Hosea 12.6 commands, you must return to your God, by maintaining love and justice, and by waiting for your God to return to you.

Almost daily we are bombarded with tragic news. Senseless killings. Natural disasters. Awful accidents. The world is broken. The obviousness that something is terribly wrong is overwhelming. We want solutions but are we looking in the right place for the answers?

The Bible teaches that the problem in the world is our rebellion against the ways of God. The Muslims would say the same thing in their book but their answer is a repressive legalism without love that stifles freedom while producing despair and poverty. The Buddhists would also admit to a world askew but their solution is to remove ourselves from feeling anything including the collective desire to fix it. The Hindus also recognize the problem but their caste system justifies the experience of the ‘losers’ while empowering the ‘winners’ to ignore them.

It is Christianity alone that explains the world and all who live in it have rebelled against God’s ways of love and justice causing everything and everyone to live selfish lives that result in pain and suffering for everyone.

The answer is not empowering governments consisting of broken people, to fix the world. Broken people in power continue to manifest a selfishness that at worst represents severe oppression and at best helps some while ignoring or even oppressing others.

The answer is for each person to return to God and His ways of love and justice. God’s ways of love command we love one another as we love ourselves. If we all obeyed this command we would certainly have a better planet. The Bible teaches God made all people from two people whose progeny resulted in every race and tribe and tongue known to us. This is why God can command we love one another since we all trace our origin to the same beginning. Loving others as we love ourselves means putting the needs, desires and wants of others ahead of our own just as we always want our needs, desires and wants made first and foremost.

Doing justly in Biblical terms is doing what is right according the will of God revealed in the Word of God. If we obey God’s commands to not steal, to not lie, to give generously etc. we will find our world much easier and more enjoyable to live in.

Trying to live this way is impossible without the presence of God living in us to empower His love and justice to be demonstrated through us. This is why everyone must first come to God through Jesus the Savior for only He Who was raised from the dead can empower people to truly live. Other religions and government entities are powerless to solve the world’s problems.

Only people rightly related to the one true God can change this world permanently for they alone have the power of God living within them. The same power that raised Jesus from the dead.