“VENGEANCE IS MINE”. God.
Temperatures in large parts of the Earth are soaring, flames engulf large regions everywhere, tornadoes ravage the Gulf of Mexico states, severe drought starve populations in southern Africa and climate extremes continue to taking over large parts of the Earth. Much like oncologists advising patients and their families of a terminal illness, so are climate scientists agonizing while reporting the advent of dangerous warming as temperatures rise and tipping points are broken”.
That’s how a recent ARCTIC NEWS bulletin starts. Bad news, so people ignore it. Carpe Diem is the attitude: enjoy life while you can.
A bit of background.
God loves his creation. In good faith he endowed it to humanity, trusting that our forefathers would honor God’s gift, and develop it according to God’s instructions. Instead, we, just like our ancestors, preferred a different way, and God let us. Deuteronomy 32: 20 explains: “I will hide my face from them,” he said, “and see what their end will be; for they are a perverse generation, children who are unfaithful.”
Remember: God’s timetable is different from ours: this was written 3-4000 years ago, but with God: “A Thousand years is like one day”.
We know now what we have done and face the consequences. We ignored the 7th commandment:
7 “You shall not misuse the name of the Lord your God, for the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name.
God’s name is written on each single created item, trees, animals, humans, soil, air, seas, just to mention a few. Every created entity is holy, but to de-sacralise them, rob them of their God-ordained sacred status, as we have done and still are doing, comes with a price: our actions are backfiring on us: the entire God-designed system has its own built-in revenge mechanism.
Two books.
All this reminds me of two books: Barbara W. Tuchman’s unequaled A Distant Mirror, The Calamitous 14th Century, and James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia, Earth’s Climate in Crisis and the Fate of Humanity.
In Tuchman’s book I found a curious parallel to today. She writes that, “At the start of the 14thCentury the Baltic Sea froze over twice.” That was after years of stable weather. It was the beginning of a little ice age, which meant disaster: crops failed, because incessant rains, resulted in famine and starvation. When the Black Plague arrived – 1344- it found a weakened human race. Then the church too, with its monopoly on religion (no salvation outside the church), was in turmoil, ending up with 2 popes, one in Rome, one in Southern France, Avignon. Both popes lived in luxury and opulence. Division of rich and poor became increasingly sharp. Wars resulted, followed by the Black Death that killed close to half of Europe’s population.
A Repeat?
There is a lesson for us: when the next pandemic appears, it too will find a sick population existing on synthetic food, void of nutrition and healthy elements, an easy prey for virulent pathogens, viruses that can cause death and destruction.
Today we have not cold and rain, but heat and hurricanes, floods and drought. All of central and southern Africa: Angola, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Malawi, Botswana, Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, have severe drought conditions, while to the African north civic strife causes much the same.
The irony is that drought and the resulting death toll, can fully be traced to us, the rich West, and our CO2 production. We, you and I, caused the famine there. God knows.
The revenge of Gaia.
The late James Lovelock in his book, The Revenge of Gaia, writes: “Despite their differences in doctrines, the existence of the Earth’s disease, the fever brought us by a plague of people, come from religious and humanist beliefs which regard the Earth to be exploited for the good of humankind.”
He basically writes that the Christian religion – heaven oriented – is to blame.
All this brings me to Vengeance is mine.
In the Bible, there is Jesus’ reminder, Vengeance in mine. Do not take revenge, my dear friends, but leave room for God’s wrath, for it is written: “It is mine to avenge; I will repay,” says the Lord.
Wise words, because without exception, the Western economy – that means us – is to blame for our heat predicament. Our opulent state of affairs, the wealth we have created, has been achieved, at the expense of God’s cosmos. Prompted by Bonhoeffer’s thinking, I am more and more inclined to see the unity of God and Creation. “It is a dreadful thing to become victims of Climate Change: forest fires, hurricane sufferers, tornado trauma, heat strokes, failed crops, flooding.” Earthquakes later?
That’s why we now are the direct target of God’s vengeance, making true: “It is a dreadful thing to fall into the hands of the living God”. (Hebrew 10: 31).