The poet Steve Turner once penned these lines:
History repeats itself.
Has to.
No one listens.
One hundred years ago the guns finally fell silent on the Western Front and the appalling cost of the conflict began to be counted. It was the first war in which people had been killed on an industrial scale and in which civilians as well as soldiers had been targeted. Surely it could never happen again? Surely it was the ‘war to end all wars?’ It wasn’t. Within a generation the world would again be plunged into conflict.
The problem is that human beings are prone to fight each other. We do so because of the selfishness of our human hearts, that want to impose their will on others and take what others have. If we truly want to live at peace and stop the cycle of endless conflict, then the starting point must be a conversion of the human heart. But how?
The message of the Bible is that through Jesus Christ we can make peace with God and have our ‘hearts of stone’ replaced with ones of flesh. Find peace with God and we find peace with one another, and when we do that then we may discover that history stops repeating itself.