Whatever the weather

We blow hot and cold over the weather. When it’s fine we praise it; when it’s wild we curse it. When it delays our travel, disrupts our commerce and devastates our agriculture it’s “terrible”. We regard it as if it’s some toddler throwing tantrums, instead of what it is: a mysterious, powerful force before which we can only bow in submission, and adapt our personal and corporate lives to its ever-changing moods.

I try not to complain; weather happens, period. But the past few months of “unseasonal” rain and cold in the UK (and extreme weather elsewhere in the world) have tried everyone's patience. It’s made me ask what the Bible says about weather.

The answer is surprisingly little, given that the ancient world was even more dependent than we are on the regularity of the seasons for life-sustaining seedtime and harvest. What isn’t surprising is that Old Testament writers see an intimate relationship between weather and God. Job 37:1-18 is one of several poetic descriptions of the Creator’s elemental control.

It’s the exceptions rather than the rule which gust through its pages. They too point from the events to the God who engineered them. Exceptional rains precipitated the series of plagues in Egypt, one thing in the ecosystem leading to another (Exodus 4-12). Rain and wind triggered the conditions for the fleeing Israelites to cross the Red Sea and then inundate their pursuers (Exodus 13-14). Later, battles were won and lost when weather intervened (e.g. Joshua 10:11).

Frequently prophets thundered that exceptional weather was a warning or punishment from God for corporate misdemeanours (e.g. 1 Samuel 12:16-19). Elijah predicted a three-year drought as a punishment for national idolatry which was relieved after a temporary spiritual revival (1 Kings 17-18). Much later Haggai (1:10-11) saw drought as God’s punishment on self-obsessed people who had neglected to rebuild their Temple.

They couldn’t preach that in western societies today. Ancient Israel wasn’t a democracy or dictatorship; it was a theocracy. It had a unique covenantal relationship with God and everything from marriage laws to foreign affairs was determined by religion. The nearest governmental equivalent today is a Muslim state ruled entirely by Sharia law.

Jesus didn’t cloud the issue with such icy blasts. He and the apostles were hardly candidates for judgement, yet they were caught in a ferocious storm on Galilee (Mark 4:35-41). Paul was shipwrecked after a 14-day storm in the Mediterranean (Acts 27).

Instead Jesus shone a warm ray of hope on the world by declaring that God isn’t (and never was) capricious. “He sends rain on the righteous and unrighteous alike” (Matthew 5:45, echoed by Paul in Acts 14:17). He taught that tragedies are not “deserved” by their victims (Luke 13:4-5). And the early church responded to weather-related hardship not by deepening people’s depression but by pioneering emergency aid (Acts 11:27-30).
 
Of course, the law of cause and effect still holds true. There have always been climatic fluctuations. There was a long warmer-than-average period in the 10^th-14^th centuries and a “little ice age” in the 17^th century. But even if current climate change is partly “natural”, global warming has undoubtedly been accelerated by human mistreatment of the environment: pouring CO₂ into the atmosphere and removing nature’s cleansing agents from forests. Wild weather is tortured nature’s mouthpiece pleading for respite.

But if a butterfly in Brazil can set off air currents that trigger a hurricane in Haiti then little acts of environmental kindness and restraint in our back yards might yet reap a harvest of peace. Meanwhile we can learn to live with inclement weather when it rains on our party. It isn’t organised for our personal convenience. We can control the atom, but not the atmosphere. It’s awesome. It calls us to patience and flexibility.

Think and talk

1.  Read Job 37:1-18. List any good things you can think of about each kind of wild weather described. How might we learn to be thankful whatever the weather?

2.  Jane is praying for fine weather for her camping holiday. John is praying for sustained rain on his crops in the next field. What principles might guide our prayers about the weather?

3.  “Bad” weather plays havoc with our transport systems. How should we regard the people who struggle to maintain them?

4.  What “little acts of kindness” can you do in your “back yard” to care for the environment?

(c) Derek Williams 2013