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The reason the world and people are out of kilter is that men and women right from the start of their existence prefer to be autonomous. They don’t like someone else — not even God — telling them how to live. We all like to believe we know best how to run our lives. So we either ignore God’s instructions for life in his world or defy him in deliberate disobedience and fly in the face of his purpose and design.

It’s hardly surprising that it ends in tears. We can’t flout God’s design without it all going horribly wrong. It’s like deciding it doesn’t matter if we put diesel oil in the tank of a petrol-engine vehicle — it’s not long before the car won’t work. Whatever the actual ways we choose to rebel against God by living to please ourselves, choosing our way rather than his, this autonomous attitude is defined by the word ‘sin’ in the Bible. This heart attitude is the mainspring of our actions.

The tragedy is that when we muscle God aside, and everybody decides he is his own god to do as he (or she) pleases, we end up fighting each other — and wars of any kind always result in misery. We despoil the world, we destroy society and we destruct our own lives. The crime and the crying, the waste and the want, the squalor and suffering, the injustice and inhumanity we see all around us in our world are all caused by our attempt to usurp God’s authority and throne for ourselves.

Our sin and selfishness in rebelling against God has made a mammoth mess of our planet and its peoples and yet still we do not want to forsake our folly. This raises an important question: “Is God going to do anything about this situation?”