TURMOIL TRIGGERS TURMOIL; FIRES FOSTER FIRES.
Gazing into the future – falteringly, of course.
The future fascinates me. I know how it will end: Global heating only has one ending: fire. Only fire has the built-in feature of complete cleansing, a ‘from the roots up, radical, comprehensive, all-consuming cure’.
Why?
Because a realistic look at the environmental situation today, reveals that nothing has been left unaltered: nothing pristine, pure, has been preserved: from water to air, from soil to souls, everything and everybody has become de-purified, as turmoil triggers turmoil.
Fire reminds me of the last Old Testament book, Malachi. There, in 3: 2 it says: “But who can endure the day of his coming? Who can stand when he appears? For he will be like a refiner’s fire or a launderer’s soap.”
I like that imagery of ‘refiner’s fire and complete cleansing,’ taking out all impurities, restoring the earth and her inhabitants, to their original pristine state. With Noah’s Flood, only the then humanity there was taken away: creation itself remained untouched. Now it is different: everything, everybody needs restoration.
Ignoring the situation is no solution.
Of course, we can ignore ‘the signs of the times’, but the happenings are unmistaken. Turmoil is everywhere, in ‘nature’, in business, in politics, in churches, in gender: no wonder that gold, pure gold, is soaring, seen as the last unpolluted resource.
Nothing is sure anymore.
‘Turmoil’, the word itself, reminds me of terminal: many of the same letters. The word ‘terminal’ has a distinct meaning, as in ‘bus terminal’, the final destination, or as in a sickness that is terminal, meaning death. Turmoil also reminds me whirling waters with their sucking sounds, their dragging down whatever is in their swirling grip to their doom.
Where are the hopeful signs?
Cop 16 on Biodiversity is meeting right now in Columbia, while the 2024 UN Climate Change Conference (UNFCCC COP 29) will convene from 11 to 22 November 2024 in Baku, Azerbaijan.
Frankly, these meetings only add to the problems, as very little of the pledges is implemented. All around the world the tide of war is rising. Russia is bent on conquering Ukraine. Iran is fighting a proxy war with Israel. China is preparing to invade Taiwan. North Korea regularly threatens the South with annihilation.
The new dangers
Perhaps citizens of the other democracies imagine the fight can be contained to these theatres. No such possibility. Whether they know it or not, the war is already being taken to them, in stealth or hybrid form: sabotage, intimidation, infiltration and disinformation, all using the West’s signature strength, its openness and freedom, against it.
Russia has been waging an increasingly intense war of sabotage across Europe. Iran has helped to fund the violent anti-Israel street protests that have convulsed much of the West. Chinese hackers are inventing new and more destructive forms of cyber warfare. The new war is fought unseen, using the magic of stealth.
In the meantime, natural disasters multiply: we have either too much heat or not enough, too much water, or not enough. Artificial Intelligence – AI – and Bitcoin, as well as bottled water from springs sustain a virtual world that will be wiped out if we don’t leave enough water for crops, livestock, wildlife, and, yes, people.
Reality, the naked truth, is disappearing.
There is a sense that we have accepted that virtual landscapes have the same validity as real ones, and yet this is so utterly untrue as to feel perverse, wrong, unsettling. It threatens to mean that we strip-mine the world of its meaning to the point of having to exist as online entities (a deranged idea) because nothing else is left. Scientists say human activity has pushed the world into the danger zone in seven out of eight indicators of planetary safety. Under a business-as-usual scenario, biodiversity loss will accelerate, with more species surviving only in zoos. More than 70 percent of large wild animals have disappeared: we have taken away their habitat.
At the very moment when all human ingenuity is needed to repair the damage done to God’s creation, we waste our ever-shrinking wealth to wage universal war, not merely against each other, but especially against the natural elements: air, water, soil.
And where is ‘faith’?
Amos 8: 12 says it all: People will stagger from sea to sea and wander from north to east, searching for the word of the LORD, but they will not find it. It is exactly our disregard for the Created Word, so well defined in John 3:16-17, God’s love for the cosmos, that lies at the heart of our predicament.
The danger of a huge temperature rise is very large in the Arctic, where vast amounts of methane are held in sediments at the seafloor and in permafrost on land, and where there is very little hydroxyl in the air to break down the methane.
Turmoil triggers turmoil. Fires foster fires.