Defiling our planet

Undaunted by facts, the climate change champions soldier on, indicting mankind for rising planetary thermostats, though satellite measurements show no temperature rise for 19 years. (It’s just a “pause,” they claim.)

But strangely enough, Scripture does indicate a planetary defilement that actually is caused by man, though the phenomenon is little noted by pagan and Christian alike. Consider two intriguing statements in the Old Testament, the first from Leviticus 18, a chapter devoted to forbidding a list of sexual deviancies:

“You shall not lie with a male as with a woman; it is an abomination. … Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.”

So the sexual immorality of humans makes the land unclean—indeed, sick enough to vomit. But that may be poetic language and nothing more, someone will contest. After all, trees of the field do not literally “clap their hands” either, as Isaiah 55:12 portrays. Still, what if the point about human-caused land pollution by moral perversion were made elsewhere in Scripture? We go to Ezekiel 36:

“Son of man, when the house of Israel lived in their own land, they defiled it by their ways and their deeds. Their ways before me were like the uncleanness of a woman in her menstrual impurity. So I poured out my wrath upon them for the blood that they had shed in the land, for the idols with which they had defiled it.”

So not only sexual sin but idolatry and wanton bloodshed also defile a land. These are the things that defile a land, so that it has a bad reaction, according to God. It vomits the inhabitants out.

A case in point is the Babylonian captivity, in which the people of Israel were spit out of the land God had given to Abraham in the seventh century B.C., when it was finally fed up with their wanton neglect of the Sabbath rest from land use that God had commanded they observe. Why would God have done something as drastic as this unless the land was very important to God?

Sometimes we are partly in the right and therefore all in the wrong. The Jewish leaders of Jesus’ day, for example, thought it was something you eat that defiled you, but Jesus corrected their half-truth about spiritual mouth hygiene:

“[I]t is not what goes into the mouth that defiles a person, but what comes out of the mouth; this defiles a person” (Matthew 15:11).

Likewise, climate alarmists are right about manmade land jeopardy, but it is not as they think: What seriously defiles a planet is not carbon dioxide from the odd power plant, but the polluting effects of life lived in flagrant defiance of God.