They do not say to themselves, 'Let us fear the LORD our God, who gives autumn and spring rains in season, who assures us of the regular weeks of harvest.' Your wrongdoings have kept these away; your sins have deprived you of good. – Jeremiah 5:24-25

Today's Scripture Reading (June 26, 2026): Jeremiah 5

A quick look at global temperature charts shows a distinct warming trend. The eleven warmest global average temperatures in the past four thousand years, so basically from a thousand years before the reigns of David and Solomon in Israel, have occurred in the last eleven years. There has been a noticeable increase in temperatures over the past decade. True, there have been temperature spikes in the past. There was a spike that lasted from the tenth to the fourteenth centuries, and another that began around the birth of Jesus and continued until about the sixth century. Still, neither reached temperatures as high as those we are currently experiencing. So, while it is true that the planet does go through cycles of heat and cold, the current warm cycle seems different.

The flipside of this discussion is that we are not talking about big numbers. The coldest global average temperature in the past eleven years was 0.85 degrees Celsius in 2018 and again in 2021. The warmest was 1.28 degrees Celsius in 2024, about half a degree Celsius above the coldest. But we need to remember that all of these temperatures are records and are a couple of degrees above normal.

It still doesn't sound like much, but maybe we need to remember that this is the truth of our whole experience. Is there intelligent life out there somewhere? Maybe. But this planet is built on many "just right" conditions. God has established this planet precisely where it needed to be for us to survive. And it wouldn't have to be moved far for the planet not to be suitable for life. There may have been life on Mars and maybe on Venus millennia ago. But not intelligent life. Earth is in the middle of the Goldilocks zone, where it is just right for what we need. And it won't take much to shift us out of that zone.

I am not saying that Jeremiah is speaking about the current climate crisis, but his words still apply. We are already discovering that it doesn't take much to disrupt the weather systems we depend on and that even a little climate change can hurt us. I often hear people argue that the planet has been here before. And we have; the difference is that at that time, the human race wasn't here. Part of what God did in creating us was cooling the earth. We can argue about how close we are to the tipping point at which the global warming trend cannot be stopped, but at some point, we will cross that line. And the rains we depend on will disappear or intensify. And the harvest we need will disappear. And the only one we will have to blame is the person in the mirror, because we failed to care for the creation that God entrusted to us.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Jeremiah 6