Today's Scripture Reading (July 31, 2026): Ezekiel 7
There is a "WKRP in Cincinnati" episode where the city of Cincinnati
is about to be hit by a tornado. The radio stations, including WKRP, are asked
to get the word out about the coming storm and what to do in case a tornado
strikes in your area, but Les Nessman, WKRP's news anchor, does not have a
script to follow concerning significant weather disruptions. Nessman's boss
remembers that Les did pen a script about a possible communist attack on the
city. (I mean, in Cincinnati, Ohio, which is the more obvious danger, an attack
by communists or the possibility of a tornado?) So, on the boss's instructions,
Les reads his warning bulletin on the attack of the communists and substitutes
the word tornado every time he sees the word communist. Although the episode's
subject matter is deadly serious, the resulting news release is amusing, and at
least once, Les gets to utter the phrase "those godless red tornados."
Where I live, we are in the middle of storm season. I am hearing
warnings of tornado clusters. (If Les were writing the news release, maybe we
would get to hear the phrase "godless red tornado clusters.”) And there
have already been deaths and damage caused by the season's tornadoes. However,
today is also the thirty-ninth anniversary of an F4 tornado that ripped through
the area on July 31, 1987. Part of the destructive outcome of this tornado was
the result of the sixty-five minutes that the tornado stayed on the ground. Hurricanes
are also brewing over the warm waters of the world's oceans, and all of this is
to be expected. However, in recent years, it seems that the storms have been getting
worse.
One writer recently commented that we need to start thinking about
removing the phrase "Act of God" to describe these storms. It might
be that Les Nessman is actually right. The storms that are attacking are
godless. While this planet has always suffered from severe storms, the
magnitude of the storms we are facing today might have less to do with an unpredictable
"Act of God" than it has to do with being the very predictable result
of the things that we have done to our planet. We are the ones who have
decimated the earth's ability to withstand the various storms on the planet,
and the result has been that these storms have become more threatening, more
dangerous, and have caused much greater loss of property and life than ever
before. The only ones we can blame for this outcome are ourselves.
Ezekiel writes one of the scariest lines of the Bible in this passage.
Writing concerning the downfall of the Kingdom of Judah, Ezekiel says that God
will "deal with them according to their conduct, and by their own
standards [he] will judge them." Basically, God has decided to leave the
people to their own devices. And the same comment might be applied to us. In
the same way that God allowed the rulers of Judah to destroy their nation so
that they would finally recognize that God is God over all, maybe he has
allowed us to destroy our planet so that we will recognize the same thing. There
is a bit of a strange epitaph that could be added here. It is not in the beauty
that we recognize God (a beautiful sunrise is never called an "Act of God,"
although I believe that it is.) It is in the storms that we see God. And I
think that is sad, but deep down I know that it is also our choice.
Tomorrow's
Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 8
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