Personal
from Herbert W. Armstrong
YES! WE are now deep in much more than an economic emergency! We’re in a social emergency – a moral emergency – an international emergency – a military life-and-death emergency! The weapons of mass destruction, for the first time since mankind inhabited this planet, can erase humanity from the earth!
But we’re too occupied taking confident pride in awesome 20th-century achievements in science, technology, business and industry to notice our REAL AND IMMINENT DANGER!
We’ve had our minds on what we think of as 20th-century “PROGRESS”! It seems that the human mind is virtually limitless in what it can accomplish! We assume confident and smug complacency in such mind-boggling feats as sending men to the moon and back safely, receiving unmanned spacecraft close-up photos of Jupiter, Saturn and the Martian surface, such technological productions as the computer! And even full-color television and modern telephonic advances would astonish those who died in the 19th century.
But, just when we pat ourselves on our backs, and think we’re pretty good and far “advanced” – WHAM!! An astronaut returns safely from a moon voyage and finds he is helpless to handle his family problems. His home and family breaks up in divorce! We are helpless before our troubles and the myriad evils that confront mankind.
Our marriage, home and family structure, on which a stable and permanent society is based, has broken down. People can’t get along with people, factions with factions, nations with nations.
WHY? Our successes are physical and material, but our troubles and evils are in the spiritual realm.
Even in the physical and material area it takes time, patience and perseverance. A motorcar company loses millions calling back certain models to correct a mechanical fault. Yet, we do make continual progress, in the physical and material areas, that is. So we think we are pretty good! These materialistic achievements do boost our vaunted morale! But we like to ignore causes of spiritual problems.
I’ve been hammering away on the fact there is a CAUSE For every effect – and humanity has tended to deal with effects instead of correcting causes in trouble areas! I repeat again and again – THERE IS A SPIRITUAL LAW that governs the problems, troubles and evils we’ve been unable to solve. We smugly prefer to ignore it in our confident vanity. Yet it’s inexorable – as relentless and as certain as the law of gravity. Break it, and it breaks you.
That spiritual law is the principle – the motivation – the attitude of outflowing LOVE. It is outflowing concern for the good and welfare of others. I simplify it by the term “GIVE” and its transgression as “GET.” This materialistic world has been traveling the way of “GET” – self-centeredness, covetousness, envy and jealousy, competition, strife, violence and war, resentment of authority.
The invisible law of “GIVE” is cooperating, helping, serving, sharing. If we would all live with that incentive our troubles and evils would vanish. But this civilization will not! Where does that leave us? Our evils and woes are accelerating. We are speeding on a collision course with human annihilation!
But thank God! Before such final crash, that all-powerful, all-“GIVE” “Strong Hand from Someplace” is going to intervene in this world’s affairs, and save a rebellious humanity from itself! All humanity shall be compelled to enjoy peace, happiness, universal abundance in well-being!
Science, industry, human government will not achieve this. It will have to be done to us! Of course, that means that at last mortal eyes shall be opened to the TRUE VALUES – and live the spiritual way of “GIVE”! Humanity shall learn, at last, that it is “more blessed to GIVE than to receive”! Indeed, some of us are learning it already!
