Blood on the Soil

I watched the movie "2012" last night. Now begins the inevitable countdown to 21 December 2012 and all the accompanying paranoia that our extinction-obsessed humanity will indulge in. It's gonna be a great 2012 Christmas and 2013 New Year celebration when everybody realizes that the doomsday clock has been reset to the next end-time scenario.

The movie's significance was intensified by the relevance of it's earthquake driven story line. Haiti, Chile, and now Turkey, have dominated international news, creating an awareness of seemingly increasing instability in the earth's crust. The University of Milwaukee have a great page that records seismic activity: www4.uwm.edu/letsci/geosciences/seismic_center/2010_eq/. 2010 has been seismically busy.

It's seems the decline of the influence of Christianity on Western culture has led to a diminished awareness of the biblical end-time scenario. Now Nostradamus or the Mayans are regarded to have the more reliable visions of the future. My exposure to biblical truth directs me to believe that any end-of-the-world scenario is incorrect, because the bible describes the end of this age as the day of the Lord, not the destruction of humanity or the planet. The visible, tangible, sudden return of Jesus as Judge of all mankind will mark the end of this current time in which he is preached as Saviour, and trusted in through faith.

Yes, the bible describes a drastic change in the condition of all creation taking place in the wake of the return of Jesus, but the interruption to our current reality will not be global destruction, but the unexpected return of the King.

In passages like Matthew 24, the bible does describe an escalation of distress and misery in the build up to this appearing of Christ. Earthquakes, famines and wars are all signs of the imminence of the event. When Christians point to these natural or sociopolitical disasters as "sings of the times" there is generally a backlash from those who have reduced God to a benign, largely inactive, plaintiff notion of goodness and benevolence that permeates the universe like a lingering smell.

Is God in the business of dishing out earthquakes as either punishment for iniquity or to mark out the tick-tock of His end time clock?

I want to suggest that our environmentalist friends and their pantheistic personification of nature (most recently popularized by the movie "Avatar") are a little closer to the truth that we realise. The bible does seem to identify the earth and even rocks and plants as (albeit small) living, role-playing characters on the stage of the redemption story.

Moses is told to speak to a rock, Jesus curses a fig tree and cautions that rocks will do the work of worship if people, made in God's image, go on strike.

In a passage that is pivotal to my point, in Genesis 4:10 God informs the murderer Cain that the blood of his brother and victim, Abel is crying out to Him from the soil. As a result Cain, previously a produce farmer, is cut off from the land. This principle of sin leading to expulsion from the land (the source of life and anchor of identity), repeats itself through scripture. Leviticus 18 and 20 describes how the land inhabited by wicked people becomes defiled and eventually vomits them out to cleanse itself. The original inhabitants of the Promised land were vomited out when the Israelites invaded. Likewise, Israel was vomited out of the promised land into exile in Assyria and Babylon after years of backsliding.

In Old Testament times sinfulness was regionalised by restrictions in travel and communication. This allowed judgment to fall on Sodom and Gomorrah and allowed other cities to survive. However, the corrupting influence of a global village has allowed darkness to spread to every culture on the plant. A pornographic act in California can be viewed by someone in Siberia if they have online access. Narcotics from a poppy plant grown in Afghanistan can enter the veins of someone in Cape Town through the medium of travel. As a result, Romans 8:18-22 describes how all Creation is distressed like a woman in childbirth.

The agony of the labour pain typifies sin and how it makes us long for the one true just King to appear and rule. The labour pain and groans precede the joyous event of the revelation of the Son of Man and his devoted ones.

If this stands to reason, then the instability of our planet is more our doing than God's. No, I'm not talking about greenhouse gases, but I am talking about pollution. The pollution of corruption, injustice, pride and wickedness that causes the land to writhe in pain and eventually vomit us out.

^{Romans 2:5} But because you are stubborn and refuse to turn from your sin, you are storing up terrible punishment for yourself. For a day of anger is coming, when God’s righteous judgment will be revealed.