Anyone who’s spent more than a second really thinking about life in this world knows there is something wrong. Live long enough and everyone’s experience is full of pain and heartbreak.
After recognising this pain, our question becomes, ‘how can it be fixed?’ We look to education and we wonder, if it were better would all the ills within society and me be eradicated?
One of our society’s greatest problems is that we don’t stop long enough to really consider what the cause of our problem is. This means that the ‘solutions’ will never be appropriate.
We must turn to the Bible to understand what the cause of our pain and heartbreak is, because it is there that God speaks and reveals what we would prefer hidden. And in the Bible, we find that the cause of our problems is sin; our own and others’.
And because we are the problem, we can’t be the solution. Anything we do will only continue to exacerbate the problem. More education only results in smarter sinners. Technology relieves some pain but is used to inflict other kinds of pain. We need someone else to deal with the cause (our sin) so the symptoms (our suffering) can be alleviated.
And that’s what God did. The whole of the Old Testament was promising and leading up to the solution, until finally we see Jesus on the cross. Taking our sin upon himself he cries, ‘It is finished,’ (John 19:30).
It could be said the cross was stage 1 of the inoculation; stage 2 is Christ’s return, when not only is sin forgiven but is completely removed along with its ill-effects. For those desperate for a world free of suffering we have an important message; ‘come to Jesus.’ He is the only solution to our problem.