“They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.” (Hosea 8:7)
So far in 2024 my home state of Ohio has the distinction of being number 1 in a very undesirable category. We have had more tornados here in 2024 than any other state in the union, some of which have been deadly.
As we were sitting through another round of severe weather and tornado alerts today the verse from Hosea above came to mind. Hosea was talking about the consequences of breaking a covenant relationship with God, and in a way our human betrayal of our relationship with God’s creation is a similar situation.
For 150 years at least, since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, Western civilization has sown the winds of pollution by prioritizing profits over people. The fossil fuel industry has known for decades that we have been poisoning Mother Earth with our addiction to fossil fuel, but they hid that scientific knowledge just as the tobacco industry suppressed their awareness of the lethal dangers of smoking to protect their bottom line.
And now we are reaping the whirlwind (sometimes literally) of our denial of humanity’s contribution to climate change. More frequent and stronger severe weather, flooding, wildfires, glaciers melting and causing ocean levels to rise, all are consequences of our irresponsible treatment of God’s creation.
And that’s the simple lesson Hosea is teaching us: our actions have consequences in all areas of our lives. It is such a basic rule of life that Paul elaborates on it in Galatians: “Do not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever you sow, that you will also reap. If you sow to your own flesh, you will reap corruption from the flesh; but if you sow to the Spirit, you will reap eternal life from the Spirit.” (6:7-8)
And as I read recently somewhere, if you sow bullets, you will never read peace.
Peacefully Harsh 