SEPTEMBER 2 2017
THE REVENGE OF CREATION.
“Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.” Romans 12: 19.
I love Romans 8, where it says that “creation is in the pangs of giving birth to a new earth.”
This brings up an interesting question: is the earth a living system, an organism that has all characteristics of such creatures as humans and animals, trees, and other thriving entities?
“Yes”, says James Lovelock, the author of THE REVENGE OF GAIA, EARTH’S CLIMATE IN CRISIS AND THE FATE OF HUMANITY. Lovelock writes, “Unless we see the earth as a planet that behaves as if it were alive, at least to the extent of regulating its climate and chemistry, we will lack the will to change our way of life and to understand that we have made it our greatest enemy”.
The Bible too is quite definite in seeing the earth as alive, as the text quoted above indicates. Only substances that are alive can give birth to a replica of itself.
When we see creation as an enemy, then creation fights back. That’s what happening now, and that’s why both the Bible and Lovelock’s book THE REVENGE OF GAIA, speak to us today. Gaia is the Greek name for EARTH. The science ‘geo-logy’ refers to that also.
Lovelock implies and the Bible confirms that if we regard Creation as a life-less entity, as a planet to be exploited, as dead matter not affected by torture, pain or even feeling, as the enemy to be destroyed, we can expect repercussions.
THE RELEVANCE OF SCRIPTURE: the earth lives!!
When we read Matthew 24 it is striking that Jesus himself uses the phrasing of ‘birth pains’.
Let me quote that passage, (verse 7) “Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”
Yes, Jesus himself sees the earth as living matter, as PREGNANT!!
There are numerous places where the Bible sees creation as alive. Psalm 98, credits the earth with ‘eyes and voice’, “All the ends of the earth have SEEN the salvation of our God. SHOUT to the Lord all the earth, RING out your joy.” Later in that same Psalm, “Let the rivers clap their hands and the hills ring out their joy.”
Isaiah 55: 12 expresses similar emotions: “the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the fields will clap their hands.” Even the stars join in, as recorded in Job 38: 6, “While the morning stars sang together, all the angels shouted for joy.”
Does Creation portray God?
Of course. In the hearing of the Bach cantatas, in the presence of a portrait by Rembrandt, in the rhythm and import of a sonnet of Shakespeare, we are in direct contact with the truth and spirit of these creators. The same and more is true when we regard God’s creation: there we hear and taste and sense the presence of the divine. When harming it, we harm the Creator. A person openly destroying a Rembrandt painting is severely punished. Will God condone the harming of his creation? Of course not. That’s why we have HARVEY.
Something unexpected.
Then there is Isaiah 62, where in verses 4-5 it says, “But the Lord will take delight in you, and the land will be married. As a young man marries a maiden so your sons marry you.” Isaiah states here that THE LAND WILL BE MARRIED.
That passage finds fulfillment in Revelation 21. There the New Earth appears, prepared as a BRIDE beautifully dressed for her husband. That means that the New Humanity will marry the Earth, the Bride of Christ. That’s why John 3: 16 is the most important text in the Bible.
Yes, that’s what the Bible tells us: NOT THE CHURCH but the Renewed Earth is THE BRIDE.
BIRTH PAINS: HARVEY, the Herald of what is to come.
However, the earth giving birth to another earth is not a smooth matter but a very, very difficult affair, a painful process as the gestation period is taking millennia, but now, in our time, this actual event is about to happen, right on schedule.
That birth is the end of the old world and the start of the new one. Once the birth has taken place, the old earth and everything in it will vanish, but the shell will remain. It will not be a new earth, no, it will be a renewed planet, in a renewed atmosphere, as the immediate space around the earth is full of space junk.
Giving birth goes in stages. Today there are certain indications that birth is imminent, evident in the current contractions, which are painful, and the shorter the intervals, the closer the time of giving birth.
Today we live in such a contracting time.
Hurricane HARVEY is directed at the State of Texas and City of Houston where OIL IS KING, where CLIMATE CHANGE is seen as a joke, where its subdivisions have paved over the wetlands with no regard for NATURE. That very area is now undergoing THE WRATH OF GOD.
FUKUSHIMA is another example.
Just like Texas, Japan should have known better. As the only country on the receiving end of two ATOMIC bombs, it built nuclear reactors so close to the ocean that a disaster could be predicted. And the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in March of 2011 received the full Revenge of Creation.
Of course, no one could have foretold the timing and scale of the tsunami, and virtually nobody expected that it could overwhelm the facility as spectacularly as it did. But that changed as the first of several hydrogen explosions was observed among the reactors. Now more than 6 years later much of the Pacific Ocean is contaminated with radioactive particles. Thankfully the radioactive fuel that melted through containment still remains in a molten state, so the worst-case scenario didn’t materialize.
The speeding up of the arrival of THE KINGDOM.
The signs are all around us for discerning eyes. Ever since we entered the CARBON AGE, some 200 years ago, we have speeded up history. That in full agreement with the Bible where, in that awesome chapter Matthew 24: 22, Jesus tells us that those days of utter destruction, will be cut short, which means that everything will accelerate, will increase in speed, will have overwhelming momentum. That’s what we are experiencing now, from the horse-and-buggy-stage to automobile to jet planes to space travel in record time; from snail-mail to Internet, from still photography to instant physical recording, all at the speed of light.
This is also true throughout nature. Glaciers that took millennia to form calve off into the sea in a matter of moments. The entire ARCTIC, with its 10,000 plus years of ice-cover, suddenly becomes ice-free, with catastrophic consequences for the World’s weather, analogous to a household without warning losing its air-conditioning. Or take Greenland, the largest island in the world and also the largest accumulated ice volume anywhere, except the Antarctic. Greenland is buried under 3000 meters of ice. Yet, for the first time in recorded history, there have been fires there on the few exposed spots, endangering the ‘permafrost’.
Or look at the old-growth forests filled with thousand-year-old trees decimated by a single wildfire. Should I mention the mysterious sinkholes in Siberia, spontaneously spouting methane-filled flames?
Fast change is also a hallmark of human society. Movements and ideas — oftentimes simmering for years, decades or longer – now, today, reach a critical state in which the populace is swept up into history-making action. Today we see that in the TRUMP tragedy, the unexpected shift from benevolent, more or less democratic rule, to autocratic anarchy in the USA.
Also today we see the disappearance of marriage. Is that an indication of what Jesus said that in the New Creation people will neither be married nor be given in marriage? (Luke 20: 35). We again see it in the weather where ‘once in a thousand year’ events become commonplace to the astonishment of insurance companies, governments, people along rivers and coasts, or those poor depending on glaciers to provide timely irrigation.
When these changes come, they happen swiftly. And life after — for better or worse — is forever different.
2008 Financial Crisis
You may remember how Queen Elizabeth visited the LSE, the London School of Economics shortly after the 2008 Financial Crisis and asked the professors of this supposedly best school in the world, why they had not seen that crisis coming.
Good question, no answer.
How quickly the bubble popped: between September and October, the S&P 500 lost one-third of its value, and continued falling through March, ending at over 50% lower than its pre-crisis high. Millions of jobs were lost over these months. And the prices of other major assets from houses to bonds were savaged, too.
Today the stock market, the house prices, all assets, except gold are again in maximum territory. Will financial history repeat itself? Of course.
No one can predict when the next market downturn will happen.
HOW THEN SHALL WE LIVE?
That question must always be uppermost in our minds. They are different for each age. Today the laws of Ecology must rule us. Ecology is the science that busies itself with the ‘eco’ a word that is based on the Greek word OIKOS which means ‘house’, now more used for the house humanity lives in.
ECOLOGY has four rules which are valid for all times. These simple directions are important enough to remember. Print them out and look at them every day, and try to live by them.
These directives are:
(1) There is no free lunch.
(2) Everything is connected to everything else.
(3) Nothing ever disappears, and
(4) Nature knows best.
Not adhering to them has brought us where we are today, as captured in my original statement:
THE REVENGE OF CREATION.
And the quote from the Bible: “Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.” Romans 12: 19.
The four (4) laws of ecology give us an indication on how to live to avoid God’s wrath and consequent revenge.
(1) There is no free lunch.
We are discovering that the use of any carbon-base device, whether that is an automobile or a lawnmower, an electric kettle or a refrigerator has consequences for the environment. We simply cannot keep on driving or cooling and not expect consequences for the world we live in: there’s no free lunch.
(2) Everything is connected to everything else.
Whatever we do has consequences far beyond our immediate vicinity. We see it in HURRICANE HARVEY. Because of Climate Change the water in the Gulf of Mexico was 30 degrees Celsius. Hurricanes intensify in fierceness when it passes over warmer waters. We can expect more and stronger hurricanes in the future. The ferocity of Harvey will result in higher fuel prices; the US deficit will balloon, the emotional despair will accelerate and general wellbeing decline. Indeed everything is connected to everything else.
(3) Nothing ever disappears.
We live in a closed system out of which nothing escapes.
Gasoline burns and is broken down into different gases, all harmful, witness Climate Change and destructive storms.
(4) Nature knows best.
Anything that harms Creation is an affront to the Creator and constitutes SIN, that dirty word we are loath to utter.
The Government of the USA and those in charge of the State of Texas and the City of Houston believe that all regulations are wrong, so with no laws to protect wetlands, and an abundance of paved surfaces, the excess water could not be absorbed. Wetlands and flood plains are there for the sole purpose to absorb excess water supply. Draining them, allowing construction there, as happened in Houston, is inviting disaster, and that’s exactly what happened.
Our entire economic system will collapse because of the WRATH AND REVENGE of creation, God’s HOLY DIRECT REVELATION.
God will not be mocked. His creation has her direct defense mechanisms and we see them at work today.