world, our world wasn’t perfect anymore. All the problems of our world can still be traced back to one man and his rejection of God’s will and authority over him. By his rebellion against God, Adam brought sin into what had been a perfect world and passed on his rebellious heart to the next generation and the next and the next in our long, sad history. Our world is struggling today with problems that didn’t even exist fifty years ago–international terrorism, mass murders, antibiotic-resistant germs, identity theft, and global warming. There are wars and conflicts around the world that seem to keep popping up like “whack-a-mole,” each one a potential threat to world peace and a possible trigger for global thermo-nuclear war that could completely destroy the human race and even the entire planet. We have to wonder what kind of a world we’re leaving to our children and grandchildren.
It certainly would be easy to throw up our hands in despair, saying, “What can we do?” And the reality is that there is very little that we can do. The reason that we can’t fix the problems in our world is that we are the problem. But there’s hope for the future of our world in the promise of God that at the proper time He is going to resolve the problem and fix our world. Though it might not seem evident by what we see happening in our world today, God is even now working a plan to restore our world to what He originally intended it to be, and even better…Only God can fix the problem of sin by stepping into human history and changing the heart of man, because our own sinful hearts are the source of the problem.
Jesus has already come and intervened in history to rescue mankind from the penalty and power of sin in their lives. And He’s coming to intervene in history again to finish the job and rescue mankind and our world from the corruption of sin itself. Ultimately, we will live forever with him in a new world on a new earth in which everything wrong with this present world will be made right (2 Pet. 3:10-13), where there is no longer any death, mourning, crying or pain (Rev. 21:1-4), when God says at last, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5). May we live each day in a manner that honors and pleases our Savior, confident that He is coming, just as He promised, and eagerly looking forward with assured confidence to that day when we shall see Him face to face and live forever with Him in a glorious new world.
– An excerpt from Allan Stewart Maitha’s book, “THE COMING: Our Only Hope For a Better World”. All Scripture references are taken from the New American Standard Bible, unless otherwise indicated.
