Spiritual and/or Moral Articles

The Solution to the World's Problem

by Alistair Begg

"But now He has appeared once for all at the end of the ages to do away with sin by the sacrifice of Himself." - Hebrews 9:26

In 1946, John Sloan Dickey, then president of Dartmouth College, told the graduating class: "There is nothing wrong with the world that better human beings cannot fix." Recently, one of the elders at Parkside Church (a Dartmouth man) told me that the current president told last year's graduating class: "You are the better human beings that we've all been waiting for!"

We may be sure that there are some exceptional young people graduating from there as well as from other academic institutions, but they are not going to fix our world. The problem with our world, the Bible tells us, is that each of us has turned to our own way by suppressing the truth about God, denying what is obvious and embracing what is foolish. Furthermore, God's word explains that we are by nature unworthy of God, unfit for His presence, and unable to rectify our circumstances.

But there is good news and a solution to our problem. Someone has come from outside who shares in our humanity but not in our sin. He has "lived for us the kind of life we should live but can't, and He has paid fully the penalty we deserve for the life we do live but shouldn't."

The Easter story is that in the person of Jesus, God has come to deal with our alienation by making peace through His blood shed on the cross. This story, Paul tells us, is "foolishness to those who are perishing but to those who are being saved, it is the power of God."

Horace, the Latin poet and satirist of the first century gave this advice to his students in writing plays: "a god must not be introduced into the action unless the plot has got into such a tangle that only a God can unravel it." There we have the problem with our world in a nutshell!

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We want God to answer our prayers. Hopefully, we will thank Him after He answers our prayers. Now, can we thank god when he does not answer our prayers? Read Jim's article and we may have a different perspective on unanswered prayers.