THE BIBLE AND THE BIG BANG
Here’s what I think will happen.
It will start with a gigantic BIG BANG EARTHQUAKE. There may have been a BIG BANG to start it all, but there will be a BIG BANG to end it all. Of course, I am referring to our poor planet.
I know, you know, that the Bible is not a book that can be used to predict that then and there we will experience this or that. But the Bible does tell us that this earth which we have made into an ANTHROPOCENE, a human dominated planet, will someday be totally destroyed, not by an act of God, but by the fatal distortions we have introduced into our fragile atmosphere.
One of these killing conditions will be human induced earthquakes.
Oh, that frightening 24th Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew.
Its translators have given it the brief one-liner heading: SIGNS OF THE END OF THE AGE. That’s what we are experiencing now, these coming decades, which also may be among the last.
Here’s a direct quote from that chapter: “Nation will arise against nation and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pains.”
All this is happening right now!
I like that description: birth pains. Romans 8: 22 too uses that same phrasing: “We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.”
Childbirth indicates that a New Earth will be born. The old earth, now almost totally polluted in all its formations, the soil, the air, the waters, will vanish, will disappear and a radical overhaul will take place, completely cleansing her from all human-induced contamination. Our old, tired, worn out earth is, nevertheless, young enough to be pregnant with the New Earth.
Once the mess we have created is repaired – which might take a couple of thousand years as the damage is so extensive, but happen it will because the earth has a tremendous self-cleaning capacity – then God will recall those (Revelation 14: 13) who have died in the Lord. They have completely rested from their labor and their deeds will follow them.
“What were their deeds?” you might ask. Jesus’ great commandment comes to mind: “Love the Lord and all his creation above all, and your neighbor as yourself.” These deeds are for eternity.
But before that happens we will experience tremendous – human-induced – earthquakes. Yes, Human-Induced. When God caused THE FLOOD he promised that he would never again destroy the then known world, implying that we would have the honors next time. And that’s what will happen.
A recurring theme in the Bible.
All of Scripture talks about that event, not just Revelation. The Hebrew Bible, the Old Testament, repeatedly refers to that last earthquake as well. And not only earthquakes but total sun eclipses, events not appearing in the time tables of the astronomers.
Amos 9: 5 already says: “the whole land will rise like the Nile, it will be stirred up and then sink.” Ezekiel 38: 19: “In my zeal and fiery wrath I declare that at that time there will be a great earthquake in the land of Israel”, and Joel 2: 10: “Before them the earth quakes.”
Eclipses of the sun? Amos mentions them too. “I will make the sun go down at noon and darken the earth in broad daylight.” And Isaiah, speaking about the Day of the Lord, says: “The stars of heaven and their constellations will not show their light, and the rising sun will be darkened (13: 10). Also in Matthew 24, in that great forecast for the future, Jesus (verse 29) says that the darkening of the sun is one of the signs of the coming end. Also that the moon shall be as blood, is a well-known thought in the prophecy. Joel speaks of this in the promise of the coming of the Spirit (2: 31) “The sun will be turned to darkness and the moon to blood before the coming of the great and dreadful day of the Lord.
Revelation, the last Bible book, on four (4) occasions mentions the earthquake: Chapters 6: 12; 8: 15; 11: 13, and, in the most ominous terms, in 16: 18, where it says that “No earthquake like it had ever occurred since humanity had been on earth, so tremendous was the quake. (19) The great city split into three parts and the cities of the nations collapsed.
Is this really true? Yes.
I follow Karl Barth’s advice: “Have the Bible in one hand and the newspaper in the other”. (That was before the Internet, of course.)
Here is part of an article that appeared in the GUARDIAN last week. The headline said:
HOW CLIMATE CHANGE TRIGGERS EARTHQUAKES, TSUNAMIS AND VOLCANOES.
The essay said in part:
Global Warming may not only be causing more destructive hurricanes, it could also be shaking the ground beneath our feet.
Tornadoes, typhoons, hurricanes and mid-latitude storms – along with heatwaves and floods – are widely regarded as climate change’s shock troops; forecast to accelerate the destruction, loss of life and financial pain as planet Earth continues to heat up. It would be wrong to imagine, however, that climate change and the extreme events it drives are all about higher temperatures and a bit more wind and rain.
The atmosphere is far from isolated and interacts with other elements of the so-called “Earth system”, such as the oceans, ice caps and even the ground beneath our feet, in complex and often unexpected ways capable of making our world more dangerous. We are pretty familiar with the idea that the oceans swell as a consequence of the plunging atmospheric pressure at the heart of powerful storms, building surges driven onshore by high winds that can be massively destructive. Similarly, it does not stretch the imagination to appreciate that a warmer atmosphere promotes greater melting of the polar ice caps, thereby raising sea levels and increasing the risk of coastal flooding. But, more extraordinarily, the thin layer of gases that hosts the weather and fosters global warming really does interact with the solid Earth – the so-called geosphere — in such a way as to make climate change an even bigger threat.”
And THE GUARDIAN IS NOT ALONE.
The reliable journal NATURE affirms this. This prestigious paper provides convincing evidence for a link between typhoons barreling across Taiwan and the timing of small earthquakes beneath the island. Their take on the connection is that the reduced atmospheric pressure that characterizes these powerful Pacific equivalents of hurricanes is sufficient to allow earthquake faults deep within the crust to move more easily and release accumulated strain. This may sound farfetched, but an earthquake fault that is primed and ready to go is like a coiled spring, and as geophysicist John McCloskey of the University of Ulster is fond of pointing out, all that is needed to set it off is – quite literally – “the pressure of a handshake”.
And it isn’t only earthquake faults that today’s storms and torrential rains are capable of shaking up. Volcanoes seem to be susceptible too. On the Caribbean island of Montserrat, heavy rains have been implicated in triggering eruptions of the active lava dome that dominates the volcano there. Stranger still, Alaska’s Pavlof volcano appears to respond not to wind or rain, but to tiny seasonal changes in sea level. The volcano seems to prefer to erupt in the late autumn and winter, when weather patterns are such that water levels adjacent to this coastal volcano climb by a few tens of centimeters. This is enough to bend the crust beneath the volcano, allowing magma to be squeezed out, according to geophysicist Steve McNutt of the University of South Florida, “like toothpaste out of a tube”.
If today’s weather can bring forth earthquakes and magma from the Earth’s crust, it doesn’t take much to imagine how the solid Earth is likely to respond to the large-scale environmental adjustments that accompany rapid climate change. In fact, we don’t have to imagine at all. The last time our world experienced serious warming was at the end of the last ice age when, between about 20,000 and 10,000 years ago, temperatures rose by six degrees centigrade, melting the great continental ice sheets and pushing up sea levels by more than 120meters.
The bottom line is that as climate change tightens its grip, we must be prepared to expect the unexpected.
MELTING ICE MAY CAUSE THE ULTIMATE QUAKE.
As the kilometers-thick Greenland’s ice sheet melt, the faults beneath releases the accumulated strain of tens of millennia, spawning massive magnitude eight earthquakes. Quakes of this scale are taken for granted today around the Pacific Ocean’s “Ring of Fire”, but they are completely out of place near the North Pole. Across the Norwegian Sea, in Iceland, the volcanoes long buried beneath a kilometer of ice are being rejuvenated as the ice load weighing billions of tons melt away, prompting a “volcano storm” that will increase the volcano level by up to 50 times.
Yes, the most dangerous aspect of Climate Change is the melting of the ice in the world’s largest island, Greenland.
There the ice loss has been a staggering 270 billion tons of ice A YEAR!! during the last 10 years. Geologists expect that future ice loss may trigger earthquakes of intermediate to large magnitude if the crust underneath the modern ice cap contains faults prone to failure. The same applies to the huge volume of rain dumped by tropical cyclones, leading to severe flooding, which also may lead to earthquakes.
The bottom line in all of this is that as climate change tightens its grip, we will see more and bigger hurricane, more and bigger earthquakes, and in general disastrous natural disasters.
End of quotes.
THERE’S WHERE THE DANGER LIES!!: trillions tons of solid ice melting, torrents of water streaming into the oceans, unsettling the earth’s axis, robbing our planet of its delicate balance. Volcanoes darkening the skies.
Revelation tells us that the disasters will be world-wide: there will not be a safe hiding place, not a refuge anywhere. Cities, however, will bear the brunt of the turmoil.
I really don’t know what to advise because ‘nobody knows the day and the hour’, as that 24th chapter of Matthew tells us. Jesus does say that there will be general signs, and I believe that these signs are definitely there today.
There are clear indications today that the world is falling apart. Trump will not emerge as a winner in the US election, now only a few days away. But his popularity, embracing close to 2 out of 5 voters in the USA, serves as a sure sign that environmental turmoil translates into human misbehavior as well.
One of the laws of ECOLOGY states that “EVERYTHING IS CONNECTED TO EVERYTHING ELSE.” God formed us of the earth, and when the earth suffers we all suffer, because the suffering of the earth is our doing.
We do well to heed Nietzsche’s warning: “to blaspheme against the earth is the most grievous sin”, because we directly blaspheme God’s majesty.
When God dictated the Ten Commandments to Moses (Exodus 20), he said: “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.”
That has nothing to do with swearing, with saying “Oh My God” occasionally, and has everything to do with harming creation, with misusing God’s name, blaspheming God, scratching out his signature and substituting it for our own. Since we do this continually, since we do this without thinking and without letup, God will not let us get away with that.
The earth, God’s earth, has her built-in defense mechanisms. Disturb its precarious balances and watch how the planet fights back.
It is exactly that which we are beginning to experience. God is not easily provoked, but once he is, nothing and nobody will be able to withstand his fury.
Revelation 16: 1 has a frightening message:
“Then I heard a loud voice from the temple saying to the seven angels: “Go, pour out the seven bowls of God’s wrath on the earth.”
The great earthquake – THE REAL BIG BANG – is merely the beginning of God’s wrath.