We all desire progress. Whether collectively or individually, we want life to be better tomorrow than it was yesterday.
While we can probably all point to some things in our life that have improved over time, such as medicine and technology and perhaps even our own abilities in certain areas, it’s safe to say that life, overall, isn’t getting better.
The world certainly has less security and financial stability than it did decades ago. There’s more environmental damage, and more violence as well. It’s easy to make the case that chaos has increased over time and continues to do so.
As the field of physics understands, everything in our universe, when left to itself, moves towards a state of disorder. Over time things don’t improve of their own accord, they get worse.
According to the second rule of thermodynamics, a natural system needs to be acted upon from the outside to maintain a degree of order. It cannot create or maintain order in and of itself.
Even when first postulated by French scientist Sadi Canot in the early 19th century this wasn’t news. God told us this 2,600 years ago in the book of Jeremiah.
Like any other system, the population of earth cannot improve itself through its own wisdom or strength. We need an outside force to act upon us in order to bring about stabilization and improvement.
That outside force is God.
When God created the universe it was good. There was order and stability. Then God created man. And things immediately started going downhill.
Adam and Eve rejected God and thereby started the process of regression on this planet. Instead of moving forward, things began to move unstoppably backward. As the centuries have passed the world’s rejection of God has only increased, expediting our decline.
The way – the only way – to solve the myriad and ever-increasing problems on the planet is to incline our ears towards God and obey His commands.
Instead of walking in our own so-called wisdom we need to humble ourselves and admit that the path we’re on isn’t working. We need to admit that if we keep to it things will only get dramatically worse. We need to admit that we can’t make things better.
But we are arrogant. We persist, like obstinant little children, to insist that we can do what we are not capable of doing. We keep believing that someday we’ll make things better.
Even worse, we keep insisting that the way to make things better is to remove God – specifically the God of the Bible – from our lives. We’ve been doing this for decades. Clearly, this isn’t working.
The human heart is filled with evil. We are only capable of evil. We are not capable of good. The only reason anything good happens on this planet is because God intervenes and makes it happen. When we remove God we remove the only possible source of good.
Hence, as time goes on and we continue to remove God from our lives and societies, life will move inexorably towards disorder.
This is why hell will be so bad. Hell will be populated solely by people who declined to accept God’s gracious invitation to spend eternity with Him in heaven. Instead, they defiantly chose to spend eternity with billions of other evil-filled human beings in a place where God – the only source of good – will not be present. Hence insufferable evil will unceasingly reign there.
The way to improve life on earth is for people and nations to reject human counsel, turn back to God, and obey Him. This requires humility – something the human heart lacks.
This is also the only way to escape hell.
A Daily Dose Of Scripture 