AUGUST 4 2018
“DO YOU THINK SOME OF THE THINGS WE DO CAN NEVER BE FORGIVEN?”
I found that question in Donna Leon’s novel “Earthly Remains”. One of the main characters, whose wife had died of cancer, and whose bees suffer from collapse blame these deaths on the criminal disposal of toxic chemicals in the waters where he lives near Venice, where Leon’s novels always take place.
The question reminds me of the sins against the Holy Spirit, which are indeed unpardonable. I believe that these sins change with the times. It seems to me that today sins against creation, the place where God has put us and mandated us to ‘serve’ it, fall into that category. The recent developments in our weather make this situation more relevant.
Fact is that the world is on fire, and we caused it: HELL on earth!
Why did I choose this topic? Last week I talked to my sister in law in Groningen where they operate a large dairy farm, having at least 200 heads of cattle, using robots for milking.
This year there was a catch, a big catch: Climate Change, until now a remote, even to them a doubted phenomenon, but it abruptly expressed itself as a ferocious force, relentlessly hammering almost all of Europe, where normally moderation, also weather-wise, reigns.
Cows need to eat, need to eat a lot, especially grass and hay. In the soggy Low Lands, with half the country below sea level, ditches are always filled with water, everywhere, with windmills sucking the land dry from the excessive moisture, so they make hay when the sun shines – often a rare occurrence, that is, until this summer.
From my schooldays I remember a poem: “O land van mest en mist, van vuile, koude regen…” translated, “O land of dung and dankness, of frigid, filthy rain”, occurring so often that it was one of the reasons I emigrated.
Not this year: harrowing heat, merciless sunshine are drying out the ditches, kill the flies, making the water-pumping picturesque windmills nothing more than a curiosity.
Cows need food, hay, grain, water. No rain, no nothing. My wife’s sister told me that they were feeding their cattle the hay reserved for the winter. On my question, ‘What about the winter, what do you feed them then?’ she had no answer.
If this drought were local, if it were the exception, feed would be available elsewhere, but suddenly heat in the so-called moderate temperature zones, is everywhere: almost all of Europe is in the grip of a tropical trauma.
Suddenly there is the spectrum of the END.
Suppose this unnatural event becomes standard? Suppose there is a permanent change in the weather? Suppose that we, sophisticated Westerners, wise to the ways of the world, have bet on the wrong horse?
Last week, as we have done for 65 years, at breakfast time, I read aloud a Psalm. Psalm 14 was the next in row, entitled, THE FOOLS. The intro tells me that a fool is not an ignoramus, but a person who has his values all wrong, who behaves as if God would never take action.
Today we experience God’s answer to our SINS AGAINST CREATION, sins that have a built-in punishment. We now live in ‘end-times’, where the normal is the abnormal, where all meaning is lost, where THE LIE has blackened the WHITE HOUSE, where there no longer is a universal truth, no more common decency, where people have lost faith in institutions, so where do we turn?
Oh yes, the news media duly mention the forest fires, and never forget to display some dramatic pictures how a dog is rescued and how a couple miraculously escapes the inferno, but that we now live in a new world, a satanic world of our own making, is never mentioned.
We are stuck in a new paradigm, totally of human origin, an earth ruled by The Evil One, a world diametrically different from the situation mentioned in Genesis 1-2 when, upon completion of creation, the Lord looked back on what he had made and called it very, very good.
Today only 13 percent of the waters that cover 70 percent of our planet is unaffected by the hand of man. Soon that too is history, and, as the earth itself has not a pure spot left, nothing of what God called ‘good’ will remain.
How long will that last?
Climate Change is a system that becomes more dangerous over time as long as we continue to emit greenhouse gases, and even decades after we stop these substances. We are just starting to see the horrors that climate change has in store for us. From here on bad things will get worse, much, much worse. Indeed, the news about what more to expect, coming out of new research, only darkens our picture of what to expect.
Heat kills, it kills soil, it kills animals, it kills people. Expect the price of food to be severely affected, which means inflation. Better get some growing skills, and make sure that you have an independent water source.
Highest and Best Use
During the last decades of my self-employment I was a Property Appraiser, appraising primarily industrial, commercial and large estates, including the 500,000 thousand acres of the Bruce Peninsula for a First Nation land claim. Part of each appraisal – which sometimes amounted to more than 100 pages – was its HIGHEST AND BEST USE. I remember appraising a store- service station which I gave a negative value because the removal of the oil tanks and the polluted soil would cost more than the value of the improvements.
That is the situation we are approaching in some cases on farm land and the improvements because, if we can’t feed the livestock, then land, building and herds are useless.
So what does that mean?
The real bad news is that the food we daily need, will go up in price and that the immovable, the land and the buildings, will go down in value: the worst of all possible scenarios.
And it will come unnoticed by most.
Public apathy and its cousin Climate Complacency are the silent enemies. Almost every day I bike to the village store – 5.6 km away – where I am the exception, also in bringing my own bag. Very few either seem to care or are willfully ignorant of the future that awaits us. The proverbial frog comes to mind, which blithely boils to death when slowly heated in a pan. That’s what awaits us with the pace of higher temperatures rapidly accelerating.
Yes, the current heatwave is a “timely reminder” that we cannot take food production for granted. Warnings are out about the crippling impact of the dry, hot weather on farms across the world. And it often comes with a double whammy: either not enough water, or too much, which today is the case in China.
Next year will be worse.
Another El Niño is on the way, which promises even higher temperatures, because a warmer Arctic comes with stronger heat waves, forest fires and associated emissions, and the rapid warming of water in rivers that end in the Arctic Ocean, all of which will further warm up the Arctic Ocean.
Then there is METHANE.
Forest fires have already been burning strongly in Siberia over the past few months and methane there recently reached levels as high as 2817 parts per billion (ppb).
Some Arctic lakes are bubbling with methane, are starting to look like witches’ brew. As Global warming heats up, the frozen ground melts, turning the permafrost to mucky mud, releasing the methane gases that have been trapped there ‘forever’, hence the word ‘perma’-frost with some 950 billion tons of carbon about to emerge.
Once this methane enters the stratosphere, altering the air, as yet still having the right combination of atmospheric gases, that is the end, THE END, as methane traps heat so fast that temperatures will shoot up by 10 degrees Celsius within 10 years, according to Dr. Guy McPherson.
God, in his eternal plan for creation, installed that mechanism into creation, just in case humans would opt for unleashing a carbon-poisoning economy rather than choose the organic, natural way of life.
I started out with the question, “Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?”, so what is the answer?
The Created and Everlasting Word, God’s direct or primary revelation, tells us that we are in trouble, deep trouble. The written Word, the Scriptures, God’s temporary, indirect or secondary Word tells us exactly the same thing. The Bible tells us of creation, fall and ultimate deliverance. That deliverance is preceded by pain and tribulation. Take Revelation, Chapter 18: the poetry there, the unvarnished reality of today’s world:
Fallen! Fallen is Babylon the Great!
She has become a home for demons
And a haunt for every evil spirit,
A haunt for every unclean and
Detestable bird.
For all the nations have drunk
The maddening wine of her
Adulteries…. And the merchants
Of the earth grew rich from her
Excessive luxuries.
Woe! Woe, O great city,
Glittering with gold, precious
Stones and pearls!
In One Hour such great wealth
Has been brought to ruin!
Rejoice over her, O heaven!
Rejoice, saints and apostles and
Prophets!
God has judged her – the great City –
For the way she treated you.
We all know or sense that the existing system cannot last. The signs are everywhere. The Bible also is a book of prophecy. The Old Testament repeatedly warned the Hebrew Nation, God’s Chosen People, to mend their ways, or perish. Now it is our turn.
Now the chosen people are within the 7.6 billion of us, globe-trotters and earth inhabitants.
Curiously these saints will rejoice when The Great City, the current economic system, will collapse. WHY? Because its entire existence, our wealth and prosperity, is totally intertwined with the energy sector. Nothing today works without causing pollution, and consequently without causing more climatic havoc and planetary pain. Each day new stories emerge of people and animals suffering from perils brought about by our way of life.
We have become immune to the suffering of creation. But if we believe the Bible and especially the Book of Revelation, we know that it fully condemns our capitalistic system of which we all are part, and which will come apart. As Revelation 18 points out (verse 11), “The merchants of the earth will weep and mourn over her (the city) because no one will buy their cargoes any more – the cars and luxury houses, the yachts and penthouses.” That means economic depression and enormous deflation.
We really should be in agony because everywhere creation is suffering and with it are those who care for creation, as God wants us to. Romans 8: 22, “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”
Coming back to the original question, “Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?” calls for a thorough self- examination, preceded and accompanied by a lot of prayer and soul-searching.
Nietzsche was right. In his Also Sprach Zarathustra (Thus spoke Zarathustra), he writes, “To sin against the earth is now the most dreadful thing.” Nietzsche’s call us to “be true to the earth”, and not listen to those preachers who tells us that we are heaven-bound.
We all sin against the earth, repeatedly, all the time. We must see the earth as holy, as is plain from the Lord’s Prayer. There the very first line is, “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, a phrase which we recite without thinking. Psalm 33: 9 says that “He spoke and it came to be,” meaning that God’s name is on everything, and thus ‘hallowed” or ‘HOLY’. When we sin on purpose against the earth, then God will have no mercy.
Example? Having a ATV or Skidoo for ‘recreational’ or better ‘cosmos desecrating’ rides only, causing noise and air pollution, combined with the Rapture belief, seems to me an unpardonable sin against creation.
I started out with the question, “Do you think some of the things we do can never be forgiven?”
The short answer is “Yes”.