Hezekiah Reads the IPCC Report Out Loud to God (2 Kings 18-19)
Climate Bible Study: August 2021
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is the science assessment body known as the IPCC, released its Sixth Summary Report about climate change causes and impacts this past month, and I thought of Sir John Houghton who had passed away a little over a year ago at age 88. If ever the history of prayer and climate change is written, reference will surely have to be made of Houghton. He was the co-chair of the Scientific Assessment Working Group which produced the Fourth Summary Report. In 2007 at a pastors prayer breakfast sponsored by Wheaton College, Houghton told the story of what an arduous process it was to have 250 delegates and 99 governments together in Shanghai in 2001 “going through a ten-page summary document sentence by sentence.” (Can you imagine?!) Houghton reflected:
There are lots of people, of course, who come to the subject of climate change with a preconceived agenda…. And the climate is a variable thing. The data is spotty, and very varied; it comes from all over the world. It comes from past climates. It comes from all sorts of places. And if you want some data that fits your particular agenda, you can find some…. We had to agree unanimously because that’s the U.N. way of doing things. So, we had great troubles with some of the people in the room. But nevertheless, if anyone wanted to change the words, they had to use scientific arguments…. Some sentences took hours to debate. And they were good debates, very good debates, trying to present the material in ways that were clear, correct, relevant to policy and all those things had to be taken into account. And inevitably, of course, on the last day, when everybody had to go home on the following day, we went right into the night to finish the document off. That was the process. It was unique in scientific history. It is the most carefully written, assessed, reviewed document on any part of science ever done that is generally accepted within the science community.
What only a handful of delegates knew at the time, but what Sir John told the pastors at the prayer breakfast in Wheaton, is that Houghton was also organizing prayer meetings with his fellow scientists who were followers of Christ. They would meet behind the scenes and appeal to the Creator God: Help us do our work accurately and well, and help overcome the obstacles of this process through your great might and wisdom.
The Bible, of course, includes a history of prayer in the midst of great crisis, and here King Hezekiah of the Northern Kingdom of Judah also deserves special reference, if simply for the unique enactment of his prayer. In 2 Kings 18-19, you can read of how the overwhelming and undefeated army of the Assyrian King Sennacherib had surrounded Jerusalem. Sennacherib sends messengers who demand Judah’s surrender in the most mocking and blasphemous ways. Hezekiah finds some reassurance from the prophet Isaiah but Sennacherib sends one last written response in which he says: “Do not let the god you depend on deceive you when he says, ‘Jerusalem will not be given into the hands of the king of Assyria.’ Surely you have heard what the kings of Assyria have done to all the countries, destroying them completely. And will you be delivered? Did the gods of the nations that were destroyed by my predecessors deliver them …?”
What does Hezekiah do? Having already donned sackcloth, having read Sennacherib’s letter, “then he went up to the temple of the Lord and spread it out before the Lord.” We should try to visualize this. Was the letter a scroll, and Hezekiah rolled it out, maybe weighing it down at the edges so that the papyrus wouldn’t curl up again? Was the letter multiple pages, and so Hezekiah could lay them side by side, left to right? Regardless, the effect is that Hezekiah wanted God to see with his own eyes the blasphemy and threat that Sennacherib had rendered into print. Hezekiah wanted God to read the letter for himself.
And Hezekiah prayed to the Lord: “Lord, the God of Israel, enthroned between the cherubim, you alone are God over all the kingdoms of the earth. You have made heaven and earth. Give ear, Lord, and hear; open your eyes, Lord, and see; listen to the words Sennacherib has sent to ridicule the living God. It is true, Lord, that the Assyrian kings have laid waste these nations and their lands. They have thrown their gods into the fire and destroyed them, for they were not gods but only wood and stone, fashioned by human hands. Now, Lord our God, deliver us from his hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, Lord, are God.”
I have already done this spiritual exercise once with the Paris Agreement itself which is only a 25-page document. The IPCC Sixth Summary Report however, with its statements of urgency and threat, seems like more fitting material for this exercise. Consider printing out (only) the two pages of the “Headline Statements from the Summary for Policymakers.” Go into the “temple” of where you privately pray and lay out the sheets of paper in good lighting. “Give ear, Lord, and hear; open your eyes, Lord, and see; listen to the words [by which polluters essentially] ridicule the living God.”
Read the nine headline statements out loud to God, beginning with A1: “It is unequivocal that human influence has warmed the atmosphere, ocean and land. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”
And conclude as Hezekiah did: “Now, Lord our God, deliver us from [this] hand, so that all the kingdoms of the earth may know that you alone, Lord, are God.”
You are very dear to God,
Lowell Bliss
On behalf of the Climate Intercessors leadership team