60 Seconds – A Crisis

Years ago, Detroit’s zoo director hired four new security guards, not to contain the animals within the cages, but to protect the animals from man. In just two years, a baby Australian wallaby left the protection of its mother’s pouch and was stoned to death. A duck died with a steel-tipped hunting arrow in its breast, and a pregnant reindeer miscarried after firecracker-hurling teens bombed the terrified animal into convulsions. Visitors even dropped lighted cigar butts on the backs of alligators, and laughed at the gators’ reaction as the ashes burned through their skin.

Finally, the zoo’s male hippopotamus choked to death when someone responded to his open-mouth begging for peanuts by rolling a tennis ball down his throat. The zookeeper wondered, “Who should be caged?”

Christ told Nicodemus, “And this is the condemnation, that the light has come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light, because their deeds were evil” (John 3:19).

Vance Havner wrote, “The world lives in the dark because it rejects Jesus Christ, the Light of the world. The word here translated ‘condemnation’ is ‘crisis’ in the original. The coming of Christ precipitated a crisis. It compels men in the very nature of things to come to the light, or abide in darkness.”

Further light is shed on “the crisis” in Paul’s words to the Corinthians, when he stated, “For the message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing” (1 Corinthians 1:18). “Perishing” means a complete failure to be what God intends man to be. It speaks of the disease of sin running its course unchecked.

The indication is man’s drifting further from God, gradually sinking into depravity, and a withdrawal from salvation. Man’s “crisis” is his constant downward path in spite of all efforts made to pull himself up.

There is a story about a hog that got drunk. When the other hogs got upset and would have nothing more to do with him, he promised, “If you’ll excuse me for acting like a man, I never will do it again!”

“A world of nice people, content in their own niceness, looking no further, turned away from God, would be just as desperately in need of salvation as a miserable world—and might even be more difficult to save” (C. S. Lewis).