Dear Friend,
Warmest New Year’s greetings from all of us. Your generous partnership throughout 2020 has made it possible for Truth For Life to finish the year strong and begin 2021 with a real sense of responsibility and expectation. Like me, you will have grown accustomed to hearing people say of last year, “I’ll be glad when this is over.” In light of the peculiar challenges and in the face of uncertainty and loss, that refrain is not surprising. However, we believe that every day is a gift from the Lord and that our times are in His hands, and this corrects our temptation to wish our lives away. It is all too easy to forget that all we have and all we are is a gift of God’s grace.
I have been pondering Paul’s address to the Athenians, and particularly his opening gambit: “The God who made the world and everything in it, being Lord of heaven and earth…” The biblical doctrine of creation has been under attack certainly since the time of Darwin, but now the opposition has reached fever pitch. It is not science-versus-the-Bible but climate change theory which has created its own apocalypse. Articles abound with headlines like “How Long Do We Really Have to Save the Planet?” or “Two Degrees of Separation from Climate Change Catastrophe.”
What is most striking about such articles is the total absence of God. Their theories are entirely Godless. That is not to say that there is not a godly way to consider climate. Indeed, many scientists in the Christian community view climate from a biblical foundation and wrestle with the more pervasive worldview which begins with ourselves.
Read again the story of Noah, which assures us of God’s commitment to human survival on earth. He is committed to the well-being of His creation. As the hymn reminds us, “This is my Father’s world!”
Listen to what He said: “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease” (Gen. 8:22). The world God has created has a rhythm to it. The seasons are established; it’s always darkest just before dawn. Creation’s reliability and sustainability are grounded in God. As the Westminster Confession of Faith reminds us, “God—the great Creator of all things—upholds, directs, disposes, and governs all creatures, actions, and things, from the greatest even to the least.”
According to Time magazine, 2020 was our last best chance to save the planet. Well, I guess we missed it! This is not science. It is a religion that has exchanged the truth of God for a lie and which worships the creature rather than the Creator.
As I say, I have been pondering, and I hope you will be too, turning on a daily basis to the Bible, reading the Old Testament as well as the New, and doing so confidently aware of the fact that, as Paul puts it, “everything that was written in the past was written to teach us, so that through endurance and the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope” (Rom. 15:4, NIV 1984).
There is a coming day of God when the heavens will be set on fire and dissolved. But according to His promise, we are waiting for new heavens and a new earth in which righteousness dwells. So pessimists look down and the fearful look around, but let the Christian lift their eyes and look up.
With my love in the Lord Jesus,
