July 20 2022
THEY KNOW!
A while ago I spoke to a young man and mentioned the disastrous consequences of Climate Change. He is a vibrant fellow, full of ideas and also successfully implementing them. His short answer was: “I know.”
My youngest brother, born 9 years after his nearest sibling, when my
mother was 46, the 9th child in my birth family, grew up in a different ecclesiastical time than his 4 sisters and 4 brothers. When maturing, his only company was an aging father and mother, very conservative and set in their ways. He felt totally alienated from their beliefs, left the church and embraced socialism, becoming an elected council member of the Labour Party. He suffered marriage breakdown, smoked and drank, and died at 69. Yet, when I talked with him, just before he died, he saw himself a Christian, and meant it. He knew.
I found an astonishing passage in an essay by Johan Herman Bavinck, a Missionary, entitled, “Religious consciousness and Christian Faith, where this eminent scholar wrote, “I have the impression that Tertullian puts his finger on one of the most remarkable phenomena in religious studies when he points out that pagans in their rare moments of existential fear, forget all their own gods and scuttle their cheap myths as the call out to God.”
In their times of deepest dread, they bow down to the God-Creator. They know.
So, what do they know?
That brings me to Romans 1: 20, and also to the Belgic Confession. First Romans: “For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that people are without excuse.”
The Belgic Confession – now mostly a forgotten declaration of faith – uses this very
passage to tell us about God:
“We know him by two means: first, by the creation, preservation and government of the universe; which is before our eyes as a most elegant book, wherein all creatures, great and small, are as so many characters leading us to contemplate the invisible things of God, namely, his power and divinity, as the apostle Paul saith, Romans 1:20. All which things are sufficient to convince men, and leave them without excuse.”
The secondary source is the Bible, of course.
The curious part is that, due to the all-pervasive influence of Gnosticism, that Greek Pagan belief, the church has been majoring in minors ever since the year 320 A.D., when it became a world-force by associating with the institutional powers, solely concentrating on the Bible, God’s indirect word, while neglecting, as largely irrelevant, God’s created or direct word.
Here too, as with all matters today, the truth is that even the church is becoming what it is, just as our economy, based on fossil fuels, is rapidly becoming what it is: a lethal enterprise, with world annihilation as the result.
People know that the church, by narrowing its focus on the Bible, has become irrelevant, and have abandoned the church. The church’s failure to acknowledge that creation is of divine design – Psalm 24 unambiguously states “The earth is the Lord’s – echoes another Psalm -105 – They see, but do not see.
Paradoxically: the church, as instrument of salvation, is increasingly becoming a hindrance to achieve that salvation, now especially, as the globe is governed by unbearable heat, as drought prevents agricultural growth and so fosters famine.
They see, but do not see.
James Lovelock correctly entitled one of his books, The Revenge of Gaia, Gaia being his name for the living earth. Just as Bach, the great composer, just as Shakespeare, the great playwright, are immortalized by their inspired works, so God, the creator should be honored for the world he made. When Paul, the great missionary, appeared at then the world’s foremost forum, the Areopagus, and addressed the elite gathered there, he started with, “The God who made the world and everything in it, is the Lord of heaven and earth.” He used the same opening words elsewhere.
What has happened?
“God has hidden his face”, says Deuteronomy 30. God, in his wisdom, has surrendered the ‘fate of the earth’ to his creatures who are a very talented lot. Why? ‘To see what their end will be’. We now see what’s happening when WE are in charge.
What really happened?
1 John 5: 19 is quite to the point: “Not God, but the evil one calls the shots now.” His goal, in his unrelenting hate, is to destroy God’s creation. We have been his willing allies, and now, Anno 2022, we are approaching ‘the end’.
We all know, even as we don’t want to know. Today the planet speaks in a roar impossible to ignore.