1. If God loves us, why do we as individuals live full of insecurity, fear, and hatred? Why are we discontent, and emotionally unstable, fall into anxiety, grief, and self-limitations, and do not feel his love at all?
2. If God loves us, why are families breaking up at the societal level, children rebelling against parents, generations being pitted against each other, and rivalries and hatred reigning everywhere?
3. If God loves us, why are there wars, hunger, poverty, injustice, discrimination, oppression, and lack of freedom? Why don’t we as a society live a wonderful plan of love, justice, and peace?
4. And deep down, a discontented question gnaws: If God loves us, why don’t we try? Why isn’t our world a paradise where we live in harmony, peace, and justice?
A. The Problem
Before we would like to solve a problem, we must know the problem. If the problem is not formulated, the solution will never, we will never find it. If our car breaks down, we go to the mechanic to tell us what’s wrong. If our watch breaks down, we ask the watchmaker to fix it for us. But if it’s a broken life, who do we go to? If the world doesn’t go in the right direction, we’re supposed to ask the Creator of the world what’s going on. For all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God. (Rom 3:23). That which does not allow God’s glory to be manifested in the world’s love and the realization of his plan of happiness, peace, and unity, is called sin. Sin is the cause of all the evils that afflict humanity.
God has poured out a flood of love upon us. But we are under an unbreakable glass that allows us to watch the rain of love fall, yet we don’t even get wet in the water of life. It is sin that keeps us from experiencing God’s love. Ever since Satan deceived our grandparents in paradise, who believed that by their strength they could gain happiness and human fulfillment, all the unhappiness in which we live began: Man has drifted away from God, the source of life, separated from his wife and blamed her, and made friends with the creature who rebelled against him. Since then, hatred, hostility, and vindictiveness have reigned. Immediately afterward, the stronger (Cain) killed the weaker (Abel). Wars, injustices, the pursuit of wealth, and all the evil that exists in the world began. Our problem is that we are sinners, and therefore we are distant from God’s love. The worst thing is that we cannot avoid it because sin is not something we can prevent from coming into us, but something that is born out of the nature of our being. Why does the lemon tree always give bitter and sour fruit and not sweet and tasty? The reason is simple: it has the roots of the lemon tree and cannot give any fruit other than lemons. And so we also bear the fruit of sin because our roots, our hearts, are sinful. We need someone to change our hearts…
We are sinners, and that is why we sin. Because our roots are the roots of sin, it stands to reason that they bear the fruit of sin. When King David recognized his sins and confessed them, he said that he was a sinner from conception, that he was born a sinner. Indeed, I was born in iniquity and my mother conceived me sinful. (Ž 51, 7). Sin is like our shadow. It cannot be separated from us. They are only two ways to be free from the shadow: Remain in total darkness – which is even worse, to be light, because light has no shadow – which, however, is for human powers impossible. To want to save one’s life with one’s strength means, falling further into hopelessness and helplessness. When the first space satellites began to be sent to the moon, the fundamental problem that humans faced was that they didn’t have enough energy to get there -they were falling to earth. And the higher they got, the harder the fall and the worse the consequences. The same thing happens to us when we want to achieve happiness through our strength and means and realization of our life: When we seek false paths: materialism, humanism without God, communism, and capitalism…, when we believe in false idols: Satanism, divinity, greed, mind control, transcendental meditation, predicting the future…, when we depend only on ourselves: the fulfillment of one law, our righteousness, our good works…
We are blind, unable to find the way. And no one else can help us, because others are – like us – blind. We need power from above, which we do not have. Two drunken men boarded a boat to sail to the other side of the river. It was already dark. They rowed all night without it, to reach the other side. At dawn, after partially sobering up, they discovered that they had not advanced a meter because the boat was tied up. We, too, are bound by the rope of sin, which does not allow us, to try as we may, to attain the salvation that is on the other shore. Neither our good intentions nor our good deeds, nor our righteousness, is not able to secure our salvation. And it matters not at all what the rope is. The little bird cannot fly whether it is tied with a steel chain or a thin thread. Either way, it cannot fly. We need someone to cut the rope of sin… Sin is not believing in God, not trusting in God and trusting more yourself, preferring yourself and negating him, rejecting his will, to arrange our life according to ourselves. This means worshiping an idol.
