An approach to the safety problem – Sunday, July 08, 1956
With increasing carnage on the highways and elsewhere, it would seem that we need a new approach to the problem of safety. And so, we suggest a consideration of safety not merely as a matter of statistics—not safety merely as a matter of mechanics—but safety as a God-given Right—safety as a moral principle. “In the beginning,” we read in the first book of the Bible, “God created the heaven and the earth . . . and God said, Let us make man in our image.”1
It is a great and blessed privilege to be made in the image of God. It is a great and blessed privilege to be alive on earth. It is a great and blessed privilege to have a sound body, a sound mind, and unimpaired, physical faculties. It is a great and blessed privilege to live with the association of loved ones, with the privilege of seeking knowledge with freedom, of enjoying other people, of developing, creating, learning, and living life to its full normal limits, with full possession of physical and mental powers, unimpaired by injury or accident. True, this isn’t all the life there is.
The Lord God has given us the assurance of everlasting life. But quite apart from these limitless, eternal promises and possibilities, every man has the right to the enjoyment of “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” here—and no man has the right, by any thoughtlessness, by any dulling of his senses, by any carelessness of conduct, or by any cause of incompetence, to impair another person or to take from him any part of his opportunities on earth, or any part of his mental or physical faculties, In short, it is a crime carelessly to contribute to the impairment of another person.
It is a crime to take unjustly from anyone what we can’t restore—and certainly we cannot restore one year or one hour of a man’s life, or repay him in any real way for pain, for physical impairment, for anguish and anxiety. Who can calculate the loss of a father’s association with his sons—or of a mother’s loneliness in the burden of carrying a load alone?
Who can calculate the loss to a child who must lead a crippled or impaired life? Who can calculate in any real way the loss of the full living of life or the loss of physical function?
If all of us would only remember that all of us are sent here for a glorious purpose, by Him who made us in His image, to live out in fullness and richness the years that God has given, we would be less careless about those things which might take from us, or from others, the full and wonderful living of life with loved ones.
God help up to impress upon ourselves, and upon every other person, that safety is a moral principle as well as a physical problem—and that the carnage of carelessness is a crime!
1Genesis 1.1, 26.
July 08, 1956
Broadcast Number 1,403