Will You Be Able to Resist the Big Green Dragon?

[Note: Our guest contributor, Jan Markell, is the founder and director of Olive Tree Ministries, headquartered in Minneapolis, MN. She rightly discerns the human inclination toward spirituality and worship and the misguided tendency to worship nature or the creation instead of nature’s God, our Creator.]

To the secular left, climate is king. Maybe I should say, it is a god. Environmentalism has become a religion. People enthusiastically worship mother earth and scoff at God the Father. This has been a fifty-year process that officially began in the early 1970s with Earth Day. The left decided that anyone who disrespected the earth was suspect.

So, how far will they go? Many voices are warning of climate lockdowns coming soon.

I am quoting online journalist Michael Snyder who writes, “Climate change lockdowns are here, and if people don’t respond very strongly to this, it is likely that we will soon see similar measures implemented all over the western world. The elite have always promised to do ‘whatever it takes’ to fight climate change, and now we are finding out that they weren’t kidding.”

Snyder continues, “Over in the UK, residents of Oxfordshire will now need a special permit to go from one ‘zone’ of the city to another. But, even if you have the permit, you will still only be allowed to go from one zone to another a maximum of 100 days per year.”

He concludes, “Oxfordshire County Council yesterday approved plans to lock residents into one of six zones to ‘save the planet’ from global warming. The latest stage in the agenda is to place electronic gates on key roads in and out of the city, confining residents to their own neighborhoods.”

If you Google this story on the Internet, you will be told it is all fake news! Be assured, that means the hard-left Silicon Valley does not want you to have all the facts and to know what’s coming!

Covid lockdowns set the gold standard. Many felt they could trust government to be for the people. Nothing could be further from the truth. Government is for advancing a control agenda and not much else! And now the lockdown mentality resurfaces for the green dragon.

Criticizing today’s green agenda does not make one anti-environment and in favor of dirty air and water! Because mankind was created in His image, God gave men and women a privileged place among all creatures and commanded them to exercise stewardship of the earth (Genesis 1:26-28; Psalm 8:6-8).

So how has the Church responded to this? Beginning 25 years ago, too many churches jumped on the climate change bandwagon. Articles today on the website of the National Association of Evangelicals feature a push to recycle and twist what the Bible says to suggest we are “killing the Planet.” They state that “loving the least of these” (Matthew 25:40) has climate implications.

Mind you, this is the National Association of Evangelicals and not the National Council of Churches, known for such leftist thinking and theology. What happened to the NAE’s once-solid focus on winning the lost while there is still time? This has been the focus of evangelicalism my entire life. Social justice and climate issues are pushing this aside.

I would think that the evangelical pulpit would be stating the obvious: God controls the weather, and man has nothing to do with it.

Worshiping the Creation

The climate conference called COP27 was held in Egypt in November 2022. It revealed a cultish agenda, insisting that the world adopt ten new commandments for climate justice and repent from climate sins. Conferees also called for a new covenant — a covenant between man and creation. If they could only understand that God has already promised a new heaven and a new earth.

Yet 120 nations were in attendance doing their due diligence for the earth. The media downplayed the event, so only a few outlets gave it serious attention. Fortunately, many online sources revealed the bizarre behavior the world thinks is normal.

Stewardship implies caretaking, not abusing. We are to intelligently manage the resources God has given to us, using all diligent care to preserve and protect them.

But, now this has become a green dragon! And this, just like Covid, could change our entire way of life and rob us of even more freedoms. Are people going to roll over and cave to new rules and regulations and even be immobilized with new forms of lockdowns? Governments and self-proclaimed “experts” do not know best.

I believe this will be the left’s big push in 2023 and beyond. We will be persecuted for our carbon footprint, for not heating with solar panels, and for the kind of car we drive. Yes, this is leftist lunacy, but it also qualifies as what the Bible calls an end-time strong delusion (2 Thessalonians 2:8-12).

And some churches will go along with this! I encourage them to be about the business of winning souls while there is still time and spending very little time worrying about our carbon footprint. Satan has masterfully deceived our churches to get their focus off of eternal issues and onto a hundred distractions.