WE NEED A DAY OF ATONEMENT.

ANOTHER JEREMIAD? WE NEED A ‘DAY OF ATONEMENT’.

“A jeremiad is a long, mournful complaint, speech, or piece of writing that warns of a society’s moral decline and prophesies disaster if it does not change.”

I like that definition. It fits my feelings. Trump is a perfect example of society’s moral decline, evident in his boasts that he is a “STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT”, a textbook illustration of the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which incompetent people are highly confident in their own judgment because they’re too incompetent to realize that they’re incompetent.

But First: Yom Kippur: Day of Atonement.

It was a yearly event to cleanse the Tabernacle, make atonement for the sins of the high priest and the community, and restore fellowship with God. Leviticus 19.

It is time that the world is told that literally our sins cry to heaven, in the form of the adverse weather events now upon us. If atonement was necessary 3,000 years ago, by divine edict, today it is untold times more called for, also because we have lost our Kingdom vision.

You may remember that my mind is fixated on the Coming Kingdom to whose arrival all Christians look forward. In the Lord’s Prayer, often glibly recited, we fail to appreciate Jesus’ true meaning. Psalm 33: 9 simply says: “God spoke and it came to be”. Whatever ‘came to be’, is holy, because it is God’s divine Word. “Hallowed – an old-fashioned word for ‘holy’ – is everything created by God’s word in his name. It has nothing to do with God’s name, as God is beyond name. It has everything to do with his creation.

Jesus first priority in his prayer, is for us to recognize the holiness of creation. His second quest is to pursue the coming of the Kingdom, the perfected New Creation.

My ‘blessed’ youth.

Both my grandfathers were born in 1870. They also both were elders in the local Reformed Church. I had the privilege to observe them in action. They, to me, illustrated the Kingdom.

How and why?

I witnessed how my paternal grandfather, a small rural grocer, in his horse-drawn two-wheeled wagon, consisting of a large wooden box filled with life’s simple needs – sugar, coffee, tea, soap, etc. – called on my maternal grandmother, a small farmer’s spouse, who paid for her purchases in farm-fresh eggs from free-roaming poultry: a simple barter process. That, to me, a young boy then, made a lasting impression.

Forward to 2026, and back to jeremiad.

Mr. Benz invented the automobile engine a century ago.

There are estimates of fatalities caused by this invention. Google tells me that between 60 to 80 million people have died since the birth of our so beloved vehicle, and hundreds of millions injured or maimed.

Should I also mention Climate Change, also a direct result of powering the pistons? A recent report by an official Canadian thinktank, cautions that “Canada can no longer avoid a hotter climate, and must prepare now for decades of more extreme and damaging weather, and whatever the world does about emissions going forward, the report finds that Canada will be nearly 3 C warmer, on average, over the next two decades, compared to pre-industrial times. Scary stuff. That qualifies for a Jeremiad label. As well as the looming El Niño which is going to be brutal. That El Nino is “Unprecedented”, but the extraordinary is starting to sound ordinary, the unprecedented merely routine.

We need a DAY OF ATONEMENT.

In 1939, in grade 5 of the JC Wirtz School, just around the corner from where I lived, the teacher told us, eager youngsters, that exactly 100 years ago, the first train, pulled by a steam engine, had traveled from Amsterdam to Haarlem, and, get this, he smirked, some people had called this “The Devil’s Doing.” We now realize that, yes, the devil is in the deadly details.

This brings me to THE TOWER OF BABEL.

The people’s desire to build a tower “that reaches to the heavens” reflects their ambition to achieve greatness and autonomy apart from God. This act of defiance against God’s command to “fill the earth” – see Genesis 9 – demonstrates humanity’s inclination towards self-reliance and pride, so God intervened. Read Genesis 11, which records God’s reaction: “And the LORD said, ‘If they have begun to do this as one people speaking the same language, then nothing they devise will be beyond them. Come, let Us go down and confuse their language, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.'”

So, what will God do today, now that we again all speak the same language, and AI is challenging God?

Here is my opinion.

AI speaks in ‘code’. The Lord will throw a pipe wrench into their precious computer speech, confusing the world’s super brains, unable to complete their ultimate goal.

AI won’t destroy the world: it simply will become another vain and failed effort to dominate creation. The immense need for finite energy in the form of fossil fuels, to power their insatiable need for electricity, will hasten the Day of Climate Reckoning.

My conclusion?

We, Christians, in these last days, must confess our forced complicity in embracing ‘the spirit of the age.’ Universal acknowledgement in the form of a period of atonement is needed, while waiting and praying for Parousia.