By Vijay Jayaraj

Wars rage across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. Yet, these violent conflicts, as horrific as they are, only mirror the silent wars raging within many of our own hearts — wars of despair, doubt, and desperation.

Deep within, I carry a deep sorrow for the struggling people of Africa and Asia who remain trapped in poverty — poverty perpetuated by harsh energy policies that lack the compassion and mercy of our heavenly Father, who in His grace has gifted us love and an abundance of resources to sustain all of humanity.

Hundreds of millions of people in the poorer parts of our world are in a generational war against extreme poverty, a relentless siege that grinds human dignity into the dust. In a village in the Sahel or a slum in Bihar, the battle begins before dawn, with a long trek, often by women and children, to fetch water that is likely contaminated.

Their toil continues with back-breaking labor in a small field. The day ends in a hut filled with the toxic smoke of burning wood, charcoal, or animal dung, the only available fuels for cooking. In this world, owning a washing machine is a fantasy on par with space travel. Having potable water flow from a tap in your home is a miracle reserved for another universe. They are often locked in a cycle of subsistence that offers no pathway to economic advancement.

It is in the face of this immense, soul-crushing darkness that the idea of God’s mercy often feels like a distant, abstract platitude. And there lies the great, overlooked truth of history. God’s providence has always helped us make our world better through various ways including the advancement in science and technology.

God is the bedrock of the ordered, rational, and discoverable universe we inhabit. The belief in a Creator who is not chaotic or capricious but a God of order and reason was the intellectual catalyst for the greatest leap forward in human history: the scientific revolution.

Isaac Newton famously wrote, “This most beautiful system of the sun, planets, and comets, could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being.” Johannes Kepler, who discovered the laws of planetary motion, saw his work in explicitly priestly terms. “I was merely thinking God’s thoughts after Him,” he declared. “Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above all else, of the glory of God.”

From Robert Boyle, the father of modern chemistry, to Michael Faraday, who unlocked the secrets of electromagnetism, the story is the same. Their faith was not a barrier to their science; it was its engine. They feared God, which was the beginning of their wisdom.

God provided a world rich in resources and empowered its people — the discoverers who unravel nature’s laws and the inventors who harness them — to build a civilization of increasing safety, efficiency, and progress.

So why, then, does a vast chasm exist between the affluent cities of Europe and the impoverished villages of Congo? The fault lies not with a lack of divine provision but with humanity’s own misguided policies. The world doesn’t lack resources; the problem is that human systems deny people access to them.

To put it in black and white, it is the anti-humanistic energy and climate policies that have proved to be the biggest disruptor of socioeconomic progress in regions that are lagging so far behind the developed West.

A young woman in Uganda should not be denied access to electricity because a European bureaucrat wants to hit a Net Zero target. A mother in Bangladesh should not have to cook with cow dung because climate activists in New York disapprove of LPG imports. These policies do not reflect scientific progress or humanitarian concern.

As a researcher who has collaborated with the scientists authoring the most authoritative climate science documents — the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that guide global climate policies — I have encountered more evidence pointing to a healthy and thriving planet than to the false image of one in crisis.

The Christian must then see the human-induced poverty not as a statistic but as a battlefield where God’s strength must be deployed. Your commitment to share God’s love will call you to support policies that provide tangible help, not ideological posturing based on vague prophecies of an impending doomsday.

It is not a passive, sentimental hope that things will get better on their own. It is an active, rugged confidence that provides the moral clarity and intellectual courage to act. Clarity on the fact that those in extreme poverty must be allowed to have access to the same fossil fuels that ended generational poverty in the West. And courage to inform your lawmakers and local representatives that you bat for the continued proliferation of traditional energy sources that has improved lives all over the world.

Just like God’s providence enabled Newton and Kepler to make our world better, the same providence is now with us to be the voice for the voiceless and the poorest.

Isaiah 6:8: “Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’”

Vijay Jayaraj writes frequently for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation. He holds a M.S. in Environmental Sciences from the University of East Anglia, a postgraduate degree in Energy Management from Robert Gordon University, both in the UK, and a bachelor’s in Engineering from Anna University, India.