What do you think is wrong with the world? Castro is stirring up a ruckus in Cuba and we feel a cold shiver run up our spine for we are afraid communism is knocking at our basement door. People everywhere are wringing their hands in despair over the incorrigible behavior of rebellious teenagers. Sudden death strikes down a little girl of six and a man of sixty as a drunken driver goes rampaging down a highway. To eager, hopeful parents a child is born malformed. A youth seemingly perfect in body and mind develops in maturity an evil spirit.

What is wrong with this world anyway? What is wrong with man, with society, with human plans and hopes? What do you think is basically wrong in the human situation?

Everybody knows how important correct diagnosis is. Whether you are taking your wife to the gynecologist or your automobile to the service man, the diagnosis is of primary importance. It won’t do any good to spend 100 dollars for a new carburetor if only an eight-dollar fuel pump is needed. If it is only intestinal flu, what a pity to operate for appendicitis. Until proper diagnosis is made, the necessary repair or therapy cannot be begun.

I had a slow leak in my left rear tire. Though competent service men took the tire off the car and submerged it in water, they could not discover the leak. Yet the tire kept going down. I knew something was wrong. But what? Finally a service station attendant shoved the valve to one side and heard the sudden outrush of air. The trouble was diagnosed, located, and repair was immediately possible.

How important is accurate diagnosis in the human situation. There is time for half-baked ideas or the practice of social or political or psychological quackery in our kind of a world. What do you think about what the real trouble is with ourselves and our world? Correct diagnosis by you is crucially important. For what you really think the trouble is will determine what you are going to do about it. Whether or not helpful therapy or surgery or treatment will be applied depends on your diagnosis. Well, what do you think is really wrong?

The great creed of Christendom suggests in a word the correct diagnosis for the human situation. That word is sin. Of course, the Apostle’s Creed does not profess: “I believe in sin.” But it does categorically confess belief in “the forgiveness of sins.” Sin is taken for granted. The major part of the creed is devoted to a statement of faith about the one who came into the human situation to straighten it out by being a savior from sin. The Creed presupposes a desperate situation occasioned by the presence of sin in human personality and society.

But such an analysis of the human situation is not universally accepted. All do not believe that what’s wrong with the world is sin. In fact, there are those who would stoutly maintain that it is this very perverted, degrading idea of man as sinner which has dwarfed man’s spirit, and given him a guilty conscience and locked him in a spiritual dungeon. The real culprits are Augustine and Calvin and those bugaboo theologians and ecclesiastics who persuaded man that he had done something wrong of which he should be ashamed, and that the whole human race was tainted with a deadly evil which inclined all men to selfishness, violence, greed and despair. What is really needed is to liberate man from his archaic notion of sin.

The mother of President Charles William Eliot of Harvard wrote a kinswoman expressing consternation that he had joined the Episcopal church and asked: “Eliza, do you really kneel down in church and call yourself a miserable sinner? Neither I nor any of my family will ever do that!”

The trouble with man, it is maintained, is not sin, but ignorance or immaturity. Given more time for homework and more opportunity to apply himself and man will make by his own efforts this little world into an Eden far fairer than the Genesis description of Adam and Eve’s paradise.

Now, the creed of Christendom merely reflects the Biblical diagnosis of what’s wrong with the world. The Bible says that though God created all things and saw that they were good, something happened to spoil that beauty and order in His creation. A rift appeared not only in man and society, but in the lower creatures of the animal world and in the higher creation of the transcendental realms. Nature became red in tooth and claw as the stronger preyed upon and devoured the weaker. St. Paul discerned spiritual wickedness in the heights of the heavens and felt he was wrestling not just against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers of evil in the spiritual realm.

The earliest attempts of the inspired writers contained in the Book of Genesis expressed this horrible reality of the human situation in what has been commonly called “The Fall of Man.” God created man in His own image. He was originally made for fellowship with God and for representing God in godliness on earth. But something happened. Man fell from his high estate. He became deformed, debased, corrupt, unreliable. The order and unity of his life with God and his fellows was frustrated and thrown into chaos and misunderstanding. Instead of enjoying bliss, he suffered woe. And the cause of all this misery, even the curse of death, the Biblical account goes, was man’s sin.

But the Bible does not stop with diagnosing the tragedy of the human situation in terms of sin — it develops a complete description of the anatomy of sin. The Bible portrays sin pictorially, graphically, as a many faceted destroyer, like the polio virus, manifesting itself in various virulent forms, laying waste to human happiness and beauty.

First of all, in the story of Adam and Eve in the garden, sin is revealed as disobedience to God. God, the Creator, makes man in his own image. He gives him a paradise in which to live. He gives him dominion over all the earth. He gives him rules for the ordering of his life in usefulness and blessedness. Then comes the Tempter: “So you have this whole world to do with as you please?” “Well, yes, only there is just one tree in the garden whose fruit we are forbidden to eat.” “Why?” asks the Tempter. “Did you know that if you eat that fruit you will become as God, knowing good and evil.”

To become like God is no unworthy motive. God had created man in His own image for fellowship with Him and intended that man should become like God in character through obedience. But here the temptation is to despise that route and to choose to be like God in power through disobedience. “The serpent in the Genesis story is telling the woman that likeness to God is to be achieved by defiance of His command and is tacitly suggesting that the likeness, which is in human reach, is likeness not in character but in power. He suggests that man can make himself the equal of God.” (Interpreters Bible)

What is the anatomy of sin? Basically, it is seen as disobedience to God’s word and will. When Potiphar’s wife made to Joseph her improper proposal, what did the young man say? Did he say, “No, I wasn’t brought up that way?” Did he say: “What would people say, if they heard about it?” Did he say: “I have to think about my future?” No, Joseph said: “How can I do this great wickedness and sin against God?” Fundamentally, sin is disobedience to God’s word.

But the Biblical anatomy of sin reveals it also as wanton violence and unbrotherliness between men. This is the lesson of the story of Cain’s killing Abel. When man becomes estranged from God through his disobedience inevitably misunderstanding, alienation, and finally violence mars his human relationships.

But the creeping cancer of sin sends its tentacles even deeper. The Biblical anatomy pictures sin also as moral depravity. This is the meaning of the story of the flood. Man is a sinner, sinning not only against God, and against his fellowmen, but against his own better self, and the race grows more and more corrupt and so defaces the image of God in the soul of man that God repents himself that He had ever made man and vows to destroy him with a deluge of water.

Even yet we have not completed the Bible’s analysis of the anatomy of sin. Before we are done, we must glimpse the Savior’s ultimate word in His parable of the Last Judgment. There, where the nations of the earth are drawn up in solemn array for the final accounting and the One upon the throne divides the hosts of humanity as a shepherd separates sheep from goats, the essence of sin is revealed as callous unconcern for both the divine love and human need. Sin is shown to be refusal to respond in love to the Eternal love of God and the appalling need of men.

“Depart from me, ye cursed . . . For I was hungered and ye gave me no meat . . . I was sick and in prison and ye visited me not . . . inasmuch as ye did it not unto one of the last of these my brethren, ye did it not unto me.”

Can’t we see why our Presbyterian forebears defined sin in our catechism as “any want of conformity unto — as well as any transgression of the law of God?”

But can it be that withholding of love — unconcern for human need and human rights all about us — is really the ultimate sin which sends men and nations to hell? Did Jesus mean that Dives really went to hell because he never paid any attention to Lazarus who was sick and starving at his door?

I had a letter from a Presbyterian minister in Ohio last week asking what the Presbytery of Memphis was doing about the need in Tent City. It seems his church is concerned and wants to work through Presbyterian channels.

When Pearl Buck and her parents visited Russia in 1908 on the heals of the Opium War in China, and they saw the pitiable plight of the Russian peasants, she remembers her father’s remarking: “The uprising will begin in Russia, for there people are oppressed not by foreigners, but by their own rulers. The Russians are the most miserable and wretched people on earth today, and there the world upheaval will first show itself. When it breaks in Russia, it will spread to other countries of Asia and because men of the white race have been the oppressors, all the white men must suffer.” Dire prophetic words, not by a disciple of Lennin and Marx, but by a Presbyterian missionary. How horribly they have been fulfilled!

And how will the tide be stemmed? A rash of frantic, spastic quivers spreads over the flesh of Americans — no more effective than goose pimples. “Fear this. Fear that. Suspect this man. Distrust that.”

What to do before the impending judgment? Simply stir men to the point of simple living and noble thinking and personal commitment of desperate concern that the good life we love and cherish be made a possibility for every child of God?

What did Jesus say? “The meek shall inherit the earth.” What did St. Paul say about the divine thinking that is behind the whole story of human redemption, the only line of thinking which runs out now to peace and salvation and joy for men? Listen: “Have this mind in you which was also in Christ Jesus your Lord.” What was His frame of mind? “Why he thought being on an equality with God was not something to be grasped as a prize, but he humbled himself, and took upon himself the form of a servant and even endured the death of the cross. Wherefore God has highly exalted him and given him a name which is above every name that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow both in heaven and in earth.” And this frame of mind which was in Christ, a mentality of concern for basic human needs and basic human rights and being more concerned for procuring them for others than for self, this is the kind of thinking which has a glorious future, not only in this world, but in the world to come.

Wednesday morning of last week, Tom Dooley died. He was thirty-four. Most of his years had been spent in preparation for the life work of a physician. Long, hard years — a terrific investment of money and labor. What did he do with that investment? Why he went out to Laos and laid down his life in humble service, burned it out in a few years, working twenty hours a day.

What is God thinking about to let Tom Dooley die? Why didn’t He call off that cancer? Doesn’t He know that Christians need more Tom Dooleys — that we have precious few of them? Can’t He see that the Commies are winning hands down in Laos? Because our Tom Dooleys are so few are far between? Yes, He knows. He can see. Perhaps that is His greatest mission for Tom Dooley, to wake us up. Perhaps His design for Dr. Dooley is to be a sort of spiritual Paul Revere to stir the whole of Christendom from its lethargy. When God wanted to compel the whole world of sinful men throughout all time to behold the damning power of sin in human life and the divine resources available for human redemption from sin, what did God do? His own Son writhed on a cross. It was hasty. It was brutal.

So the Sorrowing God goes sorrowing still

For His world that has gone to sea —

But He runs up a light on Calvary’s Height

That beckons to you and me.

And the beacon light of the sorrows of God

Has been shining down the years

A flashin’ its light through the darkest night

Of our human blood and tears.

What is wrong with the world anyway? What is the definitive diagnosis? The tumultuous shout of all Christian thought, revelation and experience is: “Sin. It is sin” — Disobedience to God’s word and will; cruel, violent unbrotherliness; moral depravity; callous unconcern for a lost world.

After correct diagnosis, what? What is the prescription — medication, surgery, therapy? What is indicated for the human situation of sin? Straight, simple, catastrophic comes the prescription: “Repent.” Confess yourself a sinner. Accept the Biblical diagnosis of the human situation. Admit that the evidence submitted describes your case. Throw yourself on the mercy of the court. Never mind the mixed metaphor — you are both a sick man and a condemned criminal. Trust that your Judge is a loving heavenly Father that can and will forgive unto the uttermost. Believe that your soul surgery can be competently performed by Him whom God has sent as your Savior. Accept, in your confused and despairing dilemma Jesus Christ as divine.