Michael V Pardo said:
I see that you're an evolutionist by your reference to fossil fuels and consequently don't believe the entire book of scripture, so continued argument is meaningless.
Scripture and God’s book of nature are not in conflict, Whenever you think they are, you should contemplate the possibility that your interpretation of scripture may be wrong. Maybe this side can help you to show you how science (evolution or that the earth does indeed move around the sun, etc) and Scripture are in perfect harmony:
http://biologos.org/
But, I'll tell you that man's modern religions (including science when it is believed before God) were intended to put you in bondage to fear. This Earth will burn soon with a cleansing fire from God and all that offends will be removed. This very morning while I was out having breakfast at Perkin's and while I was out food shopping, the Lord was ministering to me on these very things and I must tell them before my on-line ministry is complete.
It seems to me that you are more fearful than I am. When I read the Book of Revelation I remember verse 21:5:
“See, I am making all things new!”
The word of God says that in the latter days the sun will get much hotter than it was when the word was committed to men. In Christ's millennial kingdom, there will be no oceans, and men will be scarce. There will be arable lands because the Lord has spoken about this, sending rains to those who celebrate the feast of tabernacles, withholding rains from those who don't. This is all in scripture, but I'll leave it to you to find it.
Sorry, but nowhere in scripture to I find a notion of the sun getting hotter or of “Christ’s millennial kingdom.” I see the Book of Revelations telling me that John of Patmos saw
“(…) the souls of those who had been beheaded for their witness to Jesus and for the word of God, who had not worshiped the beast or his image, and had not received his mark on their foreheads or on their hands. And they lived and reigned with Christ for a[a] thousand years.” (Rev 20:4) The Saints reigning with Christ for a thousand years is not the same as Christ reigning for a thousand years. Christ being God He reigns for all eternity. As for the “thousand years”: Scripture has a thing with numbers and to figure what they may mean you will have to see how the Bible uses them elsewhere. Surely you don’t believe God only owns the cattle on 1000 hills, but does not own the cattle on the 1001th hill. Clearly Psalm 50:10 wants to say that God owns the cattle on all of the hills, the complete number. Therefore the traditional Christian belief I myself hold is that the Saints and Christ are reigning right now in the “thousand year” church-age. They will reign until that age is complete, there’ll be a second coming of Christ, judgement day and then God will be all in all. (! Cor 15:28). While I am not in the Catholic habit of assuming that I can know for sure who’s a saint and who is not, I can think of a number of admirable Christians who died for their faith and whose faith bore ample fruit. Martin Luther King is just one of the more recent ones.
My own family were ancient foresters and I'm assured that there will be forests in limited places, because the Lord has promised a place of habitation to every unclean creature on the face of the earth.
You are lucky then that none of your ancestors thought “Oh, the end is nigh anyway. Why bother planting new trees for the ones that I logged down?”. Not that we can plant new oil. When that runs out our children and grandchildren will just have none left.
Ever since the first days of Christianity there have been Christians around who were sure the end is nigh. And others who reminded them that not even the Lord Himself claimed to know the day ot the hour. It would be nice if the end-timers among us would at least consider the possibility that they may be just as wrong as those before them and that this planet may well need to sustain some more future generations..
Do you know where the safest place is on earth? The plains of Sodom and Gomorrah. Do you know why? Because those lands have already been judged by God with fire and as an example to His church, and God will by no means judge a land with fire twice. Why do I say this? The word tells us that the Lord judged the Earth by water in the days of Noah, and set the rainbow in the clouds as a sign of His covenant promise to never do this again. The word, in the law of Moses, tells us that all things (not some things) are purified by fire and by water (those which can't pass through the fire are purified by water). The earth was purified once by water and some places were purified by fire already, but the entire earth will be purified by fire (once). Consequently, the safest places on earth are those that have already been judged by fire. The Bible gives us more than two such places, history reveals more. Although evil men designed and built thermo-nuclear weapons, those that were used against lands were used ultimately within the Sovereign plan of God. The safest places in Japan would most likely be Nagasaki and Hiroshima, (though these don't have the added protection of low altitudes.) There are even some geological records of places in the Western Hemisphere that have been judged at some time by fire (places where stone was somehow glazed by temperatures high enough to melt silica.)
Most of these places are considered uninhabitable or at the very least, not particularly pleasant places to live, but what does God say with regard to His kingdom? There will be springs in the wilderness and the dessert will blossom. God will bless those lands where His people take refuge, but no place on earth will remain unaffected by His judgment.
God gave signs in His word for the inhabitants of Palestine of things to look for when judgment was approaching. I'll give you one that God has taught me from what is called the discipline of physics. Carry a compass with you, and when you see Magnetic north changing rapidly in circles, there is a magma pocket with a coreolis driven convection current headed your way. The scripture tells us that the earth is going to bring forth fire and pitch (similar to the way the wells of the deep opened with water in Noah's day) so there's going to be a whole lot of fire, massive movements of the earth's crust, and when its all over, only one land mass. Christ's return will change everything on earth, not just spiritual life, but all life.
Safety will be the least of your concerns when God finds you relishing in death and decay rather than cherishing His
very good creation as you should do (Gen 1:31). When we hear about palm oil plantations having driven orang utans near extinction, and that does not fill us with mourning and the will to do something about it, we must be bad stewards indeed. And I certainly don’t want to be found a bad steward.
What gets me is that one neither has to be an ‘evolutionist’ nor an amillennialist to see that Christ does not want us to sit on our hands while waiting for the second coming. You can keep all your beliefs and still be concerned about God’s creation.
So if one makes the victims of the Indonesia haze a simple pawn in the end-game, secretly rejoicing that surely their tragedy must mean that Christ will come soon and then Christians will be glorified, IMHO it shows that one has not quite understood what it means to love Christ and keep His commandments:
“This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you. No one shows[greater love than when he lays down his life for his friends.” (John 15:12)
Obviously some Christians would not even lay down their industrialized junk-food and oil-guzzling cars for their fellowmen. Mind you, I myself am not free of guilt: Even though I go to work by bike and stick to a mostly eco-friedly diet, I still eat fish here and there, well knowing that industrial fishing destroys both sea-life and the livelihood of small African fishermen.