to reflect his praise, the living plants and animals on it were to do so, and certainly the specially privileged human creatures with their higher intellectual capacities were to be a praise to their Creator. If they fail to praise God themselves, and prevent others from doing so, and even pollute the earth until it is too soiled to mirror brightly the praise of its Maker, then those persons must be removed. Jehovah is no respecter of persons. He did it to the Canaanites. He did it to the Israelites. He will do it to the polluters of the earth today. These ancient happenings “that were written aforetime were written for our instruction,” and “these things went on befalling them as examples and they were written for a warning to us upon whom the accomplished ends of the systems of things have arrived.” Jehovah does not waver in his principles, nor does he swerve from his purposes: “I, Jehovah, change not.” We have our warning from God about polluting the earth, just as the Israelites had theirs. Let us obey ours, profiting from their failure to heed theirs.—Rom. 15:4; 1 Cor. 10:11, NW; Mal. 3:6, AS.

Will You Get to Live on Earth Forever?

“The upright will inhabit the land, and men of integrity will remain in it; but the wicked will be cut off from the land, and the treacherous will be rooted out of it.”—Prov. 2:21, 22, RS.

1. In what ways do men now pollute the earth?

MEN are now defiling the earth. In their greed to get rich quick from its resources they denude the hills of forests and the plains of grasses, and valuable topsoil is washed or blown away. Wild animals and birds are wantonly slain for money or just for the fun of it. The air we breathe is needlessly polluted with factory smoke that many industrialists are too greedy to control. For thousands of years national and international wars have spilled lakes of blood that have defiled the land. Now in their quest for quicker ways to kill more the most powerful nations are poisoning the atmosphere, the vegetation, the land, the sea, the fish—everything—with radioactive elements. Scientists confess that the trend could lead to making the earth uninhabitable. Some parts have already been made so. The San Francisco Chronicle, June 20, 1956, editorializes: “FOREVER MADE UNINHABITABLE. There is a blanket invitation for soul-searching in reports which indicate that the testing of American nuclear weapons has probably made two of the Marshall islands forever uninhabitable and has certainly visited serious radiation sickness upon the people of a third. Not by design, of course, but through the unavoidable consequences of fission and fusion, Bikini and Eniwetok have been sown with radiation that make them taboo as dwelling places for all time; inhabitants of Rongelap were so irradiated from the air, the ground and the very food they ate that they became nauseated, shed their hair, developed skin lesions and showed other symptoms of severe radiation sickness.”

2. How are conditions becoming worse, and this means what?

² Add to this the widespread evidences of moral deterioration and breakdown, and it is apparent that the earth and its inhabitants fall short in mirroring the wisdom and majesty of their Creator and in reflecting his praise, as purposed. And as time wears on the condition worsens: “Know this, that in the last days critical times hard to deal with will be here. For men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, self-assuming, haughty, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, without gratitude, with no loving-kindness, having no natural affection, not open to any agreement, slanderers, without self-control, fierce, without love of goodness, betrayers, headstrong, puffed up with self-esteem, lovers of pleasures rather than lovers of God, having a form of godly devotion but proving false to its power; and from these turn away.”—2 Tim. 3:1-5, NW.

3. What must Christians do to be preserved when Jehovah ruins those ruining the earth?

³ “And from these turn away.” Why? For the same reason that Israel was to be separate from the Canaanites. Because “bad associations spoil useful habits,” rotten things corrupt the good, dirty things soil the clean. When groups practice or support or tolerate evils there is a community responsibility for such evils, and to escape coming under this community responsibility individuals must separate themselves, if not physically then mentally and morally and emotionally. Just as Israel was given a law that would have protected them had they kept it, so Christians have commands that will preserve them if they comply. Knowing that Satan is “the ruler of this world,” that he is “the god of this system of things,” that “the whole world is lying in the power of the wicked one,” Christians appreciate the wisdom of the command not to “be loving either the world or the things in the world” and know that whoever “wants to be a friend of the world is constituting himself an enemy of God.” Not wanting to be in Satan’s power, they separate from the world that is completely under his power. In this way they do not come under the world responsibility for all its wickedness, and they will thereby escape destruction with it at Jehovah’s war of Armageddon. Just as the land vomited out the Canaanites and the backsliding Israelites because they polluted it, at Armageddon evildoers will be disgorged from the land of the living, for that is Jehovah’s time “to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”—John 12:31; 2 Cor. 4:4; 1 John 5:19; 2:15; Jas. 4:4; Rev. 11:18, NW.

STUDY AND MEDITATION

4. In what ways will study of God’s Word change us?

⁴ How can you keep from being vomited out of the land then? By separating from “those ruining the earth.” Fit into God’s purpose for the cleansed earth by reflecting God’s praise along with the earth. Start doing that now. Do it, not in the way that you think is right, but in the way that God says is right. Learn his way by studying his Word. It is by such study of