APOCALYPSE
“The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.”
That was one of last week’s headlines in the Guardian.
I believe there once were some laws given on Mount Sinai, when Moses received the Ten Commandments, among which two in particular: (1) ‘don’t misuse God’s name’, and (2) ‘refrain from killing others.’
Misusing God’s name has nothing to do with swearing or saying OMG. God is beyond name. However, we do misuse God’s name when we maim, injure, destroy something that God created and pronounced ‘good’. By our destructive acts we openly spurn God’s love, and become part of the 21stCentury killing machine: every one of us is guilty of these crimes, nobody excepted. We negate God’s love through committing the ‘abomination that causes desolation”, the terrible act that exploits God’s precious possession, and through our actions we are complicit in killing our neighbor and God’s creation we are supposed to love.
Our most outrageous and ominous SIN is that our entire lifestyle excludes an alternative. King Lear’s complaint that “he was more sinned against than sinning”, does not hold true for us: our very existence spells ‘sinning’. It’s no surprise that today we experience God’s judgement in the form of forest fires and melting poles, of disappearing insects and glaziers galloping into oblivion.
Here’s an illustration how ‘everything is connected to everything else’, “Three hundred trout are needed to support one person for a year. The trout, in turn, must consume 90,000 frogs, that must consume 27 million grasshoppers that live off of 1,000 tons of grass.”
When the grass burns, the entire interconnected chain of events, that keeps trout alive, stops. When the trout dies: we too die. That shows us our total dependence on a simple clump of earth: APOCALYPSE lays bare our total reliance on a well-functioning earth. Isaiah 40: 6 confirms that: “All flesh is grass”. Everything depends on healthy soil.
When is Time Up?
When does Apocalypse come? When will the final facets of life show themselves? How much time do we have before there is a global revelation, a universal apocalypse, the moment when the chain of events, by missing one link, stops dead in its tracks, and everything will be seen in its true light and the naked nature of humanity will be clear to us all?
When Jesus was asked that question, as recorded in Matthew 24: 36, he answered, “Not the angels, not me, the Son, only the FATHER has the answer.” And, as Bonhoeffer has stated, God and his creation are synonymous, which indicates that the answer lies in creation. Our world, which is alive, is, and as Roman 8 attests, groaning in pain of childbirth, has an hour of expiry, a tipping point, that only creation knows. At a certain moment, the global system which we have been torturing for many millennia, reaches a breaking point, and a new earth will be born. Jesus came to make that possible.
Peter says essentially the same. 2 Peter 3: 10: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief. …fire will be universal and the earth and everything in it will be revealed.” The commentary there says, “the earth and all human works will appear before God’s judgement seat:” Apocalypse again!
In other words, ‘brace yourself’. Death is not the end: judgement is.
Jesus also said, “The meek will inherit the earth’. (Matthew 5: 5). J. B. Phillips translates it in more accurate and beautiful language, “Those who claim nothing for themselves will inherit the earth”.
I like that version: we, the greedy 21st Century creatures want everything, from cruises to snowmobiles, from second residences to foreign vacations, and now, in a bizarre twist, our luxuries are turning to global liabilities. We now have zero years before the climate and ecological breakdown, because it’s already here. We have zero years left to procrastinate. The longer we wait to act, the worse the floods, fires, droughts, famines and heatwaves will get.
Glasgow, COP 26.
In just three short months, the UN will gather in Glasgow, Scotland, for the 26th time to discuss Climate Change. The first such a conference took place in 1995 in Berlin, Germany. Every year, since then, such a gathering took place, and every year promises were made, and every year promises were broken.
I attended COP 6 in The Hague, Netherlands, in the year 2,000, where I was struck by the presentations made by the Innuit people of the Canadian Arctic who, already then, 21 years ago, saw the ice melting and their livelihood threatened. An ice-free North Pole brings its own perils, now beginning to appear.
Apocalypse also coincides with complete destruction of the world as described in some detail in the biblical book of Revelation. There, in the very last chapter of the very last Bible book, it says that “Everything will become what it is”. Our masks will be ripped off, and the true state of affairs will show itself, because, in spite of all the hype to the contrary, humanity will persist in its sinful ways. COP 26 will go the way of all previous one: promises made, promises broken, even though we are now on that turning point in history. The signs of universal destruction are all around us, but we will continue to ride our ATVs for ‘pleasure’, and travel by car to work as the sole occupant.
Of course, God knew what was coming when, already in Deuteronomy 32:20 he said, “I will hide my face to see what their end will be.” By relying on the gods of progress, capitalism, self-veneration, rather than on the God Creator, humanity sealed its doom. That is now becoming evident.
Not only the Book of Revelation, but the entire Bible testifies to the event of the apocalypse, when the final reckoning is at hand. Subconsciously apocalypse has always been on people’s minds: just as a smoker or an alcoholic knows that the addiction leads to pain and suffering and shorter life, so our addiction to perpetual growth, to ever more intricate and creative ways to burn carbon fuel, leads to doom.
The Guardian newspaper recently interviewed Diana Six, an entomologist for 30 years who teaches at the University of Montana. She took her students to Glacier National Park on a field trip and reported the following: “Life doesn’t just deal with this. When I went up Glacier with my students a few weeks ago, the flowers were curling up. At some of the lower elevations, glacier lilies were shriveled, lupins didn’t even open. The flowers should extend for another three weeks and they’re already gone. Any insects or birds that depend upon them, like bees or hummingbirds, are in trouble, their food is gone. Bird populations have just baked… People seem to think of extinctions as some silent, painless statistic. It’s not. You look at birds that can no longer find fish because they’ve moved too far off shore. They’re emaciated; they’re starving to death. We are at the point that there’s nothing untouched.” (Source: Top US Scientist on Melting Glaciers: ‘I’ve Gone From Being an Ecologist to a Coroner’, The Guardian, July 21, 2021).
“The lifestyles of around three average Americans will create enough planet-heating emissions to kill one person, and the emissions from a single coal-fired power plant are likely to result in more than 900 deaths, according to the first analysis to calculate the mortal cost of carbon emissions.”
These deaths do not include the untold number of birds and butterflies and insects and fish and……
The July 24 issue of The Economist exhibited a wild-water cover with a floating fire-filled TV screen, telling the world that there is No Safe Place anymore, portraying a thoroughly biblical scene.
That truly is the basic message of the last Bible book, REVELATION: ‘everything becomes what it is.’