A REBUTTAL AND A MARVEL

You sometimes may hear a fellow believer say, “The Bible says that in the last days you won’t be able to tell the seasons apart.” With all the hype about climate change, this statement seems to have gained in popularity in the last couple of decades. But where do people get this from, and does the Bible really say that? Here is what folks likely have in mind when saying this stuff about the last days:

Acts 1:6-7:  Therefore, when they had come together, they asked Him, saying, “Lord, will You at this time restore the kingdom to Israel?” And He said to them, “It is not for you to know times or seasons which the Father has put in His own authority…”

The overall passage this is derived from is Acts 1:4-8, and here Jesus, having spent 40 days on the earth after His resurrection, is about to return to heaven. The primary focus of Jesus’s words in the overall passage are instructions for His followers to stay in Jerusalem and wait for the baptism of the Holy Spirit not many days from this time. His answer to the question about the kingdom and Israel beginning in verse 7 has absolutely nothing to do with the seasons or the weather. In this context the Lord is speaking of historical and prophetic events.

In the New Testament Greek the word “times”, chronous, is the plural of the word chronos, which is time in general such as that marked in years, months, days, hours, and so on. The Greek for “seasons” is kairous, the plural of the word kairos, which here means a fixed or definite time in which certain things occur. Examples of kairos time include the period of World War II, the 2020 Presidential election day and events on that day pertaining to the election, et cetera. Even without knowing the underlying Greek words the average believer should be able to gather what Jesus is talking about just by prayerfully reading the passage. Read and know your Bible. That way you won’t be ignorant or be going around repeating a statement that has no factual basis.

At the same time, pause to think about the seasons and the weather. Not long ago I wrote about the testimony of nature, how the creation itself gives evidence of the existence of God. Here I am thinking about the marvelous nature of climate and how it varies throughout the year. Most places outside the tropics experience a distinct change of the seasons each year. Even in the most tropical of regions, where from month to month temperatures change little, there is still a noticeable difference between the days and the nights in that sense. Outside of there, it is cool to cold in the winter, trending warmer in the spring, warm to hot in the summer, and trending cooler in the fall. Moreover, in the southern hemisphere the seasons are the opposite of those in the northern hemisphere. While we might be hoping for a white Christmas, folks in places like Rio de Janeiro and Sydney are getting the grill out or heading to the beach. That is simply remarkable.

The weather shows amazing variety around the world also. Temperatures have been as high as 134 degrees in Death Valley, California, yet it seldom rises into the 70’s even in the summer in Utqiagvik (formerly Barrow), Alaska. In Antarctica it has been as cold as 129 degrees below zero! Rainfall averages in excess of 400 inches a year in Cherrapunji (Sohra), India, but in Arica, Chile, in the Atacama Desert which lies in parts of Chile and Peru in South America, the average annual rainfall is only three to four hundredths of an inch. In Venezuela, where the Catatumbo River empties into Lake Maracaibo, lightning occurs from 140 to 160 days a year, averaging about 9 hours a day. Tornadoes can have winds as fast as 300 miles per hour or greater. Hurricanes can severely damage large regions and inundate them with incredible rainfall. In some deserts several years may pass with sunshine visible every day. Cold areas can have multiple feet of snow in the winter while a number of very warm areas never even see flurries. And on it goes.

Whether you believe God or Satan or man, or all of them, are responsible for natural disasters such as extreme weather events, the variety of weather types on earth is impressive. They and the seasons are all dependable from year to year. The seasons and the weather events may be of different intensities from season to season and from year to year, but one thing about it: You can count on their occurrence. When you consider these constants you cannot help but marvel at God and what He has made. As His precious and holy Word says:

Genesis 8:22:  “While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, winter and summer, and day and night shall not cease.”