Climate Change (16) - Live for Now

When people turn away from God, they start to live for the present. Without God, the eternal dimension to life disappears and people focus on what they can get now. This is one reason why the modern world is so obsessed with consuming more and more stuff. Paul made this clear when writing about life after death.

If the dead are not raised,
“Let us eat and drink,
for tomorrow we die (1 Cor 15:32).

Putting it another way, if there is no God, the future is uncertain, so we might as well party now. The modern world understands Paul’s message very well. It has got on with eating and drinking and consuming as if there were no tomorrow. To sustain these high levels of consumption, we have used up more than half of the oil in the world in less than a century. Very little thought has been given to leaving an inheritance to our children.