Commentary: Subtly Ignoring God

'Mother Nature'
#1630c
Mark Schindler
Given 18-Dec-21; 13 minutes

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I am certain that by now most of you are aware of the devastating weather that struck the mid-section of the United States a week ago Friday night and into Saturday morning. Two days later, these reports were from the National Weather Service (NWS) offices in Paducah, Kentucky and St. Louis, Missouri:

On the evening of Friday, December 10, 2021, a potent storm system moving across the central United States resulted in widespread severe weather across the region, including a significant long track tornado. Preliminary surveys suggest this tornado began in northeast Arkansas, crossing the Missouri Bootheel, northwest Tennessee, and across western Kentucky, resulting in significant destruction to portions of the region. Preliminary findings indicate high end EF4 damage in western Kentucky. While the tornado was on the ground for 128 miles within WFO Paducah's forecast area, the total path length was at least 163.5 miles including the damage into Breckinridge County, KY within WFO Louisville's coverage area.

The St. Louis Office reported,

Numerous severe thunderstorms formed ahead of an approaching cold front during the late afternoon and evening of Friday December 10, 2021. Large hail, damaging winds and tornadoes occurred across central and eastern Missouri as well as south central Illinois.

At 8:28 PM CST, the tornado moved northeast and intensified rapidly after crossing I-255, striking an Amazon warehouse. The west-facing walls of the warehouse collapsed inward, which was followed by multiple structural failures as the tornado moved through the complex, including the collapse of additional walls and the loss of a large segment of the roof. This was the worst damage along the entire tornado track rated EF-3. Cars in the rear of the building were strewn eastward and power lines and several large high tension towers were also destroyed. There are an unknown number of injuries, and thus far 6 fatalities at the Amazon facility. The tornado weakened further as it moved northeast, and lifted as it crossed Butler Boulevard at 8:32 PM CST. Noteworthy is debris from the Amazon warehouse was found along the entire track of this storm, tens of miles to the northeast of the warehouse.

These were the preliminary reports by the NWS. Two days ago (December 16), following five days of investigation by the NWS, Sarah Ladd wrote the following in the Louisville Courier Journal under the banner, "Kentucky Tornadoes: Weather Service Releases Classification for Mayfield Twister":

The tornado that sliced through western Kentucky over the weekend, killing at least 75 and destroying thousands of homes and buildings, has been designated an EF4 by the National Weather Service.

The preliminary rating, announced Wednesday night, means the twister's winds reached around 190 miles per hour. EF4 is the second-to-worst category on the scale for violence and devastation.

. . . .

The tornado originated in Arkansas before beginning its trek through Tennessee and ripping through Kentucky from Fulton to Ohio counties, NWS Paducah's preliminary research shows.

The EF4 tornado was on the ground for at least 163.5 miles in Kentucky, the service reported, and its destruction was at least a mile wide.

Paducah NWS Lead Forecaster Gregory Meffert said it was wider than a mile in other parts, and the the full track of the tornado, including outside of Kentucky, will be longer than the 163.5 number. Governor Andy Beshear has estimated more than 200 miles.

While the worst of the tornadoes is now preliminarily, a high end EF4 "it is not out of the question that at some point in time in the future that this could be upgraded to a five," Meffert said.

Its winds would need to be confirmed over 200 miles per hour to get an EF5 designation, he said, and they're just about 11 miles shy of that now.

Kentucky has experienced an EF5 tornado just once before, he said, on April 3, 1974. It hit Breckenridge and Meade counties. The last EF5 tornado in the nation was in Oklahoma in 2013, he added.

"The EF5s are pretty rare," he said. Meffert said the service can confirm two tornadoes—the EF4 that hit Mayfield and a long track EF3 that cut through Christian and Todd counties—but is investigating two others.

"I would not be surprised if there's another couple … confirmed," he added. More information should emerge in the coming days, he said, as surveys are still being done.

Twenty-one tornadoes have hit Kentucky in the month of December throughout the state's history, Meffert said. Before this month, the tornado with the longest path in the state for the month of December was an EF1 that hit on Dec. 5, 1977, and was 25 miles long.

Most of what I have read to you were facts reported directly from the Weather Service as they continued to become clear over the past week and over 100 confirmed tornadoes tore through the Midwest overnight (December 10-11).

However, most of us probably received our information regarding this calamity via the media opinion grinders, who claim to be reporting news but were blasting their trumpets of “climate change” under the wrath of “Mother Nature”!

I am not opining today regarding the bellicose climate-changers, but rather the more subtle phrase that we find so interwoven in a world that is driven by enmity against God: "wrath of Mother Nature." Perhaps this is not a big deal to them, but it is certainly something we need to consider more often within an anti-God world, as we try to do and say things that are more in line with the truth of God’s Word and His absolute sovereignty over His creation.

The personification of Mother Nature was widely popular in the Middle Ages. It grew out of a philosophical idea connecting divine and human that had its source in Greek and Roman mythology, and most specifically in the Greek goddess Gaia, who the Greeks considered goddess of Earth and the mother of all life.

To this day, Gaia is part of the Greenpeace movement of those who worship the creation rather than the Creator and who continue to beat the drums of evolution. Back in the early '70s, soon after the first Earth Day celebration took place on April 22, 1970, James Lovelock, a British independent scientist, published his book entitled “Gaia.” Environmentalists consider this to be a seminal work on nature and evolution that helped shift popular perceptions about the Earth:

The book proposed a hypothesis developed by Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis, that life on Earth self-regulates its environment to create optimum conditions for the additional advancement of life. Living organisms concentrate useful elements, compounds, and nutrients, and redistribute them into the water, soil, and atmosphere where they stabilize climate, feed other life forms, and influence the environment in which they evolved.

The Roman poet Lucretius, who lived in the first century BC, opens his poem “De Rerum Natura” (“On the Nature of Things”) by addressing the goddess Venus as the Mother of Nature and her generative power, producing and generating power over life.

These things, along with many other mythological traditions of different cultures over thousands of years, were developed by people who had no connection to or understanding of our great God, and to this day they subtly continue to influence the way men think apart from God.

Here are a few quotes regarding “Mother Nature” from some notable people. Of course, some are said in jest but all without true consideration for Who really is in Charge of things.

The first is from the late host of Jeopardy, Alex Trebek: “If you can't be in awe of Mother Nature, there's something wrong with you.”

This next one is from Frances Arnold. She is a Nobel prize-winning professor of bioengineering and biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology: “Mother Nature has been the best bioengineer in history. Why not harness the evolutionary process to design proteins?”

From Geraldo Rivera: “Mother Nature may be forgiving this year, or next year, but eventually she's going to come around and whack you. You've got to be prepared.”

Michael Greger, who is a physician, author, and proponent of whole plant-based diets, has said: “Milk contains growth hormones designed by Mother Nature to put a few hundred pounds on a baby calf within a few months.”

An English scientist and professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkley by the name of Michael Walker said, “If we didn't need eight hours of sleep and could survive on six, Mother Nature would have done away with 25 percent of our sleep time millions of years ago. Because when you think about it, sleep is an idiotic thing to do.”

And finally, this is from Simon Sinek, who is an inspirational speaker and author of 5 books: “Some people are born good-looking. Some have the gift of gab. And some are lucky enough to be born smarter than the rest of us. Whether we like it or not, Mother Nature does not dole these characteristics out evenly.”

This is just a very small sampling of the hundreds of quotes from notable people that you can find that “harmlessly enough” attribute the work and qualities of our great and sovereign Creator to His creation because they are blind to the truth.

But perhaps we, who have been given the privilege to know the great God, who inhabits eternity and declares the end from the beginning, need to be more seriously circumspect regarding attribution of His sovereign authority. When the rest of the world that claims to be wise is proclaiming the glory of the creation above the Creator, it is good to keep our minds focused on the truth as spoken in places like Job 37, where Elihu proclaims God’s majestic sovereignty, as translated here in the Good News Bible:

Listen, all of you, to the voice of God, to the thunder that comes from his mouth.
He sends the lightning across the sky, from one end of the earth to the other.
Then the roar of his voice is heard, the majestic sound of thunder, and all the while the lightning flashes.
At God's command amazing things happen, wonderful things that we can't understand.
He commands snow to fall on the earth, and sends torrents of drenching rain.
He brings our work to a stop; he shows us what he can do.
The wild animals go to their dens. The storm winds come from the south, and the biting cold from the north.
. . . .
Lightning flashes from the clouds, as they move at God's will. They do all that God commands, everywhere throughout the world. God sends rain to water the earth; he may send it to punish us, or to show us his favor . . ..
God's power is so great that we cannot come near Him; He is righteous and just in His dealings with us.
No wonder, then, that everyone is awed by Him, and that He ignores those who claim to be wise.

Brethren, God may ignore the foolishness of a world that claims to be wise but credits His power to Mother Nature. But I sincerely doubt He is ignoring the words and attitudes of those to whom much has been given (Luke 12:48) to intimately know Him and His majestic power!

MS/aws/dcg