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Evil, Suffering, Death....What's the Solution?
Dr. Billy Graham
Vol 2/ No.2/March 2001

The technological revolutions of today stagger our imaginations. We try to peer into the future, and if we could actually see what the world will be like 10 or 20 years from now, I'm sure that we would be overwhelmed.

This is not the first time, however, that the human race has undergone a technological revolution.

Three thousand years ago when a young man by the name of David became king of Israel, Israel was divided and backward, and was oppressed by its neighbors. Israel was little more than a cluster of primitive tribes living in tents and people were barely scratching a living from the land.

But 40 years later when king David died, all that had changed. In only one generation Israel had become one of the strongest, most prosperous nations in the Near East. In fact, in those few decades, Israel experienced one of the greatest periods of social and economic progress in its history.

What happened? Certainly David was a man with exceptional leadership ability, and he had the favor of God.

But there was another reason: King David introduced in to Israel a new technology.

About two centuries earlier the hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing iron. Slowly the skill spread, but for many decades Israel's enemies deliberately kept the knowledge away from Israel.

But David changed all that, and he introduced the iron Age to Israel. Now, instead of using crude tools made of sticks and stones, Israel had plows, sickles, hoes, axes and other implements made of iron.

And in the course of that one generation, Israel was completely changed.

The Introduction of iron, in some ways, had an impact on David's day much as the microchip is having today.

King David reflected on what was happening. David not only was a great ruler, he also was a great poet and a philosopher and a musician.

A technological revolution had changed the lives of his people. But as David looked at life, he realized that there were several problems that technology had not solved.

In the psalms, David speaks to a number of these problems. And these problems are still with us, for they are moral and spiritual problems, and only moral and spiritual answers can solve those problems.

I want to address three of these problems.

Human Evil

The first problem that king David knew he could not solve is the problem of human evil. Some thing is wrong. We can't get along with other people, even in our own families. We find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits that we can't break. Racism, injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest o heartache and death. Even the most sophisticated among us seems powerless to break the cycle.

The Bible says that the problem is within us -- within our hearts and our souls. (1) We are separated from God, and we need to have our souls restored -- something that only God can do.

Jesus said, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander." (2)

The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was not a religious man, but on one point he agreed with Jesus when he said, "It is in our hearts that the evil lies, and it is from our hearts that it must be plucked out." (3)

Albert Einstein once pessimistically declared, "It is easier to denature plutonium that to denature the evil spirit of man." (4)

Many people have puzzled over this. People take beneficial technological advances and twist them into something corrupting. Brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down entire information systems.