God Speaks

Whether you believe in the claims behind climate change or not, one of the things that the intense emphasis on our impact on the planet has done is train us to listen to the natural world when it speaks. It has taught us to pay attention to vanishing species, diminishing habitats, manmade pollution, and more. It has trained us to recognize signs of distress around us in ways that are important. 

What we have failed to recognize is how much we have needed this reminder, as persons of a certain generation. See, in times before us, humans were much more connected to the land. Just a few generations ago, it seemed most folks had a family farm. We are all just a few generations removed from those who lived off the land - the farmers who could tell a storm was coming just by the way the wind blew or who knew the right time for planting just by grabbing a handful of soil or saw the livestock coming into heat by the tiniest changes in their behavior, well before it was time to put the mates together. Our very recent ancestors, like so many generations before them, were very much in tune with the earth. 

But we, in our very indoor lifestyles in big cities with disappearing natural spaces (or artificially-recreated ones), with pictures of the world at our fingertips but unable to identify what the dirt smells like, are very much removed from the natural world. We don't know our planet as intimately as our ancestors always have. 

So we don't always hear it when it speaks. 

That's why the reminders that the climate change debate have brought us are so important. 

The natural world has so much to tell us about God. It is a vital connection to our Creator, as created beings ourselves. The Bible tells us all kinds of things about how the natural world reveals to us the God that we worship, from flowers clothed in splendor and beauty to red skies at night to the ways that the wind blows through the mountains and the waters flow from the streams. To the ways that the birds sing and the wolves howl and the ostriches flap their wings with joy. 

The Bible tells us that if men were to be silent, the rocks themselves would cry out with the Lord's glory. And, indeed, we have to wonder, with all of the distractions that we have today, would we even hear them? 

The Bible also tells us, though, that the natural world is listening. 

In the very beginning of Isaiah, the prophet notes that the heavens and the earth are listening, that they hear, that the Lord is speaking and at least most of the creation is paying attention, even if men aren't. Even if we aren't. 

That's why learning to listen to the creation is so crucial for us. Because the creation hears what we don't, and it can be our connection to hearing the Lord again. Anew. Afresh. To learning how to listen once more. 

This isn't a post about climate change. This isn't meant to jump into the debate. But it's meant to highlight what a gift it can be to us that we have this refrain echoing through our culture right now. 

Because it reminds us to listen to a creation that hears when the Lord speaks. 

Perhaps, then, we can hear, too.