Global Warming Through the Eyes of the Old Testament Prophets

A prophet, I’ve always assumed, is someone who predicts the future.   this is what most people believe. It’s what I learned as a kid. I remember a large Christmas gathering of my extended family. During the gift exchange a copy of Hal Lindsey’s,  Late Great Planet Earth, was unwrapped and passed around.   The grownups told me that it was a book written by a a minister who could tell what would happen in the future because he knew how to interpret hard-to-understand verses in the Bible.   It was a book of prophecy.

Later, when I was 12, a well-thumbed paperback copy of Ruth Montgomery’s,  A Gift of Prophecy: the Phenomenal Jeanne Dixon joined the latest issues of Life Magazine strewn on our living room coffee table.

This idea that a prophet was a mysterious forecaster of the future stuck with me even after I entered seminary.  In order to be ordained as a minister in those days, I needed to pass a test on the basic content of the Old and New Testaments.

I read the Bible furiously for weeks in order to earn a passing grade in the English Bible Content Exam.  I read the prophets: Jeremiah, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Micah, Hosea and the rest.  They read quickly because they were cast in poetic verse, less words per page. 

I read assuming that these prophets were making predictions.  Somewhere in the avalanche of words were precise forecasts. Like a wet watercolor painting their words and ideas ran together like a wet watercolor painting. The entire last third of the Old Testament lingered in my mind like a vivid but unfocused wash of biblical-sounding declarations.

I passed the test.

After that I had little incentive to return to that mass of writing either for school and especially not for my work in congregations.

Encountering the Prophets

In my last year of seminary I landed, for reasons that I can’t remember, in a class titled, “Preaching from the Prophets.”  It was taught by Bernard Anderson who used Abraham Heschel’s famous, The Prophets, as the text.

The class ushered me into a world of thought that I never realized was there. I never became a disciplined preacher of the prophetic literature, but the prophets’ way of looking at the world has stuck with me through my ministry and into my retirement. 

In recent weeks, I’ve become alarmed about the the climate crisis. The fires, droughts, melting glaciers, and wandering hoards of displaced people signal a growing crisis of planetary proportions. I look at our planet in peril and my mind goes back to that class. I’m gripped by a conviction that the same outlook that saw God at work in marauding hoards of Babylonian invaders is just as apt for understanding the meaning of an entire planet suffocating in unnatural heat.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll return to climate after I’ve described what I see as important in the prophets.

The Importance of the Historical Situation

The first thing I learned was that to understanding the prophets I had to understand their historical backdrop, which consisted of those nervous years before Assyria and later, Babylon, annihilated Israel and Judah. 

Israel was never a dominating power in the ancient Middle East.  It was a minor kingdom squeezed between the Mesopotamian Empires to the North and Egypt to the South.  In those days, a rising empire, like Assyria, would threaten and intimidate a smaller nation, notably the northern tribes of Israel.  Much as a school yard bully threatens the “little kid” in order to steal his milk money, the dominating empires intimidated the Hebrew tribes, forcing them to pay out exorbitant amounts of wealth. The prophets were observers of their nation’s plight and they had their say about what God was thinking.

Israel was divided in those days and consisted of a northern kingdom, called Ephriam, Samaria, or Israel and a southern one called Judah. Prophets of the northern kingdom, whose writings appear in the Old Testament, include Jonah, Amos, and Hosea.  The latter two anticipated the fall of Samaria, their homeland, to Assyrian marauders.  Later, in the tribal areas of Benjamin and Judah, the prophets Isaiah, Micah, Obed, Obadiah, Jeremiah, Zephaniah, and Habakkuk made their pronouncements and wrote their prophecies in anticipation of Babylon’s invasion, which famously left Jerusalem in a state of smoking rubble. 

Exile

Not surprisingly the kings of the divided empire, Israel and Judah, would squirm and scheme trying to find a way to throw off the oppression of these muscular empires to the North.  Sometimes the tactics of the client state, be it forming an alliance with a third nation, refusing to pay tribute, or launching an armed insurrection, would rile the bully oppressor. If it got mad enough the stronger empire would simply destroy its rebellious underling and loot the country of everything worth carrying home, including people.

We use several words to name Israel and Judah’s forced relocations. We call them “exiles,” “deportations” or “captivities.”  Israel was first deported by Assyria beginning around 740 BCE. Later Judah was destroyed and carried off by Babylon just after 600 BCE. 

I’ve condensed a couple of hundred years here into a few sentences.  For example there were multiple forced marches that drove people out of Jerusalem. People also fled the conquering armies and relocated in Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean. Suffice it to say that Israel endured hundreds of years of oppression which was the dominent character of their lives for 7 centuries leading up to the coming of Christ. The Bible is a document of political crisis and the prophets brought into exquisite clarity what their faith, what their God, had to say about crisis.

Hosea

Knowing this background casts a bright light on the pages of say, Hosea.  Hosea was one of the earliest prophets who wrote down his oracles.  He lived when Assyria, to the North, was gathering strength.  As Assyria got stronger it would torment its weaker neighbors, plunder their cities, and demand tribute. Think, “protection money.” Israel, Hosea’s land, was nervous about the growing menace of its northern neighbor and was on the prowl for alliances with stronger states, notably Egypt and Assyria itself. 

Hosea was a keen observer of what was going on in his homeland.  He recognized the irony of his leaders’ toadying behavior to the very lands from which God had rescued Israel in the first place, namely Mesopotamia (Assyria), from which Abraham was called; and Egypt, out of which the Hebrew slaves had been rescued.  Hosea had an insulting word for his people—“harlot.”  Like a prostitute, Israel was traipsing around looking for lovers. 

Hosea wasn’t content just using words to denigrate his people.  He actually went out and married a woman with a terrible reputation for sexual promiscuity.   His wife, whose name was Gomer, betrayed her prophet husband and resumed her habit of sleeping around.  Hosea, ever the resourceful preacher, used his domestic woes as a sermon, whose main point was that God suffered like a betrayed husband because his “bride,” Israel, was also “playing the harlot” with god-substitute lovers. 

With the historical situation in view, the reader suddenly sees Hosea not as an impenetrable jumble of words into a lurid and spiritually significant statement:  God cares about what his people were doing.  God weeps.  God is angry.  Ultimately, God will forgive.  This is just one example of how vivid the prophets can be when we read them against the all-important situation that they inhabited.

The Depth of the Prophetic Mind

There’s more. Some prophets lived and wrote their insights after the disaster.  The most famous of these who lived after the fall of Jerusalem and the deportation to Babylon, a prophet that Jesus knew well, is the author of the chapters which appear in the Book of Isaiah, chapters 40-66.  He’s simply known as Second Isaiah or Deutro Isaiah. These final chapters of Isaiah are not filled with warning and gloom.  They are reassuring and visionary.  Again, the prophets will adjust their message in accordance with the situation on the ground.

This leads to another point.  The prophet is not simply a commentator or theologian.  The prophet, as the name suggests, is the voice of God. Prophets don’t make up their own messages. Isaiah didn’t grow up aspiring to the career of a prophet because he liked people and had a gift for writing.  God summoned Isaiah.  God gave Isaiah a powerful vision in the Jerusalem Temple.  God leads Isaiah to understand that his sinful mouth is cleansed by a burning ember so he can worthily speak the divine message that God has for God’s people.

The Emotions of God

As a stand-in for God, the prophet not only channeled God’s words but also God’s emotion.  So much of what the prophets wrote bordered on hysterical.  Additionally, the prophets set up little demonstrations in order to get attention and dramatize their message.  Ezekiel ate a scroll, Hosea married a “sex worker.”  These gestures were certainly attention–getters.  More than this, though, the intense emotional color of the prophets conveyed the feelings of God.  When a prophet boiled over emotionally at the plight of the poor in Israel, he was embodying how God felt.  What the kings and citizenry thought of as ho hum, a prophet—together with God—might find outrageous.  Through the prophets we see God not as a philosophical ideal. We see him as an emotionally engaged actor in the drama of life.

The Bible’s Prophetic Character

Another point.  Prophecy isn’t confined to the Eighth or Sixth Centuries BCE.  The entire Bible is infused with a prophetic tone.   There are early non-literary prophets like Elijah.  There were probably anonymous prophets whose utterances were forgotten.  There are false prophets who didn’t have God’s blessing for their utterances.  Jesus himself carries a prophetic character. 

The Office of the Prophet

The Book of Deuteronomy, which could be simplistically described as Israel’s constitution, makes provision for prophets at 18.15-22.   A striking feature of the society envisioned by Deuteronomy is that it is egalitarian and power is decentralized.  In ancient societies, especially in the kingdoms surrounding ancient Israel, all temporal and religious power was vested in the King.  Deuteronomy divests the king of much power and spreads it around to others including the religious establishment.  Prophets are God’s special spokespersons.  In some cases the prophet appears to stand above the King in prestige.  Samuel, for example, chooses and anoints kings, notably Saul and David. 

The Greatest Prophet

The supreme example of the prophetic spirit is Moses.   Moses emerges at the point when God’s people languish in the thrall of a brutal empire, Egypt.  God prompts Moses giving him words and gestures that overthrow the Pharaoh’s tyrannical power and sets free Egypt’s slaves.  Moses is more than a heroic actor at center of an exciting adventure story.  He embodies the character of God’s work in the world.  Exodus isn’t the first book in the Bible, but we would be on solid ground in seeing Exodus as the Bible’s first story.  All subsequent stories, even that of Jesus Christ, reenact God’s emancipation of God’s people and their journey into God’s embrace. 

The writing prophets whose literature occupies the Bible’s center hark back to Moses’ spirit. What Moses did to confront imperial power, set captives free, return God to the center of people’s devotion, and establish a prosperous God-pleasing society, are the driving principles of the subsequent prophets’ work. The major prophets are particularly mindful of the First Commandment, which insists that the people devote themselves to God alone and not stray toward other worships.   The statues and ordinances given to Moses on Mt. Sinai can be seen as guidelines for living well in the Promised Land.  If the people follow these laws, they will prosper and be at peace.  If they ignore the commandments, not only by straying after other Gods, but also by bashing the poor, then their society will come apart.   This mosaic formula for living is the main thrust of the prophets’ message. 

By the time we get to Isaiah and the upheaval that follows, it is clear that Israel and Judah have abandoned the spirit of liberation from Pharaoh, the Ten Commandments, and Deuteronomy’s statutes and ordinances.  As a consequence of this long disobedience, God will send marauding troops from the North.

What Kinds of Things Did Prophets Say?

Before turning to how the prophetic spirit casts a light on our own climate crisis, it would be useful to list several prominent themes that arise frequently in the prophetic writings.

1. Sin brings eviction.  The Old Testament Law provided an actionable formula for living abundantly in God’s sight.  To stray from the law is paradoxically self-destructive of self and infuriating to God.   Punishment in the Bible is a paradox which unites God’s sending and allowing.  The judgment of God in the Bible is a mysterious merger of God’s anger and God’s weeping.  The prophets are theologians of the judgment and punishment of God.
2. Natural and geopolitical events may be the tangible forms of the wrath/grief/punishment of God.  The prophets saw a clear causal relationship between their people’s spiritual waywardness and invading armies from the North.
3. People can avert disaster.  Because people brought on their own punishment they can through behavior change avoid consequences of their disobedience.  The Prophets were forever calling for abrupt behavior change.
4. God is human-like.  God feels deeply.  The Prophet’s writings are replete with divine emotions like grief, puzzlement, indignation, and love.
5. People often didn’t want to hear what the prophets were saying.  The prophets criticized to prevailing order of things.  The insisted on sweeping changes.  They saw life from God’s point of view, which often struck people as excessively idealistic or not pertinent to pressing problems.  False prophets found it easy to tell people and their leaders what they wanted to hear.
6. The number one sin according to the prophets was replacing God with other deities and values.  All other evils such as oppressing the poor were rooted in the Godlessness of Israel and Judah.
7. The prophets addressed Israel as a whole.  This frequently took the form of criticizing kings and religious leaders.
8. Warnings, wrist slaps, chastisement, and measured punishments simply didn’t work to change people.  Only full-scale disaster, such as being conquered by a foreign army, worked to restore what God desired in his people.
9. The prophets were conscious of God’s angry displeasure with God’s people.  This wrath, however, was not petulant or impulsive but an indignation driven by God’s more fundamental love of his creation.
10. God, according to the prophets, never stops loving. God’s righteous frustration with God’s people and the sending of marauding armies is never the final word. Judgment is always temporary, God’s love never ends.

So, are prophets precise futurists or fortune-tellers?  Not really.  They can see that trouble is coming.  But they were no more informed about the future than any reasonably aware leader in their time.  More than predicting, the prophets expose the spiritual tenor of their times.  They see the world as God saw it. 

The Prophets and Climate Crisis

The specter of global warming and emerging mass extinctions is a level of threat that compares with the crisis atmosphere that the Old Testament Prophets addressed.  The parallels between climate disaster and the destruction of Israel and Judah at the hands of invading armies are so close that the prophets often use metaphors of environmental disruption to illustrate their own geo-political catastrophe.  Two passages illustrate:

For my people are foolish, they do not know me; they are stupid children, they have no understanding. They are skilled in doing evil, but do not know how to do good.” ²³I looked on the earth, and lo, it was waste and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light. ²⁴I looked on the mountains, and lo, they were quaking, and all the hills moved to and fro. ²⁵I looked, and lo, there was no one at all, and all the birds of the air had fled. ²⁶I looked, and lo, the fruitful land was a desert, and all its cities were laid in ruins before the Lord, before his fierce anger. ²⁷For thus says the Lord: The whole land shall be a desolation; yet I will not make a full end. –Jeremiah 4.22-27

For the windows of heaven are opened,
   and the foundations of the earth tremble.
¹⁹ The earth is utterly broken,
   the earth is torn asunder,
   the earth is violently shaken.
²⁰ The earth staggers like a drunkard,
   it sways like a hut;
its transgression lies heavy upon it,
   and it falls, and will not rise again.—Isaiah 24.18-20

I cite these not to suggest that Jeremiah and Isaiah predict our climate crisis.  Rather, these words feel so contemporary.  They sound like our scientists and pundits who are trying frantically to get decision-makers to pay attention to what’s changing in our weather.  Like us, the prophets saw a terrifying glow on the horizon.  They knew, as we know, that trouble was coming.   They knew, as we know, that life as usual, or even life itself, was drawing to a close.   And each situation, ours and that of the prophets, illuminates the other.

As a general principle, the Bible is valuable because its stories frequently embody principles that repeat themselves throughout human experience.  This is particularly true of the prophets right now whose wisdom casts a blazing light on our dilemma.  The structure of the situation of the Prophets of the Exile(s) reappears in uncanny similarity with what we’re going through today. 

The most obvious parallel is the sheer scope of the crises.  If we dare to contemplate it, evidence supports the possibility that life on earth is going through a “sixth mass extinction.”  Humanity has endured and even triumphed over huge problems.  But never has it found itself slowly being dragged unstoppably into the gears of a monstrous mechanism of its own making.

Nuclear weapons come to mind as a rough parallel.  A nuclear “winter” might wipe out a chunk of the living world.  But humanity has stepped up to the edge of atomic apocalypse and seems to be frightened enough to step back.  Leaders have been pretty good about staying away from the red button.  Aging weapons stockpiles of weapons have been disabled and disposed of.  There is no nuclear bomb lobby paying bloggers to say that nuclear explosions are good for the earth. 

These reassurances don’t extend to the climate crisis.  Nuclear weapons inhabit the limited world of scientists and politicians.  Climate catastrophe is a more egalitarian apocalypse.  Governments and oil companies make a massive contribution to the changing of the atmosphere.  But carbon comes from the tailpipe of my car too.  I can’t even stop myself from burning lights unnecessarily, buying plastic and eating meat.  I curse the oil companies and climate-denying politicians and then buy petroleum products and invest in their stocks. 

The society-wide contribution to filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses is another point of comparison with Israel and Judah’s society-wide slide toward destruction.  To be sure, the prophets singled out the kings and religion leaders for criticism.  But ultimately they were addressing the nation as a whole.  This is because the whole of society was neglecting the poor and downgrading God in its devotional priorities.  The prophets screamed, metaphorically and literally, at the totality of the people’s abandonment of the sterling principles upon which they were founded.  Above all, the most infuriating point of comparison was the way that just about everyone—today as back then–carried on in intentional ignorance of what was becoming of their worlds.

Christian churches in the Western world have not even needed to face the overthrow of the Western Civilization or the collapse of Christianity.  We have many challenges, just not  existence-threatening ones.  Until several weeks ago, I never thought that humanity might cease to exist. 

Accordingly, preaching and teaching deal with smaller scale issues.  Sermons and “Christian” books focus on personal relationships, fulfillment, and spirituality.  Theologically attuned congregations hone doctrines about the nature of the Bible and missions.  Congregants see their churches as social and cultural centers filled with music and art.  Not surprisingly, today’s acculturated churches have few tools with which to respond to something as massive as global warming. 

The prophets, on the other hand, navigate confidently in mega-crises.  The Bible’s prophets fearlessly criticize people’s apostasy.  They zealously take on the reigning value system.  They confront kings and announce God-sized condemnation.  And they declare coming disaster as God’s judgment on national waywardness.  The sheer magnitude and fearlessness of the prophetic consciousness is a gift to a church caught in a rapidly unfolding climate catastrophe.

If we look again at the list of characteristics of the prophetic consciousness, we see several points where the crisis of the prophets parallels the crisis of our day. 

1. Sin brings eviction.  This is a deep biblical principle.  Adam and Eve disobeyed and hid from God and were banished from the Garden.  Israel and Judah sinned and were carried off in exile.  In making our world/home uninhabitable, we are leaving ourselves or our descendants nowhere to go. 
2. Natural and geopolitical events may be the tangible forms of the wrath/grief/punishment of God.  Often climate scientists will say, “Climate change isn’t about weather and the atmosphere.  It’s about greed.  It’s about national and racial pride.”  Thinking about global warming through the eyes of the prophets forces us to confront the prospect that God may be lovingly angry with the way we have been living and treating one another.  Climate catastrophe may represent the limits of not only Creation, but God’s patience.
3. People can avert disaster.  Because climate change is largely a result of human activity the remedy is a change in human activity.  Much the same could be said about Israel and Judah during the time of the prophets.  The prophets’ message was always that God was ready to call off his anger as soon as people called off their sin.  An abrupt change of heart warms God’s heart today as much as ever. 
4. God is human-like.  The prophets teach us that God is deeply engaged in world events.  God cares and is vulnerable to our failures.  God weeps at the wickedness of his people which invited their destruction.  God weeps in Noah’s time over the waywardness of humanity.  He weeps today at what is developing around us because of greed and oppression.
5. People often didn’t want to hear what the prophets were saying.  The insensitivity and stupidity of people kept them from genuinely hearing what the prophets were telling them.  Some people dispised the prophets.  Many today despise climate scientists and activists.  Climate denial in the face of clear duty is a stunning aspect of humanity that may spell our doom.
6. The number one sin according to the prophets was replacing God with other deities and values.  The prophets’ writings repeat this theme: when we abandon God we abandon the poor.  The militancy with which rich nations extract, sell, and burn fossil fuels and put weaker nations at a disadvantage suggests that God’s design for human life is not our central concern. 
7. The prophets addressed Israel as a whole.  The prophets called the entire people to a change of heart.  Not surprisingly the prophets message was often directed to the kings and religious officials.  Climate change is not simply a problem for scientists or politicians to solve.  It’s a problem rooted in the soul of modern society.  All leaders, nations, businesses, and people need to join hands if we are to avert the worst ravages of our warming planet.
8. Warnings, wrist slaps, chastisement, and measured punishments simply didn’t work to change people.  Only full-scale disaster, such as being conquered by a foreign army, worked to restore what God desired in his people.
9. The prophets were conscious of God’s displeasure with God’s people.  The prophets were attuned to God and carried God’s words to the people.  They could feel what God was feeling.  When they considered what was becoming of their societies as they abandoned God’s vision for their character, they had the same feelings of anger, disappointment, and hurt that God was feeling.  This wrath, however, was not petulant or impulsive but an indignation driven by God’s more fundamental love of his creation.   As we watch calving arctic glaciers and wallabies burned by fires we certainly feel bereaved and frustrated.  That’s how God feels.
10. God, according to the prophets, never stops loving. The love of God that the prophets knew is not coddling, permissive, forgetful sentimentality.  It’s like the love of a good parent that can feel exasperation and despair.  Ultimately God’s love, while angry in the moment, is always regenerative and forgiving in the end.  This abiding divine love is yet today what we count on in this present crisis.

Two Passages

We end with two sample passages, one from Jeremiah, one from Amos.  I’ve taken these from Eugene Peterson’s Message Bible paraphrase.  He uses contemporary language, which helps the reader make the transition from the original ancient situation into which the prophets injected these words to our situation today.

What fools my people are!
They have no idea who I am.
A company of half-wits, dopes and donkeys all!
Experts at evil but klutzes at good.
I looked at the earth— it was back to pre-Genesis chaos and emptiness.
I looked at the skies,
and not a star to be seen.
I looked at the mountains— they were trembling like aspen leaves,
And all the hills rocking back and forth in the wind.
I looked—what’s this!
Not a man or woman in sight, and not a bird to be seen in the skies.
I looked—this can’t be! Every garden and orchard shriveled up.
All the towns were ghost towns.
And all this because of GOD,
because of the blazing anger of GOD. –Jeremiah 4.23-26

GOD said, “Right. So, I’m calling it quits with my people Israel.
I’m no longer acting as if everything is just fine.”
“The royal singers will wail when it happens.”
My Master GOD said so.
“Corpses will be strewn here, there, and everywhere. Hush!”  
Listen to this, you who walk all over the weak,
you who treat poor people as less than nothing,
Who say, “When’s my next paycheck coming
so I can go out and live it up?
How long till the weekend
when I can go out and have a good time?”
Who give little and take much,
and never do an honest day’s work.
You exploit the poor, using them— and then,
when they’re used up, you discard them.
GOD swears against the arrogance of Jacob:
“I’m keeping track of their every last sin.”
God’s oath will shake earth’s foundations,
dissolve the whole world into tears. 
God’s oath will sweep in like a river that rises,
flooding houses and lands,
And then recedes, leaving behind a sea of mud.
“On Judgment Day, watch out!”
These are the words of GOD, my Master.
“I’ll turn off the sun at noon.
In the middle of the day the earth will go black.
I’ll turn your parties into funerals
and make every song you sing a dirge.
Everyone will walk around in rags,
with sunken eyes and bald heads.
Think of the worst that could happen
 —your only son, say, murdered.
That’s a hint of Judgment Day —that and much more.
“Oh yes, Judgment Day is coming!”
These are the words of my Master GOD.
“I’ll send a famine through the whole country.
It won’t be food or water that’s lacking, but my Word.
People will drift from one end of the country to the other,
roam to the north, wander to the east.
They’ll go anywhere, listen to anyone,
hoping to hear GOD’s Word
—but they won’t hear it.—Amos 8.2-12

Theological Implications

1. We see in the Old Testament prophets a coherent interpretation of the political and spiritual situation of Israel and Judah.  This interpretation provides both an understanding of the origins of the trouble that confronted Israel and a call to action that would rectify the situation.  While our situation is quite unlike the one in Old Testament times the Prophetic outlook still provides a plausible spiritual diagnosis and compelling summons to make changes that would avert disaster.
2. It follows that studying and especially preaching from passages in the prophets as they speak to our climate crisis will awaken awareness among Christians to the depth of the current problem.  More importantly it will mobilize them to a new mission in the world that is entirely consistent with the traditional missionary character of the faith.

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[i] Peterson, Eugene H.. The Message: The Bible in Contemporary Language (Kindle Locations 31270-31275). NavPress. Kindle Edition.

[ii] Ibid. Locations 38007-38015