The Sweet Surrender of Salvation

By rising above self-interest we can taste the true honey of new creation.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, recently warned that coronavirus infections could more than double to 100,000 a day. On Sunday, Florida reported 15,300 new cases, the most of any state in a single day. Epidemiologists keep saying we told you so. We should have seen this coming. The anticipated summer-season wane proved contrary as a hot July in the country’s hottest Southern and Western states ushered in COVID-19 levels surpassing the highs of last April. The ever-burgeoning pandemic coaxed columnist David Brooks to list COVID-19 as first among five epic crises facing our country. Piling on with the pandemic he adds gigantic changes related to race, political alignment, cultural priorities, and economics—all compounding to portend what Brooks labels a “moral, spiritual and emotional disaster.”

Left out of this deleterious deluge, as noted by a profusion of commenters, is the ever-looming cataclysm of climate change. Minneapolis meteorologist Paul Douglas, politically conservative and Jesus loving, reiterates over and over the multiple strands of evidence—CO2 levels at a 3-million-year high, temperatures and sea levels rising, rains falling harder, growing seasons longer, and crazy weather everywhere. Scripture warns of destruction by fire and famine, a portent, perhaps, of global heat to come. Jesus and the prophets tied cosmological catastrophe to wars and strife as harbingers of apocalyptic doom (Deut. 32:22; Mark 13:8; 2 Pet. 3:7; Rev. 8:7). We reap what we sow.

The gospel forecast of “a new heaven and a new earth, where righteousness dwells” induces human longing for new birth (2 Pet. 3:13). “Creation groans” under the weight ...