I would be surprised if anyone failed to note the news blurb that the worldʼs population reached seven billion people last month. That announcement probably was received with a passing yawn as insignificant trivia. Once numbers get so large they become meaningless. When we hear of budget deficits in the trillions of dollar, or stars billions of miles away, it is really impossible to comprehend such numbers.

A startling reality that helped me put our global population in perspective is the fact that barely one billion minutes have passed in time since Jesus walked upon the earth– thatʼs 60 minutes every hour, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year for almost 2,000 years! Other comparisons and illustrations simply boggle our minds.

When we arrived in Indonesia as missionaries 40 years ago we were assigned to East Java. Java is an island about the size and shape of Tennessee with 120 million people, whereas Tennessee may have approximately seven million. Because Java is a chain of volcanic mountains running the length of the island, most of the actual land area is uninhabitable, increasing the density of population. It was quite an adjustment to live in a place where you were never out of sight of people. One village just merged into another as you travel the highways.

Later our work took us to Bangladesh where 180 million people live in an area about the size of Arkansas. India was not much different; though larger with open land areas the population density of the cities was overwhelming with sprawling slums and ghettos. The population already surpasses one billion and researchers tell us in another decade or two India will pass China as the most populous nation on earth, this in a land area about one-third the size of the United States.

If we had the same population density as India, the U.S. would have over three billion people instead of our sparse 356 million. Can you imagine what that would do for our economy, our jobless rate and healthcare plans? We would have hundreds of thousands living on the streets in cardboard and tar paper shacks as they do in Mumbai and Calcutta.

It took a long time for world population to reach five billion, but in my lifetime it reached six and then seven billion and, in a very few years, will grow to eight and on to ten billion before the rate of growth begins to slow and level off. What are the implications of such growth? Because those of us in the Western World are relatively isolated from where the impact is felt in the more under-developed countries we can presume to be insulated from the problems.

But in a trend of globalization and international markets, strained economies have a ripple effect. Such population growth is reflected in an exploding demographic of youth being born without prospects of education and jobs. The number of births exceed those dying by 266,000 a day! A lot of the uprisings, chaos and ethnic warfare around the world are not just a demand for political freedom and empowerment, but are growing out of frustration and hopelessness for the prosperity others seem to enjoy.

Wars will be fought, not for territorial gain and ideologies, but for water rights and food to eat. We cannot imagine people subsisting and trying to feed families on an income of a dollar a day–when they can find work. In our indulgent society it hard to comprehend families who eat one meager meal a day, or once every three days, or millions of displaced refugees and others that are dependent on someone else to provide humanitarian aid for them to survive.

Okay, the world population has reached seven billion–so what? The immediate implications may go unnoticed, but it is going to get worse before it gets better. And the impact will be felt by our fragile economy and comfortable lifestyle as well as those being sucked into an accelerating sinkhole of poverty.