Wars, Rumors Of Wars, And Remembering The World’s Poor

Red propellor driven Air Greenland plane — Image by Arno Vesterholm from Pixabay

Jesus told us to remember the poor not go to war

Are you worried about war today? I mean, if you lived in the Ukraine or the Gaza Strip,Venezuela, Greenland, dare I say, then I’m sure you would be worried about it.

I never thought in my lifetime the USA would be making threats to annex a European ally who already has treaties that would allow American troops to defend it.

Did you know that Global Military spending is going up by a whopping 10% a year. Imagine if you could take that 10% and do something else with it?

Peace is perhaps the most expensive commodity in the world. Global defense spending for 2024 was $2.7 Trillion dollars.[1] Much of this is aimed at maintaining an uneasy peace by making our enemies believe we would be crazy enough to destroy the whole world with nuclear weapons if they attacked us first. Are we really at peace? Typically, at any given point there are many armed conflicts happening at once around the world.

If we were able to divert the approximately 10% annual increase in defense spending, we could make a huge difference to the poorest people of the world. The two most important problems that affect the world’s poor could be easily resolved.

To abolish world hunger would cost approximately $93 billion per year[2] We could provide food for everyone in the world. To also provide clean water for every human being on Earth would cost approximately $132 Billion per year[3].

We would have spare change from that 10%. And yet at the time of writing most developed countries are slashing their overseas aid budgets and boosting their military spending instead.

It seems we’d rather go to war and prepare to go to war than to care for the poor, which is the one thing Jesus told us to do, helping the poor defined his mission:

“The Spirit of the Lord is on me,
    because he has anointed me
    to proclaim good news to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners
    and recovery of sight for the blind,
to set the oppressed free” (Luke 4:18, NIV).

This was also key to the Apostle Paul:

“All they [the other Apostles] asked was that we should continue to remember the poor, the very thing I had been eager to do all along” (Galatians 2:10, NIV).

God would say to us today, whatever you do, remember the poor.

The cost of the lack of peace is huge. Not just in financial terms, but in every other way. There is a lot more to peace than war just not happening. Peace is about security and it has both personal and global elements.

Peace could be defined as the absence of internal anxiety and the absence of external war.

Does anybody want to be in a war either at a country level or at a personal level? Does anybody think it’s much better to fight than it is to be at peace? Anyone enjoy arguing so much that if they could not do it for a week, they wouldn’t be able to cope?

Most readers of this blog are not worried about war from a personal perspective, any more than we are worried about whether we can eat and drink today. Lets remember not everyone is as fortunate as us today.