Mankind has lived with wars for most of our existence. The war which is raging in the Ukraine as I write this blog is just the latest in a very long line of disastrous examples of the evil that humans are capable of when our true nature is unleashed.

Of course not all wars are fought with bombs, tanks, guns and missiles. Some of the greatest wars we face today are social and ideological. Not a day goes by when we are not confronted with the vicious rhetoric and partisan diatribe surrounding abortion, sexual identity, gender fluidity, racial inequality, social disadvantage and the list goes on.

Mankind has lived with wars for most of our existence. The war which is raging in the Ukraine as I write this blog is just the latest in a very long line of disastrous examples of the evil that humans are capable of when our true nature is unleashed.

Of course not all wars are fought with bombs, tanks, guns and missiles. Some of the greatest wars we face today are social and ideological. Not a day goes by when we are not confronted with the vicious rhetoric and partisan diatribe surrounding abortion, sexual identity, gender fluidity, racial inequality, social disadvantage and the list goes on.

Every day as I engage with the latest news story I find myself reflecting more and more on one thing: we are broken.Most of us know what it’s like to have a car which is broken. We still have a car – but it no longer fulfils its purpose. Until it’s fixed, it is more a burden than a blessing and we are going nowhere! Well that’s how humanity is – pure and simple. We are broken and until we are fixed, we are going nowhere good.

All of the wars I mentioned above are really only symptoms of something far deeper; something more intrinsically part of our human condition. The real war is within us. The real war is a spiritual war.

There is a battle raging within humans and until that war is over, all the other wars will continue and, I believe, they will only get worse. We have not seen the fullness of human depravity play out before us yet. There is much more to come and until we understand where the real war must be fought, we will continue to be the perpetrators and victims of all manner of social, political, relational and spiritual carnage. The Apostle Paul identified the root of the problem and the solution all in one simple sentence in his letter to the Church in Rome many years ago when he said:

Romans 3:23-24   “… for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus.”

If I was to put that profound statement into common language for today I would simply say, “Every human being is broken and only God can fix us.” In what way are we broken? I would suggest we are broken at the very core our being.

In Genesis 1:26 we are told that we are created by God – but more specifically we are created in God’s image, in God’s likeness. Every human being ever to walk this earth is created in the image of God. That is our spiritual DNA, if you like. That’s how we are hard-wired deep within. What actually happened in the Garden of Eden when Adam and Eve first sinned was so much deeper than eating from the wrong tree. When mankind rebelled against their Creator, we began a war against the image of God – a war within us. Every problem humanity has created and encountered since that day is simply a by-product of that war with the image of God within us.

For example, God created us to live in perfect harmony and fellowship with Him and with each other. The war within us has seen most of God’s created children reject Him and turn against each other. So now we have waves of crime crashing against the shores of humanity – tearing families and communities apart. We have courts full of people taking legal action against each other. We have humanist teachers filling our children with lies about God and their true identity – intensifying the war within each young heart.

We know that God created us ‘male and female’ and blessed our union with each other and gave us the ultimate privilege of joining Him in creation as children are brought into the world under the protection of a life-long monogamous union of a mother and father. When God created humanity, our sexual identify and biological reality were inextricably linked.

Fast forward to today and we face the ultimate arrogance, the ultimate slap in God’s face; the ultimate rejection of the image of God within us as we are forced to deal with the new humans which have been created by our social engineers under the ever-growing acronym of LGBTQIA+ which is, at it’s heart, a universal rejection of the image of God within us.

Like many nations around the world we have endured a brutal debate recently which resulted in the legalisation of same-sex marriage within our nation. Critics of this huge social shift were slammed when they warned of what would come next. They said these activists will not stop at re-defining marriage – they will want to complete re-define gender. I can remember how viciously these critics were attacked and how vehemently those activists declared that no such agenda was present.

Now here we are less than five years later embroiled in a huge debate across the world as the God-given gender identity of every human being has somehow now become negotiable and ‘fluid.’  It’s like we bought a Ford motor car but then decided we had the freedom to ‘re-badge’ it as a Holden or Toyota if we so choose. That could never happen because that vehicle was created as a Ford. Every last part of it is branded Ford. You can’t just decide it’s now a Holden, just because you want it to be a Holden.  It is laughable to even consider such a thing.

Well, it’s even more laughable to consider that we can change the gender of a human being but we all know the response we get if we dare suggest this is a laughing matter.  We already have companies and even Governments altering forms so as to remove gender terms.  What is this?  Well on the surface it is a perversion masquerading as a trendy social reform.  However, at its heart it is the full scale rejection of the image of God and God’s intended purpose for each and every one of us. If God had wanted me to be female He would have created a female in my mother’s womb. He would not have created a female trapped within a male body. How incredibly cruel would that have been?

Now in these modern ‘enlightened’ times, thanks to the incredibly strong social campaign being run by these gender vandals, more and more young people are questioning their sexuality and gender identity to the point where many are undergoing radical, irreversible surgery which they believe will ‘change’ their gender. What nonsense is this? What cruelty is this? Our gender is no more changeable than our DNA.

It makes no sense whatsoever that intelligent, thinking human beings would even entertain such a ridiculous notion as ‘gender fluidity’ unless this is not a social issue at all – but a spiritual one. This, and all the other problems plaguing humanity at present, all stem from the spiritual war which is raging within us where the image of God and the creative purposes of God are under attack from multiple fronts.

The frightening thing is that this is a war that can’t be won by those who seek to change what God has decreed. The image of God within us will remain forever. It cannot be undone. It can, however, be ignored, discredited, re-imagined or ridiculed to the point where we fail to even recognise who God made us to be and what God desires for us at our best. This is why Paul warned us about the true nature of this war within us:

Ephesians 6:12  “… our struggle is not against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly realms.”

This is a spiritual war and it won’t be won with just our words. It won’t be won in Parliaments. It won’t be won in Courtrooms. This battle will only be won by God – working in and through His surrendered, empowered disciples who know how to seek first the Kingdom of God.