What Is the Solution?
EXPERTS hotly debate solutions to humanity’s complex water problems. The World Bank wants $600 billion to be invested in sanitation and water schemes during the next ten years. The cost of not investing may be even higher. In Peru, for example, a ten-week cholera epidemic, caused by contaminated water, recently cost about $1 billion—three times the money invested in the country’s water supply during all of the 1980’s.
Yet, despite the good intentions of those who promote them, water projects often do little to help the very poor. Growth in the megacities of the developing world is explosive and chaotic. The poor live in overcrowded, poor-quality shacks with no piped water or sanitation. Having no access to publicly subsidized water services, they must pay private vendors high prices for water, often dirty water.
Clearly, the global water crisis is complex and involves interrelated factors: shortages, pollution, poverty, disease, and the rising demands of growing populations. It is likewise clear that humans cannot solve these problems.
Basis for Optimism
The future, however, is not as gloomy as many predict. Why? Because the solution to the world’s water crisis does not rest with humans; it rests with God. He alone has both the ability and the will to solve all water problems.
That Jehovah God can solve these problems is unquestionable. He is the Designer and Creator not only of the earth but also of the waters on it. It was he who put into motion the marvelous water cycle along with all the other natural cycles that make life on earth possible. Revelation 14:7 identifies Jehovah as “the One who made the heaven and the earth and sea and fountains of waters.”
Jehovah has the power to control the world’s water. He is “the One giving rain upon the surface of the earth and sending waters upon the open fields.” (Job 5:10) Of him the Bible says: “He converts a wilderness into a reedy pool of water, and the land of a waterless region into outflows of water.”—Psalm 107:35.
Time and again he has proved his ability to provide water. For example, he supplied water for the Israelites during their 40 years in the wilderness, sometimes miraculously. “He went bringing forth streams out of a crag and causing waters to descend just like rivers,” the Bible says. “Look! He struck a rock that waters might flow and torrents themselves might flood forth.”—Psalm 78:16, 20.
What God Will Do
God will not allow the water crisis to continue forever. The Bible foretells that the time is coming when he will act in behalf of all those worldwide who wish to live under the loving rulership of his heavenly government, which will soon take control of the earth.—Matthew 6:10.
That government, or Kingdom, will bring an end to waterborne diseases, along with all other illnesses. The Bible assures God’s loyal ones: “[God] will certainly bless your bread and your water; and [he will] indeed turn malady away from your midst.” (Exodus 23:25) Moreover, the polluters of the earth’s waters will be done away with as he ‘brings to ruin those ruining the earth.’—Revelation 11:18.
All the earth will flourish under God’s loving care. Never again will people endlessly struggle to find fresh, clean water. Almighty God, who always speaks the truth, inspired his prophet to write concerning the future: “For in the wilderness waters will have burst out, and torrents in the desert plain. And the heat-parched ground will have become as a reedy pool, and the thirsty ground as springs of water.”—Isaiah 35:6, 7; Hebrews 6:18.
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God promises: “In the wilderness waters will have burst out, . . . and the thirsty ground [will become] as springs of water.”—Isaiah 35:6, 7