Ok, I'll get off the subject soon enough. Just a little test for us all, inspired by Heather's comment.
“When I shut up the heavens so that there is no rain, or command the locust to devour the land, or send pestilence among My people, if My people who are called by My Name humble themselves, and pray and seek My Face, and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin and heal their land. ” 2 Chronicles 7:13-14
"Elijah was a man just like us. He prayed earnestly that it would not rain, and it did not rain on the land for three and a half years. Again he prayed, and the heavens gave rain, and the earth produced its crops." James 5:17-18
So what causes climate change, pollutants or prayer?
Cue howls of disbelief. Choruses of "medieval superstition!" Derisive laughter...
Yeah, yeah. Get it out of your system. But seriously... Which is it? Pollutants or prayer?
And of course you say, 'It's not an either-or.'
Well... even when it is a both-and, it's by no means a symmetrical 'both-and' is it? Prayer can change the climate quite apart from the levels of Co2 in the atmosphere.
And really - who's running this show? Christ or carbon?
Cue more mocking and incredulity. I hear your protests: 'Don't be ridiculous Glen, typical overstatement! The sovereign Lord still works via means and agents. He might well say to the waters 'This far and no further' but He uses gravity to do the job. Same with climate. He's Lord of climate change, but He oversees it according to cycles and seasons and constants and laws.'
Mmmm fine. That's what I thought you were going to say. I just wanted to see how quickly you said it. As a matter of interest, how immediate was your 'Yeah, but...'?
I'll probably agree with your 'Yeah, but...' I just want to know how quickly it snapped into place. I want to know how strongly it rose to the surface. Because in my heart and mind it springs like a steel trap.
And the place it springs from is not my training in historic reformed Christianity. Oh I can happily use Calvinism to justify it (secondary causes and all that). But I'm pretty sure it springs from enlightenment sources, not reformational ones.
You see I read 2 Chronicles 7, lodge its truths in some cerebral filing cabinet under 'theology', and then return to the real world where principles and programmes and professors and pollutants rule the roost. In the real world iron laws grind out our predicatable fate. And the only difference between us and the 'enlightened' secularist is that we know the name of the One pulling the levers. Right?
Sheesh... Of course by the time you've made peace with this view - the name of the One pulling the levers is so immaterial to the discussion you can afford to drop it entirely. And nothing really changes. Because, let's face it, we we basically reckon the levers pull themselves. Right?
And so here's my little test. Can you say this sentence out loud and for ten minutes refuse every urge in you to clamp down with your 'Yeah, but...':
Ultimately, prayer changes the climate, not pollutants.
Can you linger on this for a full ten minutes? Can you mull over all its radical implications?
Christ not carbon is the determining factor
Here's the deal - if you can remove yourself from the deistic clockwork universe for ten minutes and feel the immediacy and Personality of the biblical universe, I'll let you go to Copenhagen.
Fair?
Ok, off you go. But I warn you, it's a lot harder than it sounds.
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