At this moment, the world is in dreadful strife with coronavirus, huge uprisings of people in the western world caused by Marxist/Leninists who wish to destroy our current society, increasing tensions between nations and the general hell of poverty and disease. We can froth and foam about all that is ill with the world and society and posit immediate responses. That is fairly pointless. Today, I want to look at the big picture confronting the world and briefly outline the only long-term solution.

       Sometimes, I prefer to direct readers to the writings of others, so I am quoting extracts from a sermon entitled The Miracle of Reconciliation by James S Stewart (1896-1990), a distinguished Scottish preacher and academic. From 1952 to 1966 he was chaplain to the Queen in Scotland. The sermon is based on 1 Corinthians 4:19, 20. Some parts are emphasised.

       It is at once the glory and doom of man to have been made for fellowship with God. Of all the faculties and capacities which he possesses, incomparably the greatest is his capacity for God. It is his glory, for it opens up before him vistas of spiritual achievement. It is his doom, because he can never wholly escape the compulsion of his destiny, nor be satisfied while the soul within him starves. ‘Restless is our heart,’ said St Augustine, ‘until it finds rest in Thee.’

       Reconciliation with God is therefore the cardinal issue, far and away the most crucial problem confronting the soul of man today.

       That this is the main problem is, however, by no means universally admitted or recognised. The man who, diagnosing his personal situation, has reached the point of saying ‘My heart is restless until it rests in God,’ is clearly already well on the way towards the peace that passes understanding. But the trouble is that there are so many who would assent to St Augustine’s first clause, to whom it would simply never occur to go on and say the second. They put the full-stop in the middle. ‘Restless is our heart’—that they admit. That they realise. That, they feel, it would serve no purpose to deny. Their heart is ill at ease, dis-satisfied, heavy-laden. But—’until it rest in Thee’? Ah, they say, that is different! That we do not admit. That is not our psychology of the matter. In other words, they are prepared to recognise that somewhere there is a deep disharmony in their nature, something setting up a friction: what they are not prepared to recognise is that it is a disharmony with God.

       And turn from the individual and contemplate the world—this restless, heaving, fevered world. No one can look at the world today, and observe the tragic disillusionments and rampart degradations, without being driven to the conclusion that something in the organism of the human race has gone mysteriously and terribly wrong. ‘Restless is the world’s heart.’ But amongst those who agree that, would there be anything like a consensus of opinion that what is wrong is a disturbed, defective God-relationship, and that no cheerful slogans about brotherhood or democracy or progress can ultimately avail anything apart from a return to the living God? The world is convulsively restless, and it knows it. What it has not yet brought itself to say is—‘until we find rest in Thee.’

       There, then, is the problem. Man’s inability to diagnose correctly his own malady—that is what makes his plight so critical. The words do not leap to our lips, as they did with the psalmist: ‘Against Thee, Thee only, have I sinned.’ That piercing insight is not ours. God pity us, it is sometimes the last thing we think of saying.

       Now here we are laying our finger on what is undoubtedly the most ominous feature of the mystery of evil, and the most crucial difficulty in the way of reconciliation. The trouble is precisely that the sinful soul does not recognise, and by the very nature of the case is precluded from recognising, what has been going on within itself. It might seem natural to suppose that every time a man sins, he would know a little more about sin, its nature and its methods. Actually the exact reverse is true. Every time he sins, he is making himself less capable of realising what sin is, less likely to recognise that he is a sinner; for the ugly thing (and this, I feel sure, has never been sufficiently grasped), the really diabolical thing about sin is that it perverts a man’s judgment. It stops him from seeing straight.

       Hence any time any of us sins, we are making it not more, but less possible, for ourselves to appreciate what sin is; and therefore not more but less likely that we shall feel there is anything to be forgiven. Every time I indulge in pride, selfishness, or censoriousness, I am reducing my power to realise how essentially hateful and unchristlike pride, selfishness, and censoriousness are. Every time I reject some voice in conscience, I am making it certain that next time that voice is going to speak not more, but less, imperiously and convincingly. Until we have grasped this, we have not begun to glimpse the terrible nature of the problem God had upon His hands when he faced the task of man’s redemption.

       It is the claim of Christianity that this has happened. In Jesus the supposition has become the actuality. The unprecedented factor has appeared. In His perfect life and sinless personality, there has entered history a light capable of piercing the darkness of our dulled and blunted faculties, capable of bursting the bondage of sin’s blindness—because it is the lightning-flash of God. ‘In Him was life, and the life was the light of men.’

       All this is focused at the cross. All the powers of God, on the one hand to desolate the soul with shame, on the other to kindle it with joy unspeakable and full of glory, are concentrated there. When I turn my eyes to the cross and gaze on Calvary, what happens? This, first—the defences of self-excusing and rationalisation behind which my sin so subtly hides from me its true colours are penetrated and shattered once for all. That death-ray of the cross breaks every illusion down; and the truth about sin, the world’s sin and my sin—its despicable meanness, its hateful ugliness—stands openly revealed. For suddenly, as I look upon that deadly tree and its pure Victim, a voice within me cries—‘There is what your sin means: behold your handiwork!’ Is there any awakening in life half so terrible as that?

       It is all contained in the three great keywords of the Gospel of St John—Light, Love, Life.  …  The Light without the Love would terrify me and breed despair; the Love without the Light would be powerless to reach my soul; but the Light and the Love together generate Life—a Life which, as I enter into union with Christ by faith, becomes a present possession, eternal and death-defying, because it is the very life of God.

Extract from J S Stewart, ‘The Strong Name’ (Edinburgh: T & T Clark, 1941), 19-30.