Saturday, February 1st, 2025.
Tomorrow the town of Punxsutawney will have its biggest day of tourism all year.
Though traditions of using various rodents (badger, hedgehog, etc) to predict the weather have been kept for centuries, Groundhog Day is universally seen as pure superstition.
After all, now with advancements in meteorology, weather science apps, and front windows, no one is trusting a rodent to predict anything more than sales of merch at Gobbler’s Knob. (The accuracy of the Groundhog is worse than flipping a coin.)
In the modern age, Science has been touted as the great deliverer of superstition. Real science is the pursuit of knowledge through observation and experimentation to obtain evidence and explanation. Superstitious people do not have knowledge.
What should not be forgotten is that the Bible is the ancient champion of defeating superstition:
- Is that golden statue god? Nope.
- Is that holy man telling me what God says? Check the book.
- If you pay or pray long enough, will the weather be in your favor? Wrong again.
Though Christians are hardly immune to superstitious beliefs, study of the Bible has always been the giver of knowledge through the revelation of God’s word and observation of God’s world. (Scientific thinking came from this book.) Superstitious religious people do not have knowledge of God’s word.
These superstitious Christians read meaning without evidence into the ‘groundhogs’ they see around them. For example…
- Is it meaningful that a Bible was preserved through a hurricane? (Though many others were destroyed.)
- What if someone survived from a car crash while listening to Jesus, Take the Wheel?
- Did that American flag just form the shape of a cross? (Oooh boy…)
People are superstitious, but the Bible is not. It speaks truth against false religion, error, and science falsely so-called. The more you understand the Bible, the less susceptible you are to superstition.
Meanwhile, groundhogs are only cute in someone else’s yard. Here’s to hoping your yard this spring is smooth and rodent free!
For Truth,
Justin “sunshine on a cloudy day” Johnson