The Republican

One World
Lesson for July 19, 1953

"ONE world" sounds simple. But even these simple words stir a great many different ideas in different people's minds. Some, when they hear the phrase, laugh a loud cynical laugh. One world—Nonsense! Anybody who calls himself a one-worlder is obviously soft in the brain. Look at the facts of life in 1953. Do you see any symptoms whatever that the world is ever going to be one?

Others, when they hear these two simple words, think, "Why not? It ought not to be so difficult. If you put the entire living human race into one box it would not have to be more than half a mile on each side. You could dump it into the Grand Canyon and lose it. If the whole of mankind were drowned in Lake Champlain (about 600 square miles) the level of that lake would not rise six inches. Why can't we all get together instead of tearing each others' throats all the time?"

How Christians See It
Christians, when they are wise, do not think the idea of one world is absurd, nor do they think it easy. Let us brush aside two one-world notions that Christians who take their Bible seriously cannot accept. One of these is the notion that the world is, now, really one whether we know it or not. It is not one. It is not even two. It is a mess of little worlds all more or less at war. People sometimes talk of differences of race and class and creed as if they made no difference. But they do make a difference: and no amount of soft-talking is going to make a man who has to earn his living, look at life the way a man does whose grandfather left him so much he doesn't have to work. The native African who has been shoved out of the best land, can't possibly be "one" with the white settlers who shoved him off.

But It Ought To Be
On the other hand the Christian does not give up, cynically, and think that nothing can be done about this. The Christian, when he is close to the thought and ideal of Jesus and of Paul, or in other words the Christian who takes God's revelation seriously, sees every reason to believe that the world ought to be one. He believes that God made of one all the nations of the earth (Acts 17:26)—that we are all akin, that the Colonel's lady and Judy O'Grady are sisters under the skin. The Christian can see that in spite of the terrific differences that separate human beings—and there is no reason to try to iron these out or to wish all mankind to be made in an identical pattern—the Christian can see that what we human beings have in common is more important than what we do not have in common. We have all the same Creator, the Father-God of all. We are all from the same origin. We all are created for the same purpose—as one church expresses it, "to glorify God and to enjoy him forever." The Commandments, Love God and Love your neighbor as yourself, are not copyrighted by any church. They are not private rules, they are God's will for all human beings. The world ought to be one!

How It Can Be
And the world can be one—in Christ. As J.B. Phillips translates Paul's words in Eph. 2: "Christ is our living Peace. He has made a unity of the conflicting elements... He reconciled both (Jew and Gentile) to God by the sacrifice of one Body on the Cross, and by this act made utterly irrelevant the antagonism between them... It is through Him that both of us now can approach the Father in the one Spirit." Missionaries can tell you how true this is. In every land and climate and race on earth, there are Christians at this very day. Let us never forget this. There are Christians in Russia, there are Christians inside the Arctic Circle and along the steaming rivers of the rainforests of the Equator. On the face of it, nothing could be more unlikely than that an American, an Englishman or a Swiss (for example) could go to tribesmen in West China so savage that even the Chinese in a thousand years have not made a dent on them, and those same savages make (through Christ) brothers and sisters. But it has been done! Every time you are helping missions you bring the One World nearer.

(Based on outlines copyrighted by the Division of Christian Education, National Council of the Churches of Christ in the U.S.A. Released by Community Press Service.)