According to the Met Office, England has seen record-breaking temperatures in both May and June of this year. Alongside these highs, the evening news has brought several reports of wildfires across Wales, Scotland, and further abroad. The “climate crisis” is a recurring headline with a very certain interpretation attached to it. We are repeatedly told that there is a definitive link between human industrial activity, specifically our use of fossil fuels, and rising global temperatures.

However, I believe the Bible offers us the true diagnosis for the state of our planet, revealing the deeper spiritual reasons behind the environmental changes that we see around us.

Just a few weeks ago, during a BBC news broadcast, a graph appeared on screen showing the global rise in temperature since the Industrial Revolution. We were told explicitly that carbon emissions from fossil fuels are driving this spike. But as I looked at that line surging upward, I immediately saw a different connection: the dramatic moral decline of our world over the last century.

We regularly listen to sermons by Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones, who served at Westminster Chapel until his retirement in 1968 and passing in 1981. We are often struck by how powerfully he warned against the moral decay of society and spiritual apathy in the Church of his time, even as early as the 1950s, an era that seems so wholesome to us today. I believe we are living in the reality of his warnings to our nation. Looking at that steep temperature graph, I would suggest that its dramatic rise runs directly parallel to another silent spike: the staggering increase in the destruction of human life through abortion and IVF procedures since the 1960s, both in the UK and across the globe.

Sin and the Land

Reading through Genesis recently, I have been deeply struck by how Scripture consistently links moral rebellion to the physical earth. In Genesis 3, Adam and Eve’s disobedience resulted in the cursing of the ground. Humanity’s fall was not merely a private spiritual matter; the earth itself was directly impacted by human sin. From the very beginning, God makes it clear that our moral standing before Him directly affects the creation around us.

This pattern continues and deepens in Genesis 4 with the account of Cain and Abel. In a fit of jealous rage, Cain murders his brother, Abel, and what stands out most in this narrative is the vivid language God uses to describe the act:

And the LORD said, “What have you done? The voice of your brother’s blood is crying to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you work the ground, it shall no longer yield to you its strength. You shall be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” (Genesis 4:10–12)

Scripture uses powerful personification here to help us understand the magnitude of what has happened. Abel’s blood did not have a literal voice, but God uses this imagery to convey the immense gravity of murder. Cain’s sin was not hidden from God’s sight, nor was it isolated from the earth itself. The land is depicted as being forced to absorb the blood of an innocent man, and as a consequence, the ground itself resists Cain and will no longer yield its strength to him.

The Moral State of Nations

As we read further into Scripture, this link between moral purity and the fruitfulness of the earth appears again and again:

• In Deuteronomy 28, God outlines the blessings and curses tied to Israel’s covenant. Obedience would bring agricultural abundance, while persistent rebellion would cause the skies to shut and the soil to fail.
• Before Israel entered the Promised Land, God warned them that the previous inhabitants were not being driven out on a whim, but because their pervasive wickedness had corrupted the land itself: “Do not make yourselves unclean by any of these things, for by all these the nations I am driving out before you have become unclean, and the land became unclean, so that I punished its iniquity, and the land vomited out its inhabitants.” (Leviticus 18:24–25)
• God placed the Sabbath rest at the centre of His Law, expanding it to every seventh year so the soil could rest from plowing and planting (Leviticus 25:18–22). He promised supernatural provision in the sixth year for those who trusted Him. But He also warned that if they neglected His Law, exile would follow, allowing the land to forcibly take the rest it was denied (Leviticus 26:34–35). This warning was fulfilled centuries later in 2 Chronicles 36:20–21 when the people of Israel were exiled from the land God had given them.

Numerous other passages build on this explicit connection between human unfaithfulness and the earth’s decay, including Hosea 4:1–3, Isaiah 24:4–6, Jeremiah 12:4, Jeremiah 23:10, and Numbers 35:33. Together, they establish a clear biblical truth that when a society abandons God’s moral boundaries, the physical world reflects that rebellion.

A World Saturated in Blood

I am convinced that the climate shifts we are experiencing today are real, even if political groups manipulate the narrative for their own agendas. But the underlying cause is not what environmental or political parties claim it to be.

For decades, modern society has systematically ended the lives of its most innocent and defenseless members on a truly monumental scale under the guise of “my body, my choice” and “healthcare.” In England and Wales alone, roughly 1 in 3 pregnancies now ends in abortion, and more than 10 million babies have been killed in Great Britain since 1967. Globally, cumulative estimates over recent decades put the number of abortions well into the hundreds of millions. When you add to this the vast numbers of human embryos created, frozen, discarded, or lost through the commercial IVF process, we are confronting the loss of billions of human lives.

It is a level of bloodshed that is almost too overwhelming for the human mind to process.

If we then apply the biblical imagery of Genesis 4, where the blood of a single innocent man cried out to God from the soil, it becomes clear that our modern world is thoroughly saturated in innocent blood. The cry ascending into heaven today is deafening. The land has absorbed this loss of life, and from a biblical perspective, creation itself is groaning under the weight of it. We should not be surprised that the earth is reeling because of this defilement, expressed through rising temperatures, floods, changing weather patterns and tectonic shifts.

There is a striking irony among those who promote green agendas and saving the planet. Many are fierce in their moral conviction that we must care for and look after the earth – a biblical mandate we should take seriously. However, the contradiction lies in the fact that many of these same people would find it abhorrent to suggest that ending the lives of innocent babies in the womb or in a lab could be in any way linked to the decaying world around us. Their moral standpoint is rooted in a completely flawed understanding, they zealously advocate for the protection of the natural world while often avidly promoting the very bloodshed that pollutes it.

But beyond this lies a far greater worry within the Church itself. In stark contrast to the deafening cry of spilled innocent blood, there is a deafening silence from the people of God. For far too long, we have remained indifferent to the mass destruction of human life occurring around us, failing to stand up for the most innocent among us for fear of societal dislike or wanting to “pick our battles”, as though that were our choice to make. All the while, babies are killed every day and we say nothing. We have, in effect, abandoned our belief in the sanctity of human life. Our priorities are entirely inverted, reflecting how little we truly know and understand the heart of God. As Psalm 119:70 laments, our hearts have grown unfeeling like fat.