By Vijay Jayaraj

Time itself bowed two millennia ago. History pivots at the birth of Jesus Christ. Seven centuries before, the Prophet Isaiah pierced the veil of time to describe a Messiah who would conquer not with a sword, but with sacrifice.

“Surely he has borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” Isaiah wrote, foreseeing the substitutionary work of the cross. “He was pierced for our transgressions; he was crushed for our iniquities; upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace, and with his wounds we are healed” (Isaiah 53:5).

In chapter 61, Isaiah declared that the coming Messiah would carry good news to the poor, bind up the brokenhearted, and proclaim freedom to those held captive. When Jesus stood in a Nazareth synagogue and read those words, He declared the prophecy fulfilled.

The coming of Christ gave us two profound reasons to celebrate. First, the hope of salvation through the finished work of Christ at the cross. Second, the conquest of poverty for more and more people through the centuries.

Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the Law and the Prophets” (Matthew 22:37–39).

If the greatest act of love is to tell a neighbor the good news of salvation, another is to give neighbor good news that grinding poverty and enslavement can be made things of the past.

Consider slavery. The West, impelled significantly by Christian conviction, abolished legal structures that had bound people in bondage for millennia. Today, Christian organizations like International Justice Mission and Hope for Justice still labor to rescue those still enslaved.

True love for the poor must extend beyond immediate charity. It requires structural solutions that empower human dignity and abolish systematic scarcity. It requires intentional effort by Christians in all walks of life to invest their time and energy into fruitful endeavors that will reflect God’s intention for us to be good Samaritans.

For millennia, poverty, famine, and disease were the universal human condition. Today, that reality has been largely overturned. This radical improvement in global well-being is the direct result of God’s gifting humanity with the intellectual capacity to understand andharness the resources He blessed us with.

The material progress of the last two hundred years is nothing short of a sustained miracle, facilitated by a moral framework that first flourished in nations built upon Biblical principles — respect for individual dignity and freedom, property rights, and productive vocation.

Energy systems have undergone perhaps the most dramatic shift. Instead of shivering through winter nights burning dung or scrap wood that filled lungs with smoke, billions now flip a switch or turn a dial and enjoy warmth that Persian kings never knew. Liquefied petroleum gas cylinders sit in mud huts across India and Africa, saving women from hours of gathering firewood and sparing children from respiratory death.

Travel that once required months on foot or weeks on sailing ships now crosses continents and oceans in hours. My grandmother never left her village in India. My child flies halfway ‘round the world in a day. No emperor of Rome could do that.

The transformation of agriculture rivals the miracle of energy. Our ancestors lived in constant fear of crop failure. Famines occurred, on average, about every seven years. Today, the world’s breadbasket is brimming. We have escaped the cruel Malthusian trap.

Plant breeders, many trained in Christian universities, developed high-yield wheat and rice varieties that turned my native India from a nation of famines into an exporter. Norman Borlaug, a farmer’s son shaped by Lutheran habits of stewardship, helped feed a billion people.

This abundance is the result of applying science to the soil: advanced breeding techniques, sophisticated machinery, and most critically, synthetic nitrogen fertilizer derived from natural gas. This invention has saved billions of lives, not through foreign aid, but through empowering farmers worldwide to achieve record yields.

These and more measures — like life expectancy rising from under 30 to over 70 — are due to the West’s building on Biblical principles that viewed creation as a resource to be stewarded for human flourishing. The result is an unprecedented human flourishing. We live in a garden of abundance that ancient kings could not have imagined.

Nations of the developing world are eager to follow that path. They want the same longevity, the same comfort, the same security. We should champion their right to development, not block it with Green red tape. To deny them this blessing — or worse, to label it a curse — is to reject the providence of God.

Yet a secular clergy of politicians, bureaucrats, and media figures have been preaching despair. They say humans are a cancer on the Earth. They hijack the language of science to peddle a godless anti-humanistic philosophy that strips human beings of their dignity, their access to resources, and their understanding of the world around them.

This ideology is deadly for the developing world. The 19th and 20th century Western world became rich and resilient by using coal, oil, and natural gas to provide the abundant, affordable, reliable energy indispensable to the conquest of poverty. Today, these resources are condemned.

Elite policymakers and politicians in London, Brussels, and Washington tell struggling nations in Africa and Asia they must leave these resources in the ground. They demand that the poor rely on intermittent, expensive wind and solar power in the name of “saving the planet.”

The coming of Christ meant that divine power entered human time to save and restore. As His follower, you are called to extend that restoration to others.

You do this by not embracing the pessimism that demands you restrict your neighbors’ access to the resources that enabled your own opportunity.

You do this by standing with the hungry, the poor, the excluded, and saying: “Your life matters, your flourishing is possible, and the tools to build that flourishing are morally legitimate to pursue and deploy.”

So, reject the gloom. Push back against the manufactured panic. The Earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof. He has not abandoned us to a burning planet. He has equipped us to thrive.

As we partake in the joy of the season and the mission of our Lord, let another passage from Isaiah be your strength: “A bruised reed he will not break, and a smoldering wick he will not snuff out. In faithfulness he will bring forth justice, he will not falter or be discouraged till he establishes justice on earth” (Isaiah 43:3–4).

Vijay Jayaraj (M.S., Environmental Sciences; Post-Grad Diploma, Energy Management; B.S., Engineering) lives in India and is Research Associate for Developing Countries with the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.