The World That We Wanted

The really incredible thing about the world today is that it is, in just about every way, the world that we wanted for so long. The global ideological conflicts of the past century are over. The major nations of the world such as Russia, India and, China do not really stand for any ideology that they are trying to push on the world.

Perhaps the most incredible development of all is Europe. The scene of the two worst wars in history not so long ago has actually formed a union that speaks with virtually one voice. To a very great extent, we have been extremely successful in bringing about the world that we wanted in the past century.

Yet, things are just not right. America is the country that has gotten the world the way it wanted only to become possibly the least popular country in that world. As technology was making the world ever more of a global village our culture, at least as presented by the media, was getting more and more crude and it seemed that there was no one anticipating the coming global culture clash.

Even as we were shaping the world the way we wanted it, we were getting ourselves into a position where we were dependent on Middle East oil and causing global warming at the same time. We were pushing this car-based way of life on the world without a thought as to where all the required gasoline was going to come from or what it was going to do to the planet.

This goes to show that no matter how carefully we craft an ideology, there will always be holes in it that were unforeseen. Some ideologies are certainly better than others but even when we get the world we want, it will not turn out like we thought it would. There will always be something that no one thought of or a long-term problem that eluded our short-term thinking.

This is inevitably true for any man-made ideology. Suppose, for example, that the Nazis had achieved their goals. What would have happened then? Would they have had the world that they wanted? I believe that the death of Adolph Hitler would have been a critical point. Hitler had carefully stoked rivalry among his underlings to prevent any possibility of getting together and overthrowing him. The top leaders were all suspicious of each other and the Waffen SS was created as a virtual parallel army that was generally despised by the regular army. I am certain that this would have resulted in a fragmentation of the empire following Hitler's death, in much the same way as the empire of Alexander the Great.

As another example, Communism was well on it's way to taking over the world. But one of the things that no one had considered is that Communism can be interpreted in so many different ways. It can be seen as meaning a wide variety of things.

As Communism spread across the world, the inevitable fragmentation occurred. The result is that different Communist countries never did get along well with each other. There was intense rivalry between Communist factions and countries. In the Cold War the two Communist giants, China and the Soviet Union, never could see eye to eye long enough to gain victory and ended up with as much rivalry between themselves as with the United States. If the Communists had gotten the world they wanted, we can be sure that it would be a world with endless rivalry over interpretation of doctrine.

In the 1920s, American capitalists seemed on their way to building the world as they wanted it. The assembly line process had revolutionized manufacturing. Factories were turning out all kinds of products from cars to radios with blinding speed. Communism had begun as a rival system in the Soviet Union but it was a backwater that few people outside that country understood. The day belonged to Capitalism.

But as always, there were holes in the plans. The pay of workers barely increased while factories turned out millions of manufactured products. Goods began to pile up in warehouses because people did not have the money to buy them. Factories began cutting back production, meaning that workers had even less money to buy the products produced by the factories. It all spiralled into the devastating 1929 crash. Rival Communism was propelled on it's way to a global ideology and a leader named Adolph Hitler emerged from the economic devastation in Germany resulting from the crash.

No matter how well human beings plan things, no matter which ideology is the dominant one at the moment, when we get the world we wanted, it just does not turn out as we wanted it to. This shows us that it is only God, and not men, that has the ultimate answers needed by the world.

In contrast to the man-made ideologies that come and go in the revolving door of history, the Bible has all of the authority that it did centuries ago. God is only allowing us this period of dominion over the world to show us that we can never have the ultimate answers without him. Someday in the not-to-distant future after the apocalypse, Jesus will actually reign over the earth from Jerusalem. Only then will the world be the paradise that God intended it to be.