The Church Has the Solution to Our Nations’ Problems

Although our situation may seem hopeless, we children of God always have hope because we have our God on our side. And although the situation of the Church of Jesus Christ in the world at this point in history may seem so extreme and almost desperate, with the world seeming to move more and more toward wickedness or toward secularism and the rejection of the Word of God, we can still say that there is something God wants to do in our time to change that situation. We children of God are never forsaken.

In this passage I want to continue telling this story and speak about a scene presented in the text. We are told that the famine was so severe that, to illustrate what was actually happening, when Joram, the king of Israel, passes along a street, a woman calls out to him. Believing that she will obtain justice by appealing to the king, she tells him a macabre story: she and another woman had made a pact. This is found in verse 26 of Second Kings.

It says: “As the king of Israel was passing along the wall, a woman cried out to him, ‘Save me, my lord the king!’ And he said to her, ‘If the LORD does not save you, where can I find help for you? From the threshing floor or from the winepress?’ And the king said to her, ‘What is the matter with you?’ ‘This woman said to me, “Give me your son, and let us eat him today, and tomorrow we will eat mine.” So we boiled my son and ate him. The next day I said to her, “Give me your son, and let us eat him,” but she has hidden her son.’ When the king heard that woman’s words, he tore his clothes, and as he passed along the wall, the people saw the sackcloth he was wearing underneath, against his body.”

So here we see, brothers and sisters, this terrible story in which these two women make a truly horrifying pact and agree to eat each other’s son. But the second woman breaks her promise and does not give her son to the other woman to eat, and so the first woman feels she has been treated unjustly and appeals to the king, supposedly so that he will give her justice. The king is appalled by the situation this woman describes and realizes how terrible the situation is that they are living through at that moment.

And do you know what strikes me most about that passage? It is the thought of these two women, among a people like Israel, making a pact that we might almost call diabolical, and that reveals the total spiritual ignorance, the spiritual darkness, in which these two citizens of Israel live. We also see here the king’s own inability to resolve the situation. When this woman calls to him and says, “Save me, king of Israel,” the king says to her, “But what do I have to give you, when I am in as difficult a situation as you are? I have no food to give you, so how am I going to save you?”

So what I see here is a situation of such helplessness: on the one hand, the citizens are completely ignorant of moral, spiritual, ethical, and religious matters; and the king, who is supposed to know much more about spiritual matters and to be able to offer a solution, is just as powerless as the citizens to resolve the difficult situation in which his people find themselves.

So we see this situation here. What the Spirit tells me is that this situation closely resembles the one we are living through today, when the cities of the world are beset by crime and violence. We know that in Latin America right now there are entire countries gripped by drugs, drug trafficking, and gangs, and there is terrible violence in our countries. There is incredible injustice, there is poverty, there is hunger, there is ignorance, and the leaders of the nations, the rulers, are utterly powerless to solve the problems of our cities and our countries.

And not only that, but there are immense numbers of people in our societies who are completely deprived of any spiritual teaching, profoundly ignorant of the things of God; neglected by the powerful, people who live entirely on the margins of society without any sense of belonging to the life of their countries and their communities. I believe this is one of the things that foster so much crime, so much violence, so much cruelty among certain young people and certain members of our society: they do not feel that they belong to society; they do not feel cared for, attended to, or taken into account by rulers who simply grow richer, exploit others, become corrupt, and take money from the poor.

And so we see that both the powerful and the weak are in an utterly hopeless situation, like these two women who reach the point of eating their own children and believe they are doing nothing wrong. That is the state in which many of our nations find themselves.

That is why it is so important for the Church of Jesus Christ to find a way to proclaim the Word of God to our cities, our peoples, and our nations, because it is the only hope for a world that is utterly corrupt, utterly lost.

It reminds me of God’s words to the prophet Jonah when He spoke to him about Nineveh and said that there were hundreds of thousands of people in that city who could not tell their right hand from their left. They were in complete ignorance, and God has mercy; God has compassion on our cities. God wants to do something; He wants to resolve the problems of our cities, and that requires an enlightened Church, a Church that has the power of Christ, that has the Word of wisdom, that has the illumination and revelation of the Holy Spirit.

I believe that at this point in history God wants to change the course of history, to take these people who are utterly steeped in ignorance and darkness, to speak to the leaders of the nations and tell them that Christ is the solution to their urban crises and that in Him there is hope, in Him there is a solution.

The solution right now does not lie with politicians; the solution does not lie with rulers; the solution does not lie with wealthy people who have resources. The Church of Jesus Christ has the solution through the Word of God and the power of the Holy Spirit.

And we must be proclaiming the message of the Gospel; we must be bringing that Word of hope and wisdom, teaching the nations how God wants them to live and how God wants them to turn again to Jesus Christ, so that God can heal our cities and our countries and free them from the iron grip in which the power of the devil and of hell holds them.

The Church has the solution to the problems of our nations, not the government, and we must live and move with the assurance that God has given us that Word of liberation for our societies. May the Lord bless you, and until our next study, I bid you farewell in the Name of our Lord Jesus Christ.