I HATE MOTHER NATURE

I HATE MOTHER NATURE

We are accustomed to hearing the talking heads on TV’s weather-casts speak of “Mother Nature.” I hate that term! I hate it for a number of reasons. 

It is above all an avoidance of speaking about God the Father. I’m talking First Article of the Creed material. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, maker of heaven and earth.” [Apostles’ Creed]. The Nicene Creed adds, “and of all things visible and invisible.” The weather is certainly invisible. We can observe it but we can’t see the wind unless there is dirt in the air. Air should be transparent. We can observe its effects with lightning, thunder, and rain. 

To speak of what happens in the created order as referring to Mother Nature is a direct reference to the ancient pagan fertility cults. Read the Old Testament and you can’t miss all the references to the pagan gods worshiped by the peoples Israel drove out. Baal is probably the most remembered. Baal [pronounced ba’-al] was the top fertility god in Canaan. The name means “master. Baal was often depicted as the storm-god [sculpture at Ras Shamra] so there is a connection to the weather. But all the ancient gods also had consorts, or goddesses with them. The pagans Israel was to drive out worshiped them as those who caused the crops to grow, that is, be fertile. 

A helpful quote from the Interpreter’s Dictionary of the Bible [IDB] proves helpful in our understanding:

“Baal is a dying and rising god, the spirit of vegetation which wilts and dies in the heat of summer but revives again with the winter rains.” [IDB, vol. 1, p 329; the four volume set is also in our church library for those who wish more information].

There was the worship of the Baals in the Canaanite temples. In order to assure bountiful crops the people were very involved in the temple rituals which involved prostitution. Thus, the people were said to imitate Baal by engaging in this ritual prostitution. They believed that these sexual acts would ensure a bountiful harvest.

Nearly all pagan religions had a variation of this motif. The gods must have intercourse to keep humanity alive. There must be male and female because that is what the pagans saw. How ironic that today there is an emphasis on pan-sexuality! Thus, the people were said to imitate the gods and goddesses with their licentious rites. These rites were at their height in the days of Ahab who got them from his wife Jezebel, perhaps the most wicked woman in the whole of Scripture. Baal worship was characterized by imitative worship, as said above.

Yahweh, however, never revealed himself as a God with a wife or a consort. He revealed himself as God the Father who needed no consort to create the world nor to keep it going. The concept of a female deity has no home in what was revealed to Israel. The chosen people were to keep far away from such heresy, yet they continued to be drawn to it and imitated it. God revealed himself only as Father. No consort. No mother god. 

But the heresy lives on even in the “enlightened” 21^st century. Yet one asks if people still worship the Baals? In some ways they do, when they continue to talk about the created order as under the control of Mother Nature, even if people confess their belief in no god at all, but say they believe in “science.”

Mostly I think people use the term Mother Nature to avoid speaking about the true God, God the Father who has created everything and sustains everything by his almighty Word. 

Long ago, at many times and in many ways, God spoke to our fathers by the prophets, ² but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the world. [Hebrews 1.1-2]

The world was created and is sustained not by a female consort, Mother Nature, but by God’s only-begotten Son, our Lord Jesus Christ. To speak of Mother Nature is really heresy. This heretical speak should disappear from the Christian’s vocabulary. Instead we should boldly speak of the CREATED ORDER which comes from God the Father. We are not ancient pagans who were unenlightened. We should not speak that awful MN even if we don’t mean it! Let us make the good confession of the truth of God’s Word. It will give you the opportunity to speak to your neighbor about Christ!

Pastor Meyer