Planet Earth is for many if not even most of its inhabitants a mud ball of misery, only sometimes punctuated with brief rays of diversion through fleeting amusements sometimes cleverly disguised as something bordering happiness. More simply put, for millions life is little more than a bitter pill between two eternities. Most of the world personally experiences rather than merely notes in the news about far away places the ravages of war, famine, disease, oppression and violent crime. There is no earthly hope for the victim citizens of our world, and most can hardly imagine that they will ever be secure from harm, have enough food to eat or have sufficient medical attention, shelter and clothing.

Planet Earth is a mud ball of misery because of sin in the world. Sin made its debut on our planet among humans in the Garden of Eden, when disobedience to God and his inviolate Word extended hand toward the forbidden tree (Genesis 3); God changed the Edenic world into which he introduced our first parents as a consequence of their sin (Genesis 3:15-19). Next, the sin of murder nested among humanity when Cain ambushed his brother, Abel (Genesis 4). From there, humanity plunged headlong into the depths of sin so intolerable to Holy God that he destroyed all but eight souls (1 Peter 3:20), and he forever changed the world even more as a consequence of sin (Genesis 6-8).

Planet Earth is a self-inflicted mud ball of misery because of the consequences of sins. Natural calamities that so violently scar the canvass of this world and without compassion pillage even the lives of innocents trace their origin to God's punishment of sins (Genesis 3-8). Contemporaries do not bear the guilt of their forefathers' sins, but nevertheless experience the consequences of their forefathers' sins (Ezekiel 18:20). The sins of our peers likewise bring about consequences that wreak havoc not only upon them, but on us as well (e.g., those who through no fault of their own reluctantly forfeit their lives to drunk drivers). In addition, we must bear the full impact of our own sins (Romans 6:23) and their attending consequences, no matter how distasteful (Jeremiah 14:20; Micah 7:9).

Without God, life on planet earth is a sojourn in the depths of incurable despair. Obeying the Gospel will not reverse earth and climate changes (Matthew 5:45) brought about as the consequence of sins from the Garden of Eden through the time of Noah's Flood, but becoming and remaining faithful Christians offers the only glimmer of hope (1 Thessalonians 4:13-18) to grace the battered pilgrimage (Hebrews 11:10, 13; 1 Peter 2:11) between birth and death, prefatory to Final Judgment (Hebrews 9:27). Without God, even happiness and pleasures are merely illusionary temporal mists certain in their evaporation to expose the emptiness of a dreadful residency on a mud ball of misery and sin (Ecclesiastes 1:14).

We urgently must prepare to meet God (Amos 4:12). Jesus said, "He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved..." (Mark 16:16); simply, that is how one becomes a Christian (Acts 11:26). Jesus said, "...be thou faithful unto death, and I will give thee a crown of life" (Revelation 2:10).