"Well, it really all comes down to changing men's hearts."
I find myself saying that, either out loud or to myself, very often. Our family loves to discuss politics, social issues, the history and present results of ideas and events, and many other things. We often try to hammer out some kind of Biblical solution to these problems, and that is often extremely difficult, because both sides (or each side, since there are usually more than two) seem to suffer from insurmountable difficulties or to both be laden with moral problems. Take, for example, the relative insipidity of both the Republican and Democratic parties. Over all, I agree with more views held by the Republican party, but its often lukewarm platform hardly appeals to me on all levels. A typical solution might be to vote for a different party more in line with one's views, but the problem is that all such parties are comparatively tiny, and at present have little hope of ever winning a major election. Voters, therefore, seem to be in a no-win situation, where increasingly centrist politicians try to appeal to the most people with the most all-inclusive campaign platform. The platform of one of the smaller parties may be more in line with the voter's beliefs, but, he reasons, "they'll just take away votes from the 'lesser of two evils' candidate."
I am always consoled by the thought that, although this situation seems insoluble at the moment, through the changing of men's hearts by the power of the Gospel, it will one day no longer be a problem. I was nevertheless tempted a few days ago to think of this as a somewhat unrealistic solution. Let us take AIDS, for example. In Africa and elsewhere, millions of people are being infected with a very serious disease, either because of promiscuity or because others infect needles and other things that come in close contact with them. To some, the notion of changing men's hearts might seem like a half-hearted and merely theoretical solution to the problem, whereas finding a cure for AIDS is the apparently concrete and decisive course.
Now, it is true that merely sighing, "ah, some day this will all change" and then sitting back and doing nothing is ineffective at best, and quite possibly much worse. It seems a sensible course to search for a cure for AIDS, both for the hapless people infected without bringing it upon themselves, and for those engaged in promiscuity as well. Although they deserve to die for what they are doing, so did we, before our salvation, and we can certainly never tell which of them will repent and which will not.
However, it should be fairly obvious that a "cure" for AIDS would be a temporary solution. Drug-resistant strains of the virus have already formed in response to various treatments, and if a cure were found that no virus could resist, the amount of promiscuity would likely rise to alarming heights, since those engaging in it would view the new cure as a license for their sin. Ignoring the saving power of the gospel in the lives of men and paying sole attention to merely temporal solutions is like treating the emergency shut-off switch as the end of the matter, instead of actually working to fix the problem that forced him to take emergency measures. A man would be a fool not to use the switch, but he would be a worse fool if he did not try to avert the danger to a point that the switch was no longer needed.
Christians must not be ashamed of the power of the Gospel, or the promises of Christ, or of their own calling in the world, which is among other things to preach the Gospel. Men may point and laugh, and claim that we have our heads in the clouds, but while we may work on temporal solutions to try to contain evil in the here and now, we should never lose sight of the ultimate goal and the ultimate solution. It really does all come down, in the end, to changing men's hearts.
