DOES THE BIBLE PREDICT CLIMATE CHANGE?
Can the Bible tell us what will happen in the weather? Yes. I sincerely believe that The Abomination that causes Desolation refers to today’s atmospheric conditions. The phrase appears in Daniel in the Old Testament, and Jesus quotes it in that terrible 24th Chapter of the book of Matthew, where the Christ looks ahead to the very days we live in, the year of the Lord 2021.
What is the significance of these words: Abomination” and “Desolation”?
‘Abomination’ means ‘a terrible, criminal act’, something that goes against all normally acceptable conduct. The Holocaust is an example of such an event. Desolation too has purely negative overtones: its literary meaning is, “God forsaken”. A desert is an example of desolation, or the scenery after an earthquake, or the devastation caused by a hurricane, flood or tornado. Also, both abomination and desolation, point to our agricultural practises based on (oil-based) fertilizer and pesticides, poisoning the soil in the process, our clearcutting the forests, and our ravaging the seas with bottom-scraping devices: all that too fits the bill of ‘The Abomination that causes Desolation”.
There’s no doubt in my mind that “The Abomination that causes Desolation” of which the Bible speaks twice, applies to our place and our time. The little aside – let the reader be aware – means that only when it actually happens, do we recognize it. In addition, because of the world-wide forest fires, “The sun will be darkened, and the moon will not give light”: that too is happening right now where I am living, another quote from that same Matthew 24 chapter.
What this really means is that “We live in the last phase before Christ returns, the beginning of incalculable disasters.”
We, the humans of the 21st Century, face a lot of challenges, both physically and spiritually. Physically our lives in society are threatened constantly by yielding to the factory-prepared so-called foods, laden with sugar and preservatives, and the meat products which require a lot of cereals and carbon-rich fuels before they are ready for table use. A recent study by the Rockefeller Foundation outlines how the true cost of our food is three times the price we pay in the grocery stores. The real cost is now visiting us in the form of climate disasters.
“We are what we eat”.
Basically, this means that we eat oil, and we now realize that oil is not good for our well-being, to say the least. That is not the only obstacle to good health: our bodies also are ‘oil-driven’: we have become lazy: ‘use it or lose it’, is a well-worn wisdom, which we fail to implement in our own lives. Spiritually the entire commercial world – including the church – is basking in false optimism and refuses to face the ultimate consequences of our blasphemous lives.
Spiritual and physical fitness is needed to weather the continuing onslaught.
I walk 0ne Full Hour every day: Every Day. Walking has been clinically proven to not only energize our life and limbs, but also to tickle the brain and make it to retain its memory and thinking capability: mere walking. I’ve read somewhere that everyone of us has continuously two free personal health assistants available: our left leg, and our right leg.
I almost always walk on the Canada Trail which runs through the centre of my village, the old CPR train track. Once outside the built-up area it’s like ‘forest bathing’, perfectly accessible to all its inhabitants. But walking does not seem a Tweed habit: running ATVs is: for every one walker on the trail, I meet 5-10 of these motorized 4 wheelers, noisy, heavily polluting, dust-causing, exercise-preventing contraptions, truly Satan-Inspired. That’s why I have very little hope for the population at large to adopt creation-saving ways.
Oh, the Trees!
When trees die—by natural processes, by fire, at the hands of humans— they release into the atmosphere the carbon stored within them, sometimes for as long as centuries. In this way, they are like coal. That’s why the effect of wildfires on emissions is among the most feared climate feedback loops. Today, this very hour, the world’s forests, which have typically been carbon sinks, are now cruel carbon sources, unleashing all that stored Carbon Dioxide that causes the heating of our planet.
We see dramatic pictures of the fires in North America every day. What we don’t see are those in Siberia and other remote regions, ten times as disastrous. We all are banking on the Amazon region to remedy our addiction: false hope, because they now emit more carbon than they absorb, thanks to Brazil’s “Christian” president. It used to be that the trees of the Amazon took in a quarter of all the carbon absorbed by the planet’s forests each year. But since 2018, when Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil, he promised to open the rain forest to development—which is to say, deforestation. How much damage can one person do to the planet? A group of Brazilian scientists has now estimated that between 2021 and 2030, Bolsonaro’s deforestation would release the equivalent of 13.12 gigatons of carbon. Last year, the United States emitted about 5 gigatons. This means that this one policy would have between two and three times the annual carbon impact of the entire American economy, with all of its airplanes and automobiles and coal plants.
The world’s worst emitter, by far, is China; the country was responsible for 9.1 gigatons of emissions in 2020. This means Bolsonaro’s policy is the equivalent of adding a whole second China to the planet’s fossil fuel problem. No, believe me, there will never be an end to Climate Change ever: it will get worse ever faster.
There is a public health impact as well: every square kilometer of deforestation produces twenty-seven additional cases of malaria, thanks to what is called “vector proliferation”—when the trees are cleared out, the bugs move in, and a new pandemic explodes.
What must we do?
Prepare and pray. Expect an enormous earthquake! It is mentioned not only in Matthew 24 (Read it aloud!) but in numerous places in the Hebrew Bible as well. Follow the Old Testament regulation of ATONEMENT. Leviticus 16: 34 prescribes the procedure, “This is to be a lasting ordinance for you: Atonement is to be made once a year for all the sins of the people”.
No generation in the entire history of the world has sinned more than ours, affecting the very essence of God, atonement not once a year, but every day and every week amidst God’s people.
The disasters will simply multiply: James Lovelock called one of his books, The Revenge of Gaia. Bonhoeffer states that God and creation are synonymous: hurting creation, exploiting it, is a direct confrontation with God. Malachi, the last chapter in the Hebrew Bible simply says, “The Day of the Lord will burn like a furnace”.
Back to Matthew 24 where Jesus displays his usual bluntness when he says, “For then there will be a great tribulation, such as has not occurred since the beginning of the world until now, nor ever will. Unless those days had been cut short, no life would have been saved; but for the sake of the elect those days will be cut short”.
For the sake of the elect……Romans 8: 18 has something to say there, “The creation waits in eager expectation for the children of God to be revealed………We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pain of childbirth. We wait eagerly for our adoption… for in that hope we are saved.”
Can we use the Bible to tell what is in store for us today? Yes, a definite YES.