Droughts, floods, record heat waves and crippling snow storms, burning forests, saturation of the soil with toxins and chemicals. Disease, pestilence, famine. The climate is changing.
Resistance to such a notion is understandable. Typically, such charges come from technocratic elitists that hate you, your children, and your God; but a vitriolic denial of climate change is an over correction. It denies what we each read, hear, see, and experience each year as things around us get progressively worse and more concerning. Do not be misinformed, trust your senses and look around.
However, we should be less concerned about ”climate change deniers” and more concerned with Christ-deniers. For it is those who deny Christ that create for us a climate crisis.
Not Sins Against Dirt
Climate change is manmade, but not in the way we are told to believe. Your car, your lights, your lawn mower, your steak, your airplanes, your plastics—none of these cause climate change. Even if we ceased all animal agriculture, sequestered every extra molecule of CO2 gas, recycled every bit of plastic, stopped cutting down trees, and all drove electric cars nothing would change. In fact, they very well may continue to get worse. It would simultaneously get hotter and colder, wetter and drier, we would have more disease, more famine, more war, more catastrophe. This is because we do not cause climate change with his sins against the dirt.
Man causes climate change with his sins against a holy God, the Creator of the universe. As these sins increase, so does our climate crisis. The climate has responded to our vile and wicked actions, our adultaries, our abominations, our homosexuality and genital mutilation, and of course the murder of our children.
And you shall not lie sexually with your neighbor's wife and so make yourself unclean with her. You shall not give any of your children to offer them to Molech, and so profane the name of your God: I am the Lord. You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination...Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants. Leviticus 18:20-25
Environmental Indigestion
The world’s global food supply of cereal crops has been dependent on breadbasket nations; i.e. those that produce an abundance that supplies enough for itself and can export the excess. Powerful nations such as the US, Russia, Canada, and Brazil have supported the global food supply chain for many years.
In the recent growing seasons (and sometimes longer) these nations have begun to wilt. Droughts, floods, and late or early frosts have decimated important crops. So much so, that many of these bread baskets, that are supposed to feed the world, have been buying up cereal crops from smaller neighboring countries.
These nations came to strength, often, because of the prosperity granted by God in response to persistent Protestant work-ethic, godly fathers and mothers, and a God-honoring culture that permeated all of life. Now, these nations begin to unwind into a God-hating people, full of wickedness, murder, and sexual perversions, and have made their lands unclean. Crops will fail, the water will be poisoned, the air will become toxic, and temperatures will increase. The oceans might even rise. They are being vomited out. Lord, spare your people.
A Prosperous People: Alomonga, Guatemala
A few decades ago, Alomonga, a community of 20,000 people in Guatemala, was rife with alcoholism, violent and abusive husbands and fathers, slothfulness, and pagan ancestral worship and demonic activity. It was lost. Then, as the Lord may have it, through faithfulness of missionaries and local pastors the community began to transform. Nearly eight out of ten citizens surrendered to Christ. Churches began to spring up. vehicles and street signs don scripture. A community of twenty-thousand, after conversion, closed every jail. On the Day of the Dead, as neighboring cities practice idolatrous worship of ancestors, fifteen-thousand Alomongans gather en masse to worship the living God.
Furthermore, the land began to prosper. This community, with its recently barren and arid soil, drunkenness and laziness, became an agricultural powerhouse. Crop yields increased over one-thousand percent, seasons became longer, vegetables grew larger in less time, farmers prospered and the local economy was lifted into wealth not before known to the town.
Christ conquered their idols. He crushed their drunkenness and gave them vigor. He removed their laziness and made them stewards and husbandmen. He took their poverty and gave them abundance. He rid them of their idolatrous worship, and gave them to Himself, to be his Church.
Repentance and Agrarianism
As the breadbaskets of the world unwind into chaos, I pray for two things. First, that the Lord’s church might intercede with petitions of prayer. That we might be preserved, that we might repent, that we might turn our people away from their abominations and to the Lord, and that the land might not vomit us out. Second, that there might be more Alomongas in the world. Hundreds of thousands, millions of them. Enough to feed the world. That he might make more breadbasket nations. Nations that honor Him in Asia, in South America, and in Africa. Lord, send bread and missionaries to my people.
I am full of hope, however. Do not read gloom into my words. Christ is Lord over all. He is Lord over agriculture, over the environment, and He is Lord over silly politicians that think we can fix the the global temperature by allocating twenty million dollars to research tree equity in black neighborhoods. From His throne, He is raising up an agrarian response from within His people. One that will have the resilience to weather His changes to our environment, one that is generous and hospitable to its neighbor, one that feeds the hungry and clothes the naked, one that is thankful to Him for His faithfulness to his people, and enjoys good food at a table with a faithful wife and many little children, all to His glory.
