We’ve Come a Long Way… and We’re Lost!

The Christmas story takes us back to simpler times… primitive times. To the days of coarse cloth, torchlight, cisterns, and wood stoked fires. The comforts of a common shepherd were not too far removed from the comforts of the sheep. Roads, in most cases, were rutted cart paths. Transport was arduous. Medicine was a mixed bag of herb and superstition. Work, for the most part, was manual and no one had considered the wisdom of an eight-hour day, or a forty-hour week. War was up close and personal, not yet accelerated by high explosives, yet cruelly deadly and brutal. “Surgical” was not a concept that yet applied to an air strike or blown appendix.

How far we have come. We enjoy common comforts unknown to kings and emperors of old. We travel in luxury at speeds unimagined just a century ago. We have mastered the skies, and now test the potentials of travel through space. What used to take hours, now takes the flip of a switch, or the tripping of a motion detector. The world is at our fingertips… 4G and counting. Medical barriers are falling. The world is shrinking. Hopes and dreams that once seemed fanciful are now in our reach. We hold in our hands the power to exterminate the whole world by bomb or bug. Policemen of the world work overtime to keep us from that terminal destiny. We’re not in Nazareth anymore! We’ve left the Greeks and Romans in our dust. We’ve come so far, and yet we really haven’t really changed that much.

No matter his ingenuity, man cannot invent a new an improved morality. We are still killing, raping, looting, hating, stealing, scheming and wounding. Our most recent chapter (century) is stained in blood. We are still Adam’s fallen race… still incapable of conquering sin… still denying the God who made us… still ignoring the straight path in favor of our own way.

Having come so far from the poverty of Bethlehem, we yet suffer the poverty of the soul… and that’s why what happened in a stable some two thousand years ago matters. We need a Savior, and for that, all roads lead to Bethlehem. In an age of reinvented governments and realigned superpowers, cratering economies and clamoring philosophies, we need something beyond ourselves. That “something” is a Someone who came as the answer to a longing we attempt to satisfy with pleasure, power, or prideful invention… a longing for redemption.