A CREEPING SICKNESS

Despite all the signs of God at work in the world, it is still in a mess.

There is appalling inequality between rich and poor nations. In 1983 the national income for each person in the United States was $9,600, in China $510, in India $170.

A massive population explosion is on the way. By the year 2000 there will be twice as many mouths to feed as there were in 1950. They increase at 210,000 a day —starvation affects more and more of mankind.

The world is running short not only of food but of oil and energy. The age of abundance is over, and yet the West continues in careless extravagance.

The air, the land and the waters of the earth are being ruined. Dumping radioactive waste in the sea is just one of the ways we are poisoning the environment for future generations.

Families are breaking up, with great misery and hurt. One marriage in three collapses.

The crime rate all over the world is accelerating with terrifying rapidity. It is an age of violence and brutality such as the world has never seen. It is the age of concentration camps, of the most exquisite forms of torture, of genocide.

Leonardo da Vinci suppressed his invention of the submarine, he tells us, ‘because of the evil nature of man. They would use it to practice assassinations at the bottom of the sea.’

He had put his finger on the heart of our problem: the evil nature of human beings.

‘What’s wrong with the world? I am,’ said a famous man of letters.

Of course, if you put that to the man in the street he will tell you: ‘I’ve never done anyone any harm.’ ‘I’m all right.’ ‘I’m as good as people who go to church.’

But Christianity will have none of it. The Christian faith is unashamedly a rescue religion. That is why so many respectable people will have nothing to do with it. The Bible proclaims that we are not all right. The world is in a mess, and each individual life is in a mess.

‘Who can understand the human heart?’ asked the prophet Jeremiah. ‘There is nothing else so deceitful; it is too sick to be healed.’

Jesus himself tells us something crucial — something that we are painfully having to rediscover today. Will more education or more social welfare put us right? Or is it ‘the system?’ Change the system and all will be right .

No, said Jesus. For ‘from our heart come the evil ideas which lead us to kill, commit adultery, and do other immoral things; to rob, lie, and slander others.’

The fault lies not in our stars but in ourselves. The ‘human disease’ of self-centeredness is nothing short of fatal.

You must have seen a tree throttled by ivy. It is a sad sight. A tree is such a strong, beautiful, living thing. And we feel it ought never to succumb to the insignificant tentacles climbing up it.

But ivy is like a creeping sickness. Look how it starts: so pale, and frail, and innocent- looking. But it grows. It increases its hold, shuts out the light and air, and eventually strangles the life out of the tree.

That is very like the effect on us of the disease the Bible calls sin. We were made to be great — the crown of God’s creation. But sin spoils it all.

‘Whoever commits sin becomes a slave of sin,’ said Jesus.

‘I do not understand what I do; for I don’t do what I would like to do, but instead I do what I hate. . . What an unhappy man I am! Who will rescue me?’ cried the apostle Paul. ‘Sin pays its customers; the wage is death.’

This is all very unflattering for a generation which thinks it is the greatest. But it is a true analysis, however humiliating. It means that we need two things above all:

Forgiveness for the mess we have made of our world and of our lives;

A power beyond our own to set us free.