Everyday, the Auschwitz Museum posts pictures on social media of people who were killed at the Nazi death camp. I look at the pictures of men, women, and children, and imagine what their lives were like before they were so cruelly killed. I have also been reading Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn's book, The Gulag Archipelago, which details the horrors of the Soviet system of repression that killed millions and lasted for decades. While reading about the atrocities of the past is not pleasant, it is important for us to remember man's inhumanity to man. But we do not just have to read history books to detail this, rather all we need to do is turn on the news or go on social media to see modern examples of evil. In fact, all we really have to do is interact with people in everyday life, and we will experience evil in our world and in ourselves.
Last week, I wrote about God's unchanging good and sovereign nature which helps us have a firm place to stand in our uncertain world. This week I want us to examine the truths about why our world is so broken. To do this we need to go to Genesis 3, where Adam and Eve disobeyed God's command, and as a consequence their relationship with Him was broken and the whole world was affected. The Apostle Paul declares in Romans 3:23, "for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God," which tells us that the problems in the world are not just with those people over there (the democrats, the republicans, the boomers, the millennials, the foreigners, the racists, etc.), but with all people everywhere including ourselves. It's really easy to see the problems in the people or groups that we hate, but it's much harder to recognize that we are in the same category and liable to the same sins. But we tend to minimize sin in our own lives, and give ourselves and our group more credit for being able to fix the world. If we just gave power to the right president, the right party, the right scientists, the right judges, (you know people who think like me), then the whole world would be fixed.
A really good example of this in the past year has been how we have dealt with Covid, and who we blame for it. Over the last few months, the virus continues to break out no matter the policies which we have tried to implement in accordance with this expert or that expert opinion. It's hard to give total credit, and therefore hard to give total blame to any particular expert or system because it seems like so many places in the world with different policies and different ways of dealing with the pandemic have all had to face outbreaks. If it was not so tragic, it would be funny how many times someone has declared that they have figured it out only to be proven wrong a month or two later. Yet we all are still seeking the correct expert and the right science to try to save ourselves.
I'm not saying that there aren't better and worse ways to handle issues in the world, but rather that we often make the assumption that some person if they did the right thing could simply fix the problems. This is a denial of the effects of the sin, namely that the world is broken in such a way that we cannot totally fix it. No matter who we put in charge, they will still be a sinner and they will still be limited in their abilities. The more they try to fix the problems on their own, the more clear it will be that they are not all-powerful, they are not inherently good, and that they do not hold the future in their hands. In other words they are not God, and so are not worthy of our complete trust and allegiance.
The biggest and scariest unfixable problem is that we are all going to die, and no human no matter how smart or powerful can fix that. Right in Genesis 3, Adam and Eve were told that the consequence of disobeying God was that they would surely die. So much of our modern life is set up to prolong life and ignore the possibility of death. Unfortunately, even with all of our intelligence, technology, and science, we haven't come up with a way to avoid death. Things like covid, cancer, and old age remind us of the limits of our control.
On a personal level, this was made clear to me in 2012 when my son Micah, who was only 11 years old, passed away. He had an autoimmune disease that affected his kidneys and also developed another disease that affected his blood vessels. Even though we were doctoring at Mayo Clinic with some of the best healthcare in the world, we could not save his life.
We need someone bigger and better than ourselves to save us from our sin and it's consequence -- death. The truth is that there is only one who has lived a perfect life, died to pay the penalty of our sin, and rose again to show us that His sacrifice was acceptable to God and that death was defeated. We need to acknowledge the truth that we are broken, that our brokenness breaks the world, and that therefore we need a savior. Jesus is the only one that can save us and redeem the whole world (see Act 4:12 and John 14:6).
As you look around at the hurting in the world and perhaps the hurting in your own soul, remember to seek your help and salvation in the only one who has beaten both sin and death.
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