ASPO, the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, suggest that the key date for us all is not when the oil runs out, but when production peaks, meaning that supplies begin to decline. We have already reached that point, here in the UK.
What implications does this have for us? For a start, 90% of the world's transport depends on oil. But also, most of the chemical and plastic trappings of life which we scarcely notice - furniture, pharmaceuticals, communications - need oil as a feedstock. Obviously we import oil and that may keep us going for another generation or so, but ASPO believes that world oil stocks will peak around 2010, which means that there will be no oil for our descendants. There is every reason to plan now for a post-oil age in the foreseeable future.
Does this sound devastating? It should, for without oil our whole way of life will drastically change. But those modern-day prophets who forecast the end of our way of life as we know it, are largely ignored or ridiculed or side-lined. We vaguely know about threats to our environment, but we don't pay them too much heed.
In many ways the situation was very similar in the days of Zephaniah. The age of Zephaniah, in the 7th century BCE shortly before Jeremiah, was a time of religious degradation. Worship of the one true God had disintegrated and all the old idolatries had reappeared. People were worshipping the nature gods of sun, moon, and stars, and foreign religious rites flourished in Jerusalem. Zephaniah announced impending judgment in the "Day of the Lord" to this corrupt city in the southern kingdom of Judah.
In Zephaniah's view, the Day of the Lord would not be a day of rejoicing but would be a day of punishment both for officials who refuse to acknowledge the corruption of Jerusalem, for ordinary people who "leap over the threshold" to reach and worship their household deities, and for Judah as a whole.
In that day, says Zephaniah, God will actively search out sinners, especially those who rest on their laurels and refuse to believe that God will intervene in life in any way. According to Zephaniah, God says this:
At that time I will search Jerusalem with lamps, and I will punish the people who rest complacently on their dregs, those who say in their hearts, "The Lord will not do good, nor will he do harm." Their wealth shall be plundered, and their houses laid waste. Though they build houses, they shall not inhabit them; though they plant vineyards, they shall not drink wine from them.
Moreover, says Zephaniah, this day is not some dim
and distant day which won't affect the present generation, it is in the
foreseeable future and it will be God's war against Judah. Present wealth will
not be able to prevent this terrible happening, neither will the people's
status as the Chosen People protect them from God's judgement.
In fact,
we know in retrospect that it was indeed the rich and educated who were
affected first when the prophesied doom fell upon both Israel and Judah in the
form of the Babylonian invasion. The Babylonians cleverly abducted the wealthy,
educated classes and took them off to Babylon where their skills were used by
the Babylonians. This left the Promised Land devoid of any who had the skills
or the education to incite an uprising against Babylon, but it also left the
peasants to continue to till the land and grow crops for the advantage of
Babylon. So the Babylonians had the best of both worlds and the Ancient
Israelites had the worst of both worlds.
Today's reading form Zephaniah
is unmitigated doom and gloom. There is no bright spot, no hope anywhere. But
in chapter three, glimmers of optimism begin to appear and Zephaniah follows
the pattern of all the prophets by revealing that after the prophesied
destruction, God will again restore the fortunes of his people. And this, of
course, came true, for the exiles eventually returned and in due course even
the ruined temple at Jerusalem was rebuilt. And after all this came Jesus, to
set us all free from the clinging tendrils of sin and corruption.
The
pattern seen so clearly in the Bible of the rise of wealth and riches followed
by corruption followed by destruction followed by another gradual rise of
wealth and riches and so on, has always been reflected throughout the world.
All great civilisations have eventually fallen prey to corruption and once that
process starts, the end of the civilisation is in sight.
There is no
reason to suppose that we will be any different, and the warning voices of
present-day prophets are growing louder. We know that we are in danger. We're
in danger from global warming, from the drying up of oil, from the threat of
nuclear weapons, from various terrorist groups.
What makes us any
different from the people of Zephaniah's day?
The difference is that we
have Jesus, God within humanity. Through Jesus we have a means not only of
communicating directly with God without the need for any intermediary, but also
of dealing with our own sin and corruption. All we need is for good people to
rise as one to denounce corruption and to reclaim our God as the centre of
life.
Then, for us, the Day of the Lord might be averted. If we
Christians don't do that, then it will not be long before our oil runs dry, but
even for us there is still that post-script of optimism. Eventually, if our
world as we know it is destroyed, it will begin to rise again and future human
beings may begin to build a better world for their descendants. Let us pray
that God will be at the centre of their world and that for them, a Day of the
Lord will be averted.
