I’m sitting here looking at a full page magazine ad that states “96 elephants are killed every day in Africa.” It stirred a memory of someone who said to me, “If only Satan would die, the world would get better.” My reaction to that is absolutely not. It isn’t Satan out there killing those elephants. It’s ignorance. I would like to say, “If only we could eliminate ignorance the world would be a better place.”
There is no question that the most dangerous animals on earth are humans. Our bottomless pit appetites drive us to amazingly thoughtless acts of cruelty and destruction. Our ignorance of the consequences of our acts or our blindness to see those results are destroying the very earth over which God made us stewards. We deny well researched scientific data merely to satisfy those appetites with cheap whatever.
We don’t need Satan to inspire our actions. We are very capable of imagining and designing our own evil. Sometimes we are tempted to say the world keeps getting more and more evil. However, that is a lack of knowledge of world history. Holocausts, pogroms, mass slaughters and serial killers have been with us since the dawn of written records. The one thing that has changed is technology makes it easier and more efficient to do our dirty deeds.
Often we point our fingers at others with disgust and rarely understand or admit to ourselves that we under the same circumstances of those others might have done what they did. The only real answer to this is the indwelling of the Holy Spirit to transform us and finally according to I Corinthians 15 replace our corruption with incorruption. It cannot come soon enough.
Written by Roger Bothwell on September 2, 2014
Spring of Life, PO Box 124, St. Helena, CA 94574
Rogerbothwell.org