What's wrong with the world?

Scroll through the news for five minutes and you'll find plenty that's wrong with the world: war, cyberbullying, racism, loneliness, poverty, corruption. Almost everyone agrees the world is broken. The real argument is about why.

There's a famous story about the writer G. K. Chesterton. A newspaper supposedly asked well-known writers to answer the question "What's wrong with the world?" Chesterton's reply was short: "Dear Sir, I am. Yours, G. K. Chesterton." Is that a cop-out, or is he onto something? This lesson asks the third big question: what's wrong with the world?

What you'll learn

• What happened in Genesis 3, and the four relationships it broke
• What the Bible means by "sin" (it's more than breaking rules)
• Why the Bible says the problem is "in here", not only "out there"

Out there or in here?

Think about the problems on that list. Is the root cause mainly out there (governments, systems, lack of money or education) or in here (greed, pride, fear, selfishness)? Most problems turn out to be both. Systems really matter, but systems are built and run by people.

Every worldview has a diagnosis. And just like a doctor, if you get the diagnosis wrong, you'll get the cure wrong too.

Genesis 3: what went wrong

In Genesis 3, a serpent speaks to the first woman about the one tree God told them not to eat from:

"‘You will not surely die,’ the serpent told the woman. ‘For God knows that in the day you eat of it, your eyes will be opened and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.’" (Genesis 3:4–5)

Notice the two things the serpent makes her doubt: whether God is really good, and whether his word can be trusted. And notice the offer: to be "like God", deciding good and evil for ourselves.

That's what the Bible means by sin. It isn't just breaking rules. It's turning away from God and putting ourselves at the centre. And when that happened, every relationship cracked:

Later writers in the Bible add to the diagnosis:

"The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)

"For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God." (Romans 3:23)

Three things are worth noticing:

• The problem is universal. It's not just "bad people" over there. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a Russian writer who suffered in a Soviet prison camp, said the line between good and evil doesn't run between groups of people, but right through every human heart.
• Sin isn't the first word. The world was good first. Evil is a twisting of good things, not an equal opposite.
• There's hope even here. In Genesis 3:15, God promises that a descendant of the woman will one day crush the serpent.

The Bible also doesn't say every hard thing in your life is your own fault. Sometimes we suffer because of what others have done (Jesus makes this clear in John 9:1–3). The point is that we all share in the problem, not that every pain is a punishment.

Two other diagnoses, fairly

Secular materialism says suffering is part of how nature works. Human problems come from ignorance, superstition, instincts left over from evolution (like aggression and tribalism), and bad systems. It gets something right: education, science and better systems have reduced real suffering. Far fewer children die young than 200 years ago, and Christians support that work too. But it struggles with two things. Can it say something is truly evil, or only harmful? And some of the worst evils of the last century were carried out by educated, scientific societies, so ignorance can't be the whole story.

"Be true to yourself" says what's wrong is outside pressure: society, expectations and judgemental people stopping us from being who we really are. It gets something right too. Pressure and judgement really do crush people, and Jesus himself was hardest on proud, judgemental religious people. But if the problem is always "out there", then I'm never part of it. The trouble is, everyone is someone else's "out there". And Jeremiah asks a hard question: what if the heart itself is part of the problem?

Key words

• The Fall: the moment in Genesis 3 when the first humans turned away from God, and its effects on the world.
• Sin: turning away from God and putting ourselves at the centre; it shows up in what we think, say and do.
• Diagnosis: an explanation of what's wrong, so that the right cure can be found.
• Universal: true of everyone, everywhere.

How this points to Jesus

Right in the middle of the bad news of Genesis 3, God makes a promise: someone born of a woman will crush the serpent's head, though he will be wounded in the process (Genesis 3:15). Christians see this fulfilled in Jesus, who defeated evil by being crushed on the cross and rising again. The Bible's diagnosis is honest, but it's never the last word.

Think about it

Take it further

This week, when you notice something wrong (online, at school, in the news), ask two questions: what's wrong "out there", and is any of it also "in here", in me? Your worksheet helps you compare diagnoses and add the "What's wrong with the world?" row to your worldview table.

If you'd like to, you could pray: God, I see what's wrong in the world, and I'm honest that some of it is in me. Thank you that you didn't give up on us. Amen.