Creation Prophesies
Creation Prophesies
"Woe to him who builds his realm by unjust gain...The stones of the wall will cry out, and the beams of the woodwork will echo it." (Hab 2.9-11)
"And he answered and said unto them, I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out." (Lk 19.40)
By-and-large, modern Western Civilisation and its Christianity, ignorantly and arrogantly treat Creation as insensate and dumb! (It's financially convenient?) As a consequence, great tracts of the Church are almost completely deaf and blind to one of God's major, contemporary sources of communication and prophecy.
For example, Creation's proclamation of God's "eternal power and Godhead" is so "intelligible and clearly visible", that all mankind is left "without a rag of excuse" for not offering Him either "praise or thanksgiving". (Ro 1.20-21) And when the Lord Jesus says that "the stones would immediately cry out", that's not some cutesy-pie piece of figurative poetry...it's rock-hard reality! If the religious Establishment of that day had taken His statement literally, the outcome and end of their elitist lives might well have been vastly different and more positive.
Right now, Creation is prophesying both positively and negatively to the human race, concerning where we are at in the countdown to "the great and dreadful day of the Lord". (Mal 4.5)
"The trees in the woods will shout for joy when the Lord comes to rule the earth...Clap your hands, you rivers; you hills, sing together with joy before the Lord, because he comes to rule the earth." (Ps 96.12-13; 98.8)
"The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God." (Ro 8.19-21)
The often shocking juxtaposition of Creation's extravagant beauty and destructive savagery, is a real Word from the Lord, designed to activate and promote in us all an ever-burgeoning and fierce longing for His Parousia and Second Advent..."when perfection comes" and "the imperfect disappears". (1 Co 13.10)
Creation's immediate and personal involvement in God's salvation of the planet is glimpsed in the experience of the Christian hermit-prophet, Thomas Merton. He wrote in his diary on 13/11/1965, "This morning...in front of the hermitage, I saw a wounded deer limping along in the field, one leg incapacitated. I was terribly sad at this and began weeping bitterly. Then something quite extraordinary happened. I will never forget standing there weeping and looking at the deer standing still looking at me questioningly for a long time, a minute or so. The deer bounded off without any sign of trouble."
And it is proposed in the writings of one such as Isaac the Syrian, bishop of Nineveh in the 7th C, "The humble man approaches the beasts of prey, and as soon as they see him their wildness is tamed. They come up to him and follow him as their master, wagging their tails and licking his hands and feet. For they smell on him the smell that Adam had before the Fall, when the animals gathered before him in paradise and gave them their names."
(Church History is replete with accounts of wild animals being tamed by Christian hermits and recluses, intercessors...most notably Francis of Assisi and the wolf!)
But Creation also has the power to prophesy negatively concerning our progress into the Last Days. This I believe the Lord Jesus Himself is speaking of in passages such as Matthew 24 and Luke 21,
"There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. All these are the beginning of birth pangs." (vs 7-8)
"There will be great earthquakes, famines and pestilences (fatal, epidemic diseases) in various places...At that time they will see the Son of Man coming in a cloud with power and great glory." (vs 11 and 27)
All too often, Christians enthusiastically grab or shrink back from serious consideration of such passages in the Bible, as they seem to portray God gratuitously smashing the human race by way of punishment for sin. But an alternative view and interpretation of Matthew 24 and Luke 21 has been advocated by the German abbess (theologian, botanist, artist), Hildegard of Bingen. In the 12th C she wrote,
"All of creation God gives to mankind to use. If this privilege is misused, God's justice permits creation to punish humanity."
So, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, floods, tidal waves, hurricanes etc etc, are neither meaningless accidents, nor are they a fickle God randomly lashing out. But they are Creation's agonising longing (and warnings) concerning its own and our salvation, intensifying as Jesus' return gets closer.
"For we know that up to this very moment of time every part of the created world shares in groans of anguish (sighs and throbs with pain) as the new age is born; not only so, but we ourselves, who already have the gift of the Spirit as a first instalment of what is to come, are also groaning within ourselves as we wait for God to make us his sons and set our whole being free." (Ro 8.22-23)
So, what some may mindlessly call "acts of God", and others dismiss as meaningless, mute disasters, are in fact prophecy, alerting us to speedily-approaching Perfection and Judgement.
"Go...and tell that fox, Behold, I cast out devils, and I do cures today and to morrow, and the third day I shall be perfected." (Lk 13.32)
"For it became him, for whom are all things, and by whom are all things, in bringing many sons to glory, to make the captain of their salvation perfect through sufferings...And being made perfect, he became the author of eternal salvation unto all them that obey him." (Heb 2.10, 5.9)
"The Lord will perfect that which concerns me." (Ps 138.8)
"You will be faultless on the Day of our Lord Jesus Christ." (1 Co 1.8)
"He became what we are that He might make us what He is...For the Word was not degraded by receiving a body, rather, He deified what He put on." (Bishop Athanasius of Alexandria, 296-373)
"The seed of God is in us. Now the seed of a pear tree grows into a pear tree; and a hazel seed grows into a hazel tree; a seed of God grows into God." (Meister Eckhart, Dominican scholar and mystic, 13th C)
"How long shall the land mourn, and herbs of every field wither, for the wickedness of them that dwell therein?" (Jer 12.4)
"For the land is full of adulterers; for because of swearing (the curse) the land mourns; the pleasant places of the wilderness are dried up, and their (the prophets') course is evil, and their force is not right." (Jer 23.10)
