‘One generation commends your works to another; they tell of your mighty acts – Psalm 145:4’ (NIV)
David states a simple principle in this verse. Each generation is responsible to pass to the next the evidence of God’s mighty works. Typically, we think of this in terms of telling the stories of what God has done. We find people doing this throughout scripture, recounting stories of God’s great acts in Israel’s history in their writings, festivals (Passover being one example), and songs. In all of this we perceive the responsibility to preserve the stories of God’s great acts and to pass them along to the next generation.
But the works of God are found in more than stories. In another Psalm David wrote, ‘the heavens proclaim the glory of God, and the skies display the works of his hands’ (19:1). This sentiment is expressed throughout the Bible, that the works of God are manifest in creation (see, e.g., Romans 1:20). Indeed, you might say God tells the story of his existence and glory in the things he has made. Consider the words of Augustine:
‘Some people, in order to discover God, read books. But there is a great book, the very appearance of created things. Look above you! Look below you! Read it. God, whom you want to discover, never wrote that book with ink. Instead, he set before your eyes the things he has made. Can you ask for a louder voice than that?’
The Church Father Irenaeus agrees: ‘the initial step for a soul to come to knowledge of God is contemplation of nature.’ Who can doubt it? A starry sky, the expanse of the ocean, the forest primeval, the mountains in their Autumn hues, the remarkable complexity and diversity of life – it all bears witness to the mighty works of God. In all this, we perceive another facet of our responsibility: we must preserve God’s mighty works in nature and pass them along to future generations.
But we aren’t.
I have been reading David Wallace-Wells’ remarkably comprehensive and terrifying book, The Uninhabitable Earth: Life After Warming. It is a scientifically informed exploration of climate change, both the evidence for it (which is overwhelming) and the consequences that we can expect to experience in both this century and the next. I commend the book to your reading list. But if I may bottom line things, we are in deep trouble. No matter what we do from this point forward, the damage we have inflicted on God’s creation over the past 75 years or so is almost certain to raise global temperatures two degrees Celsius by 2100. The Paris Climate Accords, which the United States recently rejoined after an insane hiatus, are designed to keep warming below that threshold. A two-degree rise will invoke drastic consequences, most of which are at this point unavoidable. But even worse is that if we do not do something equally drastic to curtail our rising carbon emissions, the rise will be even higher, anywhere from three to six degrees according to conservative estimates, perhaps as high as eight. The consequences along that continuum are not just drastic, they are catastrophic. And we are headed for them. As of today, very few countries have met their goals under the Paris Climate Accords. Most, including the worst offenders, are increasing their carbon emissions as we speak. We are, by our actions, racing through a century during which the temperature will surely rise significantly more than two degrees.
Which means that in the coming decades, and certainly by 2100, we can expect the following:
- Rising temperatures that will make life near the equator impossible
- Massive crop failure and farmland loss across multiple continents
- Flooding of Biblical proportions along coastal areas throughout the world
- A surge in wildfires and consequent property damage and loss of life
- Massive hurricanes, typhoons, and tornadoes
- Water shortages (this is already a problem. Wallace-Wells notes that ‘as soon as 2030, global water demand is expected to outstrip demand by 40%’).
- Dying Oceans (rising acidity, eco-system destruction, and species loss including the loss of oxygen producing diatoms that are responsible for much of the oxygen we breathe)
- Widespread loss of animal habitats
- Mass extinctions
- Biodiversity loss
- Toxic air
- Plagues (viral and bacterial)
- Economic collapse
- Climate Refugees, as many as one billion
- War (depleted resources will ignite them; it should be noted that the United States military takes climate change very seriously. They are well aware of the instability it brings).
This is NOT hysteria or alarmism. This is verifiable scientific fact. There is more than mere consensus in the scientific community about this. There is near unanimity of opinion (the outliers are the sort who put Galileo under house arrest for claiming the sun was the center of our solar system). My God, if only ¼ of the items on that list come to pass, and I should note the list is far from exhaustive, we will be, by century’s end, in a world of hurt.
This is the world we are passing on to our children and grandchildren. This is the manner in which we are commending God’s wonderful works to future generations. If we don’t pull our heads from the sand quickly, we will have failed to do what David – what the whole Bible – commands.
It’s time to educate ourselves, change the way we live, and demand that our leaders take dramatic action to stave off the worst that climate change will bring.
I end with a story.
In the Babylonian Talmud, we read of the sage, Honi, who was walking along the road. He saw a man planting a carob tree. Honi asked him, ‘How long will it take for this tree to bear fruit?’
‘Seventy years,’ the man replied.
‘Honi then asked, ‘Are you so healthy a man that you expect to live that length of time and eat its fruit?’
The man answered, ‘I found a fruitful world because my ancestors planted it for me. Likewise, I am planting for my children.’
Under Christ’s Mercy,
Brent