GOD'S SALVATION: THE WORLD'S ONLY HOPE -- Devotional for August 22, from "Good Seeds"

God made history with salvation. The whole earth comes to attention to see God’s work of salvation! Shout your praises! Let loose and sing! Strike up the band! – a tribute to God when He comes to set the earth right. Yes, He’ll straighten out the whole world. He’ll put it right, and everyone in it! (Psalm 98:2-4,9)

Psalm 98 is a song we need to sing in this godless age. As we look around our world today, though Christians are everywhere, the Christian gospel has fallen on hard times: Islam is growing at breakneck speed, while God’s people sit and stew – and shrink! Even just looking demographically at our western nations gives cause for concern. The general population is diminishing dramatically, with the replacement birth rate between 1.2 and 1.6 children per family, while Muslim families in these countries are multiplying at an alarming rate. It is predicted that if these shrink/growth numbers continue, Islam will replace Christianity as the dominant faith in the western world within a few generations. But we don’t look to statistics, but to the Scriptures, to strengthen our hearts, and to find our strategy, and the Bible says history will be strewn from beginning to end, from east to west, with God’s salvation! Sometimes it speaks of the future as having already transpired, or as happening now. If the prophets of God are that confident, why are the people of God so cast down? Even apart from the threat of Islam, the western world has largely left Christ behind, relegating Him to a former, “less enlightened” age. In His place it has set up the gods of pleasure and treasure. The outcome of this transference is a transformation of society that is already manifesting itself in elevated depression and suicide, crowded prisons and divorce courts, and in the downturn of our economy equaled only by the downturn of church attendance. People today have an insatiable appetite for goods and gadgets that provide instant gratification to the mind and body, but which leave hearts starved for soul nutrition, for the deeper meaning outward things can never satisfy. And popular religions now having their fling will also prove to do nothing for man’s inner longings. Why? Because those longings have to do with the guilt men carry, the guilt of sin that weighs them down. The only remedy for that condition is God’s salvation, and God “made history” when He sent Jesus to die for man’s sin. This Word has gone out into all the world, but most ignore it, looking for something or someone else to set things straight. Guess what: there is nothing else, no one else, no other solution, no other hope! Maybe the time has come for us who know this is true to shout salvation from the housetops, to “strike up the band” for Him who will straighten up the world, once and for all!