Don't Take My Word For It--The Jehovah's Witnesses Told Me...

Hopefully, the title of this post piqued your interest, so I'll wait a bit to explain it. Isaiah 24 covers some very familiar ground, that the Lord will destroy the Earth, but this chapter raises the stakes by not just implicating Judah, but the entire world. The imagery is harsh and unflinching and doesn't portray a place where any of us would like to spend time, which leads to my general point.

I think my house used to be a regular stop for the Jehovah's Witnesses as they were out and about on Saturdays. It sure wasn't to talk to me, but I think they (in their mind, at least) had developed a relationship with Lisa (they hadn't--let's be 100% clear on this)but they hadn't stopped by in awhile. So, while minding my own business, doing what everyone else does on a Saturday morning (entering play-by-play data from yesterday's baseball games into my 350,000-line Excel spreadsheet), our DEW (Distant Early Warning) monitor, otherwise known as our dog Tessa, goes crazy because someone had the audacity to WALK ON MY SIDEWALK! Even more, they even CAME UP TO THE DOOR and RANG THE DOORBELL, which is not allowed in Tessa's mind. I answer the door, and it's either because of me or the dog, but they're not that interested in talking. They simply hand me an invitation to a presentation (not even a Watchtower--I guess budget cuts cross all lines), and they hightailed it as fast as they could. I bet there's some secret mark in front of my house identifying me as a hardcore LCMS defender.

Still reading at this point? You truly are patient. The title of the presentation (and it will be given at Northern Illinois University in Dekalb, if you're so inclined to attend) is "Will Humans Ruin This Earth?" Read Isaiah 24 and decide for yourself. 24:1 states it rather succinctly:

See, the LORD is going to lay waste the earth
   and devastate it;
he will ruin its face
   and scatter its inhabitants— 

I've commented before and probably will again, but it takes extreme hubris and egotism to believe that we humans can destroy the Earth. Our little home has had it all thrown at it in its history--bombardment by comets, asteroids, extreme heat, cold, poisonous gases in the atmosphere, and even today, in any contest between man and any of Earth's extremes (heat, cold, pressure, height, depth), man's going to come in second. I'm guessing here, but from what I can tell reading the rest of the flyer, the Jehovah's Witnesses come to the same conclusion.

Way back in Genesis 2, God gave Adam stewardship over the Earth, and stewardship implies the wise and judicious use of what we've been entrusted with. Humans can mess things up pretty bad, but still--even the Gulf Coast oil spill of last year has largely been rendered invisible, and much of that was due to the EARTH and not to man's efforts. Consider on any scale the worst of man's degradations to the Earth, and compare it to what the Earth can inflict--tsunamis, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, wild fires (the ones caused by lightning strikes, which are the vast majority), even snowstorms like that one we had last February. Man can mess things up, but we got NOTHING on the power of the Earth. And the Earth has nothing on God. When God decides our time is up, then, and not one moment sooner, will the Earth go away. 

Scott