The Environmental Crisis

Then God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it."    (Genesis 1:28 NLT)

Before I get into the environmental crisis, let me just mention that I received my latest copy of Zion’s Fire magazine this week. I was refreshed to read that in the lead article; America: Righteous Exalts a Nation that editor Marv Rosenthal said many things similar to what I have been saying in this series of posts. It is gratifying to know that several of the Lord’s servants are thinking along the same lines. This makes it easier to believe that even though  our thinking is contrary to that of the world at large, we may be led by the same Spirit. Marv Rosenthal is also among those who believe that judgment is coming upon America for her abandonment of God’s righteousness. I know that in my post: Question 2 I was still quite uncertain about whether or not God was taking an active hand in judging our nation. I still am, but the more I read, and the more I see, the more inclined I am toward this active judgment. Mr. Rosenthal is a Messianic Jewish commentator whose opinion I respect very much. The introduction of this article is available at www.zionshope.org You will have to subscribe to read the full text, but it is well worth the price.

As I write about the environmental crisis, you are going to see that I will paint the picture of the environment with some very broad strokes.

We are accustomed to thinking about the environment and the harm that is being done to it in terms of such things as “climate change”. We used to call it “global warming” before its advocates got in trouble and lost a great deal of their credibility by manipulating statistics to favor their agenda. According to the climate change crew, manmade activity is causing the climate to change into one that is too radically hot in the summer, and perhaps even too radically cold in the winter (that is easy to believe after this last winter season) and in general, the cycles of drought and rain are also being messed up, and in general the climate is becoming more hostile to human life. This is of coursed based on the presumption that the climate heretofore was unchanging, based on less than 200 years of climate records. If we would only stop driving those gas-guzzling cars and trucks (not to mention Motorhomes) and stop eating meat, as raising livestock produces methane gas which intensifies the greenhouse effect, then the climate would return to normal, and all would be right with the world. They used to pick on the “smokestack industries” too, but a significant change in these had no real effect on the problem, so they had to find a new villain. Besides, car-driving, meat-eating individuals are easier to lay a guilt trip on than impersonal manufacturing corporations.

Well, maybe they are right (although I am disinclined to think so). After all, who says that the cosmic disturbances in the Bible’s last days texts will not be caused by the sins of men rather than the hand of God?

I have to say however, that far more than “climate change” I find myself concerned with such things as the quality of our air, the quality of our water, the quality of our food supply, and the quality of the thing that we ingest into our bodies.

I believe that we have been, and continue to be, poor stewards of our planet’s environment, particularly in the four areas mentioned above. I believe that when God said, “Be fruitful and multiply. Fill the earth and govern it.” that it was a responsibility that was given us. It was our first job assignment from God. The first assigned duty of mankind was to care for the earth. It is unfortunate that the words often translated in describing our relationship to our environment in Genesis 1, such as “subdue” and “dominion” carry with them a negative connotation. I believe that God is simply telling us to take charge, and be the caretaker. No one likes an abusive person in charge of anything. We are to use and to manage, not to abuse.

The unfortunate truth going forward is that we have abdicated our responsibility to manage, and have degenerated into exploiters of our environment or at best, indifferent to what is going on around us. Often, we allow the environment to manage us, rather than the other way around.

Much of what is happening has to do with the fact that there are so many places on our planet where too many of us are packed into one spot. We have all become specialists in managing our own lives and have left the care of our environment to the specialists in caring for the environment, and to social philosophers who have a non-biblical world view, and to politicians, who have their own conflicting agendas.

The quality of our air is certainly not as bad everywhere as it is in the places where we are the most populated. As I write this, I am in St. Louis Missouri. Fifty years ago, when I was growing up here, we were one of the cities with the worst air quality in the nation. After I left here back in the 70’s, the city took responsibility for turning the situation around and considerable improvement was made. As I visit here today, I can see that we are sliding backward in this area. Out here in the suburbs it is less noticeable than in the inner city, but this metropolis seems to me to be definitely losing ground. I suspect that other cities are the same way. A city dweller should not have to leave town to get a breath of fresh air. A large part of this too is not the soot and smoke that used to be visible, but such things as heavy metals and industrial chemicals that are not so visible, but perhaps even more dangerous.

The decrease in the quality of our water is, in my opinion, more widespread and even more dangerous than the air quality. Often we can take a break from the city to escape air pollution, but the pollution of our water is even more pervasive.

When I went to Europe in the mid 80’s I was surprised to find raw sewage being dumped routinely into their waterways. We would never think of doing such a thing here. Yet agricultural runoff and the insecticides and pesticides that are the byproducts of the agricultural pursuits, as well as the runoff from the large feedlots and livestock confinement situations are all finding their way into the waterways of the rural areas of our nation.

Our food supply seems to be diminishing in quality as it becomes necessary for farmers to produce more and more food for more and more people. The farming practices therein involved become more like mining operations as we “mine” more and more of the minerals, nutrients and organic matter out of our soil. I have heard many doctors say that today’s food is as nutritious as it has ever been, and then they turn around and buy their groceries at Whole Foods and other such places. And then there is the matter of taste. Is it just me, or does food not taste as good as it once did? There is no doubt that the need to grow more and more food has made it incumbent upon the food producers to take more and more shortcuts in the process. The result is lower quality food in many respects.

And what about the Genetically Modified Organisms (GMO)? Do these modifications have anything to do with the diminishing quality of our food? Growth hormones ingested by livestock are, of course, ingested by those of us who eat them as well. I am no scientist (as you have probably already guessed), but I am persuaded by many arguments that I have seen that suggest that the growth hormones and the like, as well as many of the preservatives necessitated by the need to keep food fresh that must be transported long distances and then have a somewhat extended shelf life before they are consumed, play a significant role in the increasing incidence of cancer.

The things that we are putting into our bodies I also see as significant. We just talked about our food, but what about all those drugs? It seems that today’s physicians feel that there is a pharmaceutical solution to every medical problem. Being a member of the pill-pushing generation, and watching my peers over the age of fifty, it seems that nearly everyone is taking a prescription for something. Really?  I have observed in addition to this that periodic adjustments are necessary to offset the buildup of various elements in their bodies, and to counteract side-effects. And then there is the legalization of marijuana. I won’t even get started on the disingenuous dialogue surrounding the medical marijuana debate. The recreational use alone, in those states that have legalized it is going to have the same ill effects as it did before legalization. The only difference will be that they will be going to hospitals and treatment programs instead of jail. By the way, if cigarette smoke is bad for your lungs, can marijuana smoke be that much better?

Well, I’ve gone on about this long enough. I feel that I lack the kind of expertise in these areas necessary to discuss them as fully as necessary, but my opinion is that we have been poor stewards of this earth of which our God has placed us in charge. We need to think about what we are doing and we need to think about what our responsibilities are, and what we need to do to fulfill them and to become the good stewards or our world that our Lord is expecting us to be.

I know that this series is dragging on but as Lt. Columbo used to say “just one more thing. .” I want to talk next time about what I think the future holds and about applying the five solutions that I mentioned previously.

Thanks for sharing this moment with me today.

The Moral Crisis

As a teacher of the Word, I have  been on a campaign of sorts in recent years to point out the Bible teaching that the Christian is to follow the Holy Spirit rather than the law of Moses. I have consequently been quick to point out that the common idea of the “nine commandments” as being the “moral law” of God is an artificial and extrabiblical designation that is only so designated to aid our understanding of the Christian’s relationship to the law of Moses. I have been careful to point out to my students the Apostle Paul’s warning: “I am a sinner if I rebuild the old system of law I already tore down.” (Galatians 2:18)

Having said that, even I have to admit that there is in fact a moral law, and that this moral law comes from no one less than God Himself. It is in fact broader than the nine commandments and it includes a general concept of right versus wrong that is beneficial to, though not followed by, all mankind. It is what we have in mind when we say we must “love our neighbor as ourselves” (see Luke 10:25 ff.).

 

I was always pleasantly surprised during my career in Law Enforcement that an overwhelming majority of my fellow officers, including those who had little or no use for church, displayed what seemed to me to be a more highly developed sense of “right and wrong” than did my fellow Christians. I attributed this to the fact that they were dealing constantly with moral issues.

There is indeed a moral law in this universe. It does not necessarily reside in the conscience of everyone, but in fact exists outside of us. I believe it comes from our Heavenly Father Himself.

 

My friend Charles, who is himself an astute observer of the contemporary American scene recently said that if only our nation would accept the moral principles of God as expressed in the Bible they would not necessarily have to adopt a belief in God, or even a belief in the truth of the rest of the Bible, but the world’s moral crisis would be averted.

 

As I have said in the previous posting of about a year ago, (it’s time for me to weigh in, January 2013) much of our moral crisis stems from the fact that we have turned our back on the Judeo-Christian outer morality and turned within ourselves to an inner morality that is dragging our society down further and further as we go along. We have become like Israel in the period of the Judges in that “every man did what was right in his own eyes” (Judges 17:6), which is simply another way of saying “what’s in it for me!”

 

And it is not just that we are simply misguided, or have temporarily lost our way. As I said in a previous post, the moral attitudes that are dragging us down seem entrenched. They seem not just to be a change, but an outright reversal of the previously held Judeo-Christian ethic. If something is a traditional Christian value, it seems that our society automatically shuns it. That seems these days to be our default setting. Yet we seem to be shocked when we see school shootings, and human trafficking, substance abuse, ponzi schemes, and such things in our society! We sow the wind, and reap the whirlwind (Hosea 8:7).

I won’t say that the church is just as bad as the society around us, but surveys seem to indicated that we not only lack a biblical world view, but that we seem not to have much better success than the society at large in either understanding or implementing God’s moral values in our own lives.

I think we are sometimes intimidated by the society around us and we want to retreat into our own little cliques and we don’t engage that society around us. We have met with resistance and ridicule and have become discouraged. As Jesus said: “Sin will be rampant everywhere, and the love of many will grow cold (Matthew 24:12)”.

Yet we really need to engage our society. First, we need to recognize that we are different from the world around us and accept that we will meet with resistance when we seek to live for Christ. Peter had some advice for us:

 “It is God’s will that your honorable lives should silence those ignorant people who make foolish accusations against you. For you are free, yet you are God’s slaves, so don’t use your freedom as an excuse to do evil. Respect everyone, and love your Christian brothers and sisters. Fear God, and respect the king.” 1 Peter 2:15-17 NLT

We desperately need also to get involved in the political process. We have the privilege of living in a country where we elect our leaders. Everyone’s vote counts the same. That is quite remarkable when you think about it! However, not only is there a dearth of Christians running for public office, but many of us don’t even vote!

We are often encouraged to pray for a righteous government, and we should, but a righteous government simply will not happen until the people in it are willing to act righteously. I cannot see this happening any other way than by Christians becoming involved in it.

We have a tendency to diminish the value and the power of prayer. Yet there is probably no more valuable and no more powerful thing that we can do. The society of Jesus’ day, into which the Christian church was born was among the most Godless and immoral that the world has ever known. Yet the New Testament continually admonishes us to pray for the society around us.  The government was not a popularly elected one that had the possibility of participation on all levels of society as ours does, yet we are continually admonished to pray for the government and its leaders.

Our moral crisis is not just a crisis in government, yet we cannot escape the observation that the government is taking a leadership role in the moral direction that our society is going. With a popularly elected leadership, we must also admit that we, the electorate are tolerating the direction that our leadership is taking. To pray and to participate in our society, and to resolve to reclaim it for God’s righteousness and the Holy Spirit’s leadership is the only way that our moral crisis can be averted.

Next time: the environmental crisis.

Thanks for sharing this moment with me today.