Sure, if you make allowance for inevitable rhetorical hype. A modern preacher might say something similar in his sermon about a contemporary event. This sort of colorful description is a common aspect of the rhetorical style of many orators and preachers.
It's only a problem for people who want to be excessively literalistic in their reading.
Indeed. The tendency to project one's emotional state onto the surrounding world is so common that a specific term--"the pathetic fallacy"--was coined for the phenomenon when it occurs in literature.
You see it in everything from bad verse to blues ("the sky is crying").
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