The Heart Of The Issue

It is just the end of April, still pretty early in the year, and already the news is filled with national unrest, bloodshed, fierce natural disasters, wars and an increase in police-involved brutalities.

 

In the news today, the recent death of an unarmed black man in police custody has caused the most debilitating rioting and looting in the Baltimore area since Martin Luther King Jr's assassination. There seems to be an increase in police-related fatalities in the last six-months alone, re-igniting already fragile race relations in many urban communities. 

 

Many are looking for solutions.

Some have proposed re-education, body cameras and other suggestions; but will that be enough? Will any of these put an end to the increasing police-force issues our nation is facing? When will we have police/justice reform?

 

Despite the now 'constant news' of some sort of police-involved death, we also have deeper issues to deal with across the nation and worldwide. There is a rise in human trafficking, violence, child abuse, cruelty to people and animals, battery, fraud, lying, cheating, identity and other types of thefts, and the list goes on and on. How do we fix these social plagues that we see on a daily basis? Could it be that humanity's best efforts will never be good enough to fix our broken society? I believe these deep-seated issues are more than just mental but spiritual.

 

No number of body cameras and re-education of the police forces will eradicate accidental and purposeful fatalities. There may be biases and prejudices in the police force, but there are some in all of us as well. We all need some form of 'reformation' but it doesn't start and end with the mind, but it must penetrate the spiritual self. If these issues weren't spiritual, they would have been fixed already...

 

We have a heart problem. You cannot put a wolf in sheep's clothing and expect him to act like a sheep. He may mimic sheep-like behavior for a while, but sooner or later, he shows his true colors. The same goes for us all: our prejudices, hatreds, favoritisms and jealousies all come out in the open when we are tested. If our words don't reveal who we are, our actions will.

The Bible speaks about our desperately wicked heart (in Jeremiah 17:9). The unconverted heart is open to all types of evils. No matter our status, race, religion (or lack thereof), we are all capable of the most heinous crimes.

There is a song that says 'Jesus is the answer for the world today' and this is the absolute truth. Some might jest or jeer about this solution, but there is no other solution for a world that is sinking deeper in wickedness, hatred and turmoil.

 

We are in for some portentous times. The Bible warned us about the troublesome times we would be facing before earth's final days, and each day, we are seeing them unfold.

 

If you haven't noticed yet, we (as a part of the human family) are not improving, this world is not getting better and this, we are told, is just the beginning, but praise GOD, there is Hope and He has a Name...

 

PART II to follow...