Climate change & persecution?

Dominating the news during the Autumn and early New Year were the reports of ferocious bush fires sweeping across Eastern Australia.

Properties have been destroyed, people killed and from time to time, with high temperatures and strong winds, it was acknowledged that the situation was out of control.

Unimaginable

The controversy about whether or not climate change is happening goes on. But let us suppose it is true. Does Scripture have anything to say about it – anything distinctive to add to the conversation concerning what to do about it?

A theological approach does not, of course, rule out secondary causes – monitoring greenhouse gases is not irrelevant. Nor does it necessarily link specific disasters with the sins of particular people or communities, (John 9:1-3). So I am certainly not pointing a finger at Australia as a particularly bad country (Luke 13:1-5). I am simply speaking generally. But what a theological approach does tell us is that the fact that the earth is the Lord’s and everything in it. Psalm 24:1 should be taken seriously.

It’s not something the secular mind would ever contemplate, but the Bible does appear to link environmental disaster with violence and persecution, especially the persecution of God’s people. We are against the persecution of anyone, but attacking Christians is to touch the apple of God’s eye and brings consequences the ordinary person would never have imagined.

A biblical sketch

A brief reminder from Scripture of the link I am suggesting would go something like this.

In Genesis 4, the first murder is framed in terms of religious persecution. Cain killed Abel because his own actions were evil and his brother’s were righteous (1 John 3:12). And what was God’s subsequent judgement on Cain? ‘When you work the ground, it will no longer yield crops for you’ (Gen. 4:12). The earth became barren for Cain.

The greatest environmental catastrophe of all was the Flood. It was an undoing of creation (Gen. 1:9) in response to the earth being filled with violence ( Gen. 6:13).

Answering the oppression of God’s people in Egypt, Pharaoh was humbled by ten great plagues formidably environmental in nature – from insect swarms to polluted rivers.

Even for Israel in the Promised Land many of God’s judgements concern climate and famines (Lev. 26:19; Ruth 1:1; 1 Kings 17:1, etc.).

But it is when we get to the last book of the Bible that more clarity is given. In Revelation 8, the seventh and last seal of God’s scroll is about to be opened by Christ – the final judgement. But when it is opened there comes a delay. There is a strange silence in heaven (Rev. 8:1). Warning trumpets are given to seven angels. But nothing happens immediately. In the silence, the prayers of the saints rise as incense from the altar to God’s throne (Rev.8:3,4). These prayers seem to be especially the prayers of the martyrs mentioned in Chapter 6. The martyrs are asking God: ‘How long before you avenge our blood?’ Then the silence is broken as the angelic trumpets sound. These trumpets bring judgements on the earth, which blast out a fanfare of warnings of the Last Judgement. But we immediately note that the nature of these judgements is mostly environmental. ‘A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up’ (Rev. 8:7).

Persecution of God’s people appears to be linked to environmental disaster.

No surprises

If this is true, then is it any surprise that the last century, which has seen the greatest number of Christian martyrs in history, should also be the century in which we have begun to see the earth’s ecology and environment start to unravel? According to Open Doors USA, across the top 50 countries where there is persecution, 11 Christians are killed every day for their faith and every month 105 churches are attacked, burned or vandalised.

It would not of course prove anything, but it would be interesting to see, for example, a graph correlating the rise in persecution and the rise in sea temperatures.

As I have said, we don’t ignore secondary causes, but perhaps if we want to see things move in a better direction on climate change then the message the world needs to hear from the church is ‘stop persecuting people and especially stop persecuting Christians. This is God’s world.’

It’s not the kind of thing you are likely to hear from Greta Thunberg or Greenpeace.