MARCH 23 2019
HOW ARE WE GOING TO COPE?
No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father. As it was in the days of Noah, so will it be at the coming of the Son of Man. For in the days before the flood, people were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, up to the day Noah entered the ark. And they were oblivious, until the flood came and swept all the sinners away. So will it be at the coming of the Son of Man.
You may recognize the above passage as a quote from the Bible. Yes, it is part of that terrible chapter Matthew 24. In it Jesus describes in devastating detail the situation that now is unfolding this very minute, with the reports becoming more ominous by the day.
Of course there are people who deny this Climate Change matter, calling it a conspiracy, a hoax, see it as trumped up treason to torpedo our Capitalistic system that has brought us prosperity unequaled in human history. Not surprisingly the Bible has a text for that mindset as well. Psalm 17: 14 reminds us that the beneficiaries of our economic system are having their reward in this life: “By your hand save me from such people, LORD, from those of this world whose reward is in this life”.
“In this life” implies that there is another life to come. Those who want to cramp in all the sights of the world, and fly everywhere – always at great environmental cost – could well forfeit the unimaginable delights in the New World to come.
These same people are part of what I call “the FIVE “D” crowd” who, as far as Climate Change is concerned, “Deny, Delay, Divide, Dump, Dupe”. They have taken their cue from the Tobacco Industry which did exactly that, in spite of overwhelming evidence that smoking painfully shortens life.
We now have an immensely more major calamity emerging: our ferocious use of fossil fuels frightfully fractures ALL life on the planet. Where, with a bit of willpower people could quit the nasty tobacco addiction (I did), the carbon-induced global death-threat is so ingrained in society that quitting it cold turkey means another “D”: DEATH of society as we know it because we can’t function without fossil fuels. But if we don’t take action, we are in for an even more disastrous situation, it means – like lung cancer – sudden death of all that lives.
Thus the choices we all face are a ‘lose-lose’ proposition: no matter what we do we end up worse off.
It is that choice that faces us as a society, especially the “educated” Western section because WE caused it all.
As certainty and confirmation of Climate Change becomes ever more pronounced, paralyzing feelings of panic, anxiety, and resignation are appearing.
A few examples.
“The Uninhabitable Earth,” David Wallace-Wells’ new book about how Climate Change, has as its first sentence, “It is worse, much worse, than you think. In superhot cities, roads will melt and train tracks will buckle. At five degrees of warming, much of the planet would be in constant drought. With just six meters of sea-level rise—an optimistic projection—land where three hundred and seventy-five million people currently live will be underwater.”
Already all the signs are there: right now, as I write this, thousands are fleeing ferocious floods all over the globe; late last year thousands again were frantically fleeing fierce fires in the Paradise Camp Fire finding themselves sprinting past exploding cars, their sneakers melting to the asphalt as they ran.
To anyone who has been paying attention, the broad strokes of “The Uninhabitable Earth” come as no surprise. We are racing toward—in fact have already entered—an era of water shortage, floods, wildfire, sea-level rise, and extreme weather.
How are we going to cope?
People are starting to ask hard questions about their own future. When will the place where I live be flooded or burn? Where should I live when it does? Where will my future children live? Should I have children at all?
Last week, John Vidal, of HuffPost US wrote, “The Rapid Decline Of The Natural World Is A Crisis Even Bigger Than Climate Change.”
The article opens with words as frightening as David Wallace-Wells’ book about how Climate Change, quoted above: “Nature is in freefall and the planet’s support systems are so stretched that we face widespread species extinctions and mass human migration unless urgent action is taken. That’s the warning hundreds of scientists are preparing to give, and it’s stark.”
Last year has seen a slew of brutal and terrifying warnings about the threat Climate Change poses to life. Far less talked about but just as dangerous, if not more so, is the rapid decline of the natural world. The felling of forests, the over-exploitation of seas and soils, and the pollution of air and water are together driving the living world to the brink, according to a huge three-year, U.N.-backed landmark study to be published in May.
Increasingly climate experts are blaming industrial farming for much of the loss of nature, claiming that the food system is the root of the problem. I agree.
I live in a rural area, where beef cattle roam in a meadow across from us. Daily I see how the farmer travels with his diesel-powered tractor to bring a big round bale of hay, totally wrapped in thick white plastic, to feed his methane-belching cows, at an all-round cost to the environment.
To follow these cows through to their final destination as a piece of steak on the plate of a consumer, from the field to a slaughter house hundreds of kilometers away, back to the local store, where a consumer drives a car to buy it, once ingested impairing the consumer’s health, all at a cost of some 20 energy calories for each edible one. Never is the cost of ecological degradation considered in the price we pay for food. This example applies to the entire food industry.
How are we going to cope?
And then there are insects, vital to the diets of other animals, as well as the pollinators of our food: they are facing a bleak future as their populations appear to be collapsing. Land use changes and increased pesticide use are destroying habitats and vastly reducing their numbers. In Europe, up to 37 percent of bees and 31 percent of butterflies are in decline, with major losses also recorded in southern Africa, according to the pollinators section of the report.
Over 70 percent of freshwater species and 61 percent of amphibians have declined along with 26 percent of marine fish populations and 42 percent of land-based animals … It is a dramatic change and a direct result of the intensification of farming.
No wonder that people are realizing that, “We are facing the greatest struggle in human history, one whose outcome will determine the fate of humanity for eternity. We cannot dither or postpone or wait for the next generation to deal with this. We must act right now, and knowing human nature, “We Will Not Act!”
“How are we going to cope?”
Psychologists are observing how people are dealing with the enormous challenges now emerging. Their findings are that many just ignore it, shrug it off as not important, or claim that they mistrust the science or deny that there is a human connection. Some simply say that their actions would be too small to make a difference and choose to do nothing.
It reminds me of a text in the last Bible book, Revelation 22: 14, where it says,
“Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the tree of life and may go through the gates into the city”.
This text directly points to personal action that leads to eternal life.
J. H. Bavinck in his unique, “Between the Beginning and the End, a Radical Kingdom Vision”, points out that “The people of the Ancient Near East see their clothing as expressing their personality….. It reveals something of their very being and their authority.” This indicates that clean robes mean an un-polluting and cleansed self.
So doing nothing is no option. Ignoring is no option. It is our holy duty to take action, personally, NOW, because, as the text quoted at the very beginning says,
“No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father”.
It is a fact that we are on the final stretch of life on the planet. There are a few pointers that confirm this:
- It will come, there’s no doubt about it. Both the Bible and our unbiased observations confirm this.
- Humanity will be blind to all the signs. Throughout the millennia people have not changed: just as in Noah’s days, so too today they go their merry way, ignoring the obvious.
- The End will come as a total surprise, because
- The Bible tells us that there is a tipping point that comes without a warning.
The text has a mysterious line: “No one knows about that day or hour, not even the angels in heaven, nor the Son,but only the Father”.
That last line “only the Father” puzzles me. The Bible tells us that the Father has given all authority in heaven and earth to Jesus, so how is it possible that Jesus too is ignorant about the day and the hour of what I call, “The Tipping Point”?
Richard Elliot Friedman in one of my favorite books, THE HIDDEN FACE OF GOD,
ends his masterpiece with, “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.”
James Lovelock sees the entire world as a living entity, something confirmed in both the Old and New Testament: both give definite hints that creation is alive, and is now dying, as Romans 8:22 tells us, “Creation is suffering unbearable pains”.
Back to “There is some likelihood that the universe is the hidden face of God.” If that is the case then only Creation herself, has the answer and only by listening to her cries, can we estimate the time of ‘the tipping point’, the period, not the day or the hour, but the approximate time, because Jesus gives some hints, pointing to “the devastation mentioned by Daniel”, something we very much see today, and leaving other pointers, clearly referring to The End.
How are we going to cope?
Yes, there is growing anxiety out there, as we observe the death struggles of creation, which also signifies our own demise. Ignoring these symptoms is no solution. Admitting them is the start of coping and seeing it as God’s plan, as the beginning of redemption. Forget about Rapture and going to heaven: that’s pagan prattle. God made the earth, that’s why it is holy: it is God’s Primary Word. Treat it as such, starting today.
Christ died to restore creation. That being accomplished, we now eagerly wait for our adoption as God’s children, the redemption of our bodies, as Romans 8: 24 attests, “for in that hope we are saved!”
We have lived the life of destruction. We have left to our children nothing but chaos. We need to apologize to them for the unrepairable mess we have created. The world now is full of our toys, but empty of God’s creatures, full of chaos causing Climate Change but empty of fish, fowl, and foliage.
We have to fit on the new clothes, meaning adopt a new way of life: “Blessed are those who wash their robes, that they may have the right to the Tree of Life and may go through the gates into the City”.
We have to thoroughly clean ourselves of the stains, the creation-destroying elements, which are leading us to gloom and doom. Only then may we claim the right to the TREE OF LIFE and enter into THE ETERNAL CITY, the NEW JERUSALEM.
That’s the only way to cope today.
More about that next week