Most recently the State of Florida underwent an emergency when hurricane Ian exacted its wrath upon the western shores of that state, and then spun its way across central Florida leaving a path of destruction.
Overall a hundred people were killed and thousands were (and still are) left with rubble for their livelihoods.
Currently, in the Ukraine, as most people know, there is a humanitarian crisis taking place at the hands of the Russian government, as it continues to ravage the Ukrainian countryside with bombs and bullets, displacing or destroying millions of people and their homes in the Russian army’s wake.
In the State of Texas, where I live, there is an education emergency taking place where upwards of 30,000 elementary and High School students have suddenly decided they have had enough of school and dropped out.
All across the globe, some of which you might be aware of, one emergency after another besets the human population, and those not directly effected are trying to help those who are by rendering aid, whether physically or financially.
One emergency, though, that has been ongoing and has been mostly ignored, is one that involves everyone, but fewer and fewer seem to want to do anything about it.
That emergency is destruction of the human soul, or the very thing that has led to other destructive behaviors, like transgenderism, rioting in the streets, and the imminent threat of nuclear war.
J. Gresham Machen, a prominent and thoughtful Christian theologian wrote,
No thoughtful man can possibly look upon the world today without observing that we are in the midst of a tremendous emergency. It does seem perfectly clear to the thoughtful people, whether they are Christians or not, that humanity is standing over an abyss.
After diagnosing the source of the problem being evil within the soul of man, he would detail the crisis that besets humanity by stating,
Europe is armed to the teeth. Russia stand under the most systematic and soul-crushing tyranny that the world has ever seen. In Germany, fiendish wickedness is being practiced in the name of science, and that country as well as Italy, even the form of liberty—to say nothing of the reality of it—has been abandoned. Civil and religious liberty are being treated openly as though they have been merely a passing phase in human life, well enough in their day but now out-of-date. In America, the same tendencies are mightily at work. Everywhere there rises before our eyes the specter of a society where security, if it is attained at all, will be attained at the expense of freedom, where the security that is attained will be the security of fed beasts in a stable, and where all the high aspirations of humanity will have been crushed by an all-powerful state.
Machen’s analysis, however, was written nearly a hundred years ago!
So, if America was facing an emergency then, what is it facing now, given the decades of neglect whereby tyranny, crime, perversion, ignorance, lying, cheating, and apathy have only gotten worse? A catastrophe? A tragedy?
Clearly, in order to address the emergency or impending catastrophe, the human soul must be considered first.
Failure to refocus our attention and to keep going down the same political, educational, or social roads for solutions will only invite the fatal consequences that ignorance or neglect toward the emergency will produce.
