Brace yourself for some dreadful news.
If today is an average day, approximately 15,000 children will die somewhere on our planet of preventable or treatable causes.
That number should break our hearts. If losing a child represents the deepest sadness, imagine multiplying such grief by 15,000. It’s hard to know even how to respond.
But before we rush to change the subject or succumb to a variety of feeling-numbing distractions, let’s remember what the late medical doctor and educator Hans Rosling said about numbers. In his bestseller Factfulness, he urges his readers not to be drawn in by the shock of a single metric.
It’s important, says Rosling, always to see numbers in their appropriate context. And the context in this case is the amazing story of how the mortality of the world’s most vulnerable citizens has been steadily declining for years.
For most of human history, something like half of the world’s children have died before the age of five. As recently as 1950, childhood deaths exceeded 25%. But United Nations statisticians tell us that global child mortality in 2024 was only 3.6%. That number, as dreadful as it is, is actually the lowest it has been since the dawn of humanity.
Extreme poverty (currently defined as living on $2.15 a day, adjusted for inflation) is likewise in a steep decline. Just after World War II, around 50% of the world lived in grinding poverty. That’s the origin of the commonly held belief that the world remains evenly divided between the Haves and Have-Nots.
But things have been changing, and for the better. Last year the world’s level of extreme poverty dropped to an extraordinary 8.5%. Comparatively speaking, the world has never been so well of.
Columnist Nicholas Kristof, trying to put these developments into perspective, notes that since the year 2000 more than 80 million children’s lives have been saved. And roughly 30,000 people move out of extreme poverty every 24 hours. Experts anticipate even greater progress will happen on both these fronts in 2025.
Concerning the heartbreaking number of daily child deaths, Hans Rosling wrote, “I am the first person to wish the number was even lower and falling faster.”
But in context, he nevertheless regarded that number as “beautifully small.” Things that we could hardly have believed would ever happen – wonderful things – are actually happening. Praise God.
The danger of zeroing in on a single number is that it rarely tells the whole story.
The same thing happens when followers of Jesus mistakenly think that God’s whole story can be summed up in a single verse.
All too often, we cut and paste Old and New Testament texts as if Scripture is a Microsoft Word document that we can shape according to our tastes and needs – extracting words from their original contexts and presenting them as if we now have the right to say, “Here’s what the Bible says.”
I once heard a preacher declare that the Holy Spirit had foreseen modern urban traffic congestion through the voice of one of the Old Testament prophets: “The chariots storm through the streets, rushing back and forth through the squares. They look like flaming torches; they dart about like lightning” (Nahum 2:4). Surely that’s a prediction of headlights, right?
It would seem wiser, however, to note that the very same prophet makes it clear he is actually describing columns of Babylonian chariots invading Nineveh six centuries before Christ.
Let’s be honest: You can “prove” virtually anything if you collect a few Bible words here and mingle them with a few verses over there.
There are celebrated “prooftexts” for reincarnation, astrology, extraterrestrial visitors, the 9/11 terror attacks, the Indian Ocean tsunami, and the Cubs winning the 2016 World Series. Entire ministries are founded on the notion that God wants you to be rich, and that he is obligated to give you whatever you want if you simply discover the right way to frame your requests.
The old saying remains true: A text without a context is a pretext.
In other words, we must never stake our lives on our understanding of just a few words.
There’s no such thing as a stand-alone verse of Scripture. We must always look carefully at the ever-widening concentric circles of context.
Words and phrases make sense only when we look at the sentences in which they appear. The meaning of sentences is dependent on paragraphs, paragraphs become clear in the context of chapters, and chapters are comprehensible only in the light of the entirety of a biblical book.
But there’s an even wider context to consider. How does a particular text jibe with the Bible’s basic storyline – the narrative that weaves its way through all 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, from Genesis to Revelation?
One number, however heart-stopping, does not an accurate worldview make.
Nor does one verse tell us everything we need to know about God.
In a world that seems able to surprise us in endlessly different ways, may God grant us the grace of seeking to learn more of the whole story.
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