What's Wrong?

A woman arrives in the emergency room of the hospital in pain and distress. "What's wrong?" asks the technician or nurse on duty. "Pain - head - severe" are all that the woman can say in response. Immediately she's taken into the examination room and given a barrage of tests, various pain medications, etc. Hours later, she is still in acute pain in her head, neck, and elsewhere. The medical staff had been able to treat some of the symptoms, but could not identify the underlying problem. I continually ask blessings for medical staff who have such dilemmas day in and day out. Their hearts want to help, but often they have to work in the 'dark' to address what is really wrong.

So, what's wrong with us? What is wrong generally with all of us - whether in a medical emergency or not - is a problem that cannot be alleviated by intravenous chemical treatments or other less/more invasive procedures. We are in the 'dark' as we try to treat the problem in our own knowledge and efforts. What is wrong with us is our sin nature - the defective DNA, for lack of a better term, passed onto humanity by our first parents Adam and Eve. Their decision to live their lives independent of God's rule cast their offspring into a condition that they could not deliver themselves from. Every human ever born - save for one - inherited this condition that doesn't just cause physical problems, but also affects how our emotions work, impairs our psyches, has even brought disruption and imbalance to the rest of creation. How else can you explain the devastations of natural disasters that increasingly worsen? How else can you explain the devastations of man's inhumanity to his fellow man - holocausts and reigns of terror, mass destruction, indescribable depravity? There is no other causative but sin.

Sin - rebellion against God and His laws and principles - has supernatural implications. That is, there is more to it than meets the eye; more than an 'act'. It is ingrained, insinuated, pressed into our nature and natural bodies and cannot be excised out; our bodies are imperfect and subject to disease, psychoses, and other problems. Inexplicable things. We are born in sin and even our hearts are opposed to God from birth. God sees the condition as spiritual death - a separation between us and Him. Living in a spiritual darkness. Spiritually dead people cannot receive God naturally. There is nothing we can do in and of ourselves to cross that chasm. No religious professional can rectify the condition nor can anything a religious professional does - regardless of the religion - make it possible to become spiritually alive in God's sight. Nothing. So, what can be done?

What can be done has been done. Since it is God's law and sovereignty in question by Adam and Eve's rejection and hence the subsequent dilemma we are in, it would have to be God's act of resolution to the problem that must take place. (John 3:16-18; 1 John 4:8-10; 1 Corinthians 15:2-4; Galatians 1:4; Ephesians 2:1-10) Only God can fix what's wrong with us. And we must respond to his question, "what's wrong?" with the admission that what is truly wrong with us is our rejection of His Son - the only means through which we can truly be healed.