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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Scott Christiansen

Planet In Distress, Part 1

What we'll be talking about tonight is not usually discussed in Christian circles, and is not usually discussed in Adventist circles, which is strange to me.

We're going to be talking about the effect of sin on our physical earth, on the planet itself.

And once you start looking at the effect of, looking in scripture and in inspired writings for references on the effect of sin on the planet itself.

It turns out there's an abundant amount of material.

But we haven't noticed it, or we've skipped over it, or we've missed its interpretation, but we haven't looked at this.

We haven't pondered about the effect of sin.

We've looked at the effect of sin on men, absolutely.

We've all had pets that have died and things like that.

But the effect of sin on the planet itself...

Now when I was a kid growing up in Loma Linda, I lived here for like 30 years before I moved out into the rest of the world.

I understood, 1 of my earliest memories is of my mother's reaction in the living room.

She's screaming and throwing her hands up and the iron drops off the ironing board and it's melting the carpet and there's this smoke rising.

I mean, very unusual, you know, what's up with my mom?

Well, that was the news coming over the radio that President Kennedy had been assassinated.

And so 1 of my earliest memories is with the sin in man, the death resulting from sin.

And of course I remember well the Vietnam War and the reports that would come over the television.

But as I grew up, I, somewhere along the line, got this idea from a teacher, either from scripture or spirit of prophecy, that sin affected the world itself.

I mean, in Loma Linda, staring up at Mount San Gregorio, you know, it's huge.

Especially when you're a kid, it's like, wow, that's really big.

How could sin affect, we'd go down to Laguna Beach, I'd go body surfing, how could sin affect the ocean?

The ocean was so big, it was huge, it was between me and Catalina Island it was so big.

And then when I moved to La Vida Mission from Loma Linda and worked among the Navajo, It was a tremendous privilege to work there, and I got to know some of the older Navajo, and somehow the conversation led to this thing about the world changing.

They said, oh yeah, the world is changing.

We know the world's changing, it's getting worse, And the Navajo understand that that means the end of the world is coming.

The older Navajo would tell me about the peach trees that their grandparents would grow, these highly prized peach trees.

I mean, you know, just wow, out there in the desert they had peach trees.

And those peach trees had been gone for a generation and a half.

Little modest gardens that the Navajo used to be able to grow wouldn't grow anymore.

The Navajo said, you know what, it's changing.

I talked to a couple Navajo who had become Adventists, and that's a small number to begin with, and I asked them about this topic and they said, yeah, yeah, the world is changing.

So this idea that a measurable decline, a decline that we could perceive in the natural world would have a spiritual implication, the first place I saw that was among the Navajo.

Then I moved to, my wife and I moved to Mongolia, a hop, a skip, and quite a jump from New Mexico, and started the agra work there.

And it was in New Mexico, it was in Malagalya that I saw tremendous impacts on human society.

I saw the Gobi Desert advancing north and cutting into traditional grazing lands for Mongolians, which is a big deal, because Mongolians live about 20 miles apart.

They live in these round felt huts that they make from the fur, that's not the right word, but anyway, the wool of the sheep.

And they move everything on the backs of their camels and on the backs of their yaks, and they ride their horses around.

And even though it's a very cold country, and we see 40 below there every winter, I mean, it's a very cold country.

Even though it's a very cold country, they can heat these tents with the dung from the cows.

So anyway, they're living like that and the Gobi Desert advances and Mongolians have to move.

Families that have gone from place to place pretty much in rotation for hundreds and hundreds of years, handed down, and they have to move.

When they have to move, there's no space available.

So instead of living 20 miles apart, they're living 10 miles apart.

More than that though, more than just seeing nature change and seeing humans go into conflict, in the late 1990s, 1997 or so, Mongolia started experiencing something that they call a dzud.

You know, a snowstorm, what's the big deal?

Anything less than a foot, and they better not close the schools because it's just inconvenient.

I mean, Mainers, we just drive through it and don't even pay attention.

The grass is so sparse and the grazing areas are so large that when snow falls, the animals have to clear space to get to the grass underneath, except there's hardly ever grass.

I mean, they're not finding it by sight, so it's random.

As soon as there's snow on the ground, and the snow on the ground does not melt for months in the Mongolian winter.

Okay, so if it comes in November, you know.

So we had hundreds of millions of animals starving to death, and that was the foundation of rural life.

And we had hundreds of thousands of Mongolians coming into the capital city, which absolutely couldn't support them.

And these people were destitute and throwing themselves on the mercy of distant relatives who were already poor.

Crime skyrocketed, prostitution skyrocketed, the sale of children, every bad thing that you could imagine.

And Mongolians had kept a verbal and written history for a very, very long time.

I mean, they'd see 1 once every 15 years, but not 3 or 4 times a year, year after year after year.

So in Mongolia, what I saw was a society whose fabric was being torn apart and also feeding into moral decline by the changes in the physical earth.

And I'm kind of connecting all these dots.

And then I got tapped to be the country director of ADRA in China, start up the ADRA program in China.

It was right next door, but it was very, very different.

In China, it was a matter of, I mean, there were tremendous environmental things going on.

The Earth was changing tremendously, but the big pressure was 1.3 billion people consuming resources much, much, much faster and much more intensely than could be sustained.

And so I saw resource pressures in China.

Put all that together, I'm going to circumvent some of the story.

And in 2012, my book, Planet in Distress, was published by Review and Herald.

And how many people are here from Geoscience Institute?

The rest of you, the rest of you, because I think you'll nail the question.

I'm going to try and give this book away and you have to answer the question correctly and if you're working for the Geoscience Institute, you probably know the answer.

But okay, so we're going to talk about the systems that God created to sustain life on Earth and how these systems are in rapid and accelerating decline.

We're going to talk about the fact that man's society is built 4 square on these systems.

And where you have a foundation that is in rapid and accelerating decline, you also have a human society, global complex society, which is rapidly following and what that means.

We're going to talk about the arc between cause and effect, the arc between original sin and the state of the physical world and the state of human society and how this is pushing us towards the fulfillment of prophecy right in front of our eyes and how we've missed it.

Tonight we're going to be talking about the physical world.

We're gonna be talking about the systems God created.

Tomorrow morning, a sermon which kind of knits the 2 pieces together.

Tomorrow afternoon here at 04:00, we're going to be talking about human society and bringing it all together, knitting it all together, and finishing up by talking about what we should be doing at this point in time.

So our anchor text, Matthew 24, 6 through 8, if you don't mind, I'll read it for you.

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Planet In Distress, Part 1

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