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Is God Green? #1: God, the World & Us
THE VIEW FROM ABOVE
More than 40 years ago, the Apollo space missions to the moon sent pictures of the earth back home. For the first time ever, humanity saw its planet from afar. The clouds, the land, the oceans, sitting there: whirling, powerful, innocent, vulnerable. And that image caused a revolution in the hearts and imaginations of millions around the world. Suddenly, the world was no longer an endless vista of untapped resources and infinite possibilities. Instead, we began to realize how small, how fragile, how very delicate our home really is. No longer were environmental issues confined to a few lonely voices. We began, en masse, to get very anxious about what we were doing to this lonely globe. 40 years later, in the news, almost every day there’s something about our environment.
And Christians are getting on the bandwagon too! Take, for example, The Green Bible. The blurb from the website says:
The Green Bible will equip and encourage people to see God's vision for creation and help them engage in the work of healing and sustaining it. With over 1,000 references to the earth in the Bible, compared to 490 references to heaven and 530 references to love, the Bible carries a powerful message for the earth.
Verses in the Bible about the earth are highlighted in green. Is that the way that Christians are to approach this topic? To me, The Green Bible seems to be a Christian way of playing catch-up. The world around us cares about global warming so we publish a Bible on recycled paper that highlights the green verses, just to prove how with-it we really are!
But there’s actually a far better approach. I hope that you’ll come to see that everything in the Bible is relevant to issues of the environment, not just 1 000 green verses. To really come to grips with these issues, we need to get a firmer grasp on the Bible's whole message—from beginning to end. We need to understand God and his purposes for our world first. That’s what this 3-part series is all about. We’ll be looking at God's plan for us, for the world, for his son Jesus, and particularly, how those plans relate to us in the world.
PEOPLE & THE WORLD (GENESIS 1-2)
In this first article, our focus is the beginning of the story of the world as recorded in Genesis 1-2. In these two chapters there are three of key things to notice in these chapters:
1. The world is not the same as God. God chose to make the world—but God was there before the world was made. Genesis 1:1 says, "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth." In other words, God isn't a pagan (see Different Views of Us & the World).
2. The world is good. Whenever God makes something, he sees that it is good. The light (1:4), land and sea (1:10), the trees (1:12) and everything else is described as being "good". God is pleased with and loves what he has made. This means that the world has value and this value is given to it by its creator.
3. Humans have a special place in the world. We are part of the world, we’re not God. But we have a special place in the world because we have been made in the 'image of God' (Gen 1:26-28). This also means that we have a special relationship with God that's different to God's relationship with the rest of creation. We also have a special relationship to the world: we are the rulers of the world under God (see also Psalm 8).
HOW TO RULE THE WORLD
In 1967, a man called Lynn White wrote a famous article called 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis'. In the article, White blamed Western Christianity for most of the environmental degradation that has happened in the history of the world. His accusation was this: the Bible—and Genesis 1 especially—had been used to justify wholesale exploitation of the environment. White says:
God planned all of this [creation] explicitly for man's benefit and rule: no item in the physical creation had any purpose save to serve man's purposes.[1]
We can't deny that some Christians in the past have been arrogant and selfish towards the environment. And to our modern ears, the Bible does sound pretty harsh when it uses phrases like 'fill the earth', 'subdue it', 'have dominion', 'rule'. It seems to sound like God has given us the world to bash into shape.
But like anything in the Bible, we need to read these verses in context. Firstly, we need to remember that, in Genesis 1, God saw that the world was good before he made humans. The world has positive value in God’s eyes, simply by being created by him. So as we rule, we have to remember that we are ruling something God has made and that God believes is good.
Secondly, we need to look at how this rule is described in Genesis 2:
The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Genesis 2:15, NIV)
Humanity's 'rule' of the world is not to be selfish, despotic, or tyrannical. God describes our role as taking care of the world. Ruling the world is about serving; serving God, who made the good world, and serving the world by taking care of it.
If you think about it, this makes sense of what we see humans doing all the time. Take, for example, the organisation called Save the Wales. They have a song that you can download the MP3 for off the internet. You won’t find a pod of whales getting together to form a society called 'Save the Humans', will you? Whales can’t download MP3s about saving humans. That's because humans are there to look after the whales, not vice-versa.
Our special role in the world is to be servant-kings of the world. God does not want us to exploit the world for our own greedy gain. But at the same time, God doesn't want us to leave the world alone. We're not just to be the stewards of the world, not just the park rangers, making sure nothing happens to it. God wants us to be active, to turn chaos into order like he did at the beginning.
In Genesis 1, human beings were good for the world. And as humans rule, we enjoy the benefits of being God’s rulers:
Then God said [to the human beings], “I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground – everything that has the breath of life in it – I give every green plant for food.” And it was so. God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Genesis 1:29-31)
We can enjoy the world as we subdue it and, according to God, this is very good. When we eat food it is a very good thing because that's what the food is for. Here's a description of ecological harmony from the Bible:
He who tends a fig tree will eat its fruit (Proverbs 27:18).
So how does this all work out? How do you and I actually go about ruling? How do we know what to do?
Did you notice that repeated little phrase 'according to its kind' in Genesis chapter 1? It's there in verse 11, 12, 21, 24, 25. God has made vegetation according to their various kinds; fish according to their kinds; birds, livestock, wild animals, according to their kinds. There’s variety in creation. This variety helps us to understand that we do different things with different parts of creation. This next little verse is an example of how this works:
Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast, but the mercy of the wicked is cruel (Proverbs 12:10 ESV).
One of the things about being righteous is that you have regard for the life of your beast. That is, you know the value of an animal's life—not just for your own selfish purposes, but in terms of what God has made. The righteous person understands that the animal has been made a certain way 'according to its kind'. And he respects that creation. An animal is different to a human, of course. Respecting a chicken is different to respecting your mother. But a righteous person will still respect the life of the chicken, as a chicken. It’s not just an egg-producing machine. Do you buy free-range eggs? Why? Why not? Do you regard the life of the chicken? Not just the taste or the eggs. The life. Because God thinks the chicken is good. The good ruler of the world is the one who discerns what this value is. While we eat the eggs and the chicken nuggets, we also take care of the chicken while it's alive according to what God has made it, not just what we can get out of it. This is what ruling and subduing, is all about
THE CURSE
We had a go at starting up a compost heap a few years back. Why? Because each Australian, on average, contributes one tonne of waste each year, and we're turning the land into tips to get rid of this rubbish. But God has made the land for reasons other than dumping rubbish. It’s for beauty, for living in, for growing crops, for recreation. And it's getting to the point where it's harder to find land to do these things, because the land is taken up with rubbish. So our compost heap helped to reduce our rubbish and helped the earth that God has given us to be used for other purposes. It's not rocket science. We are created by God to rule our world, to serve our world, to enjoy our world.
But I know what you're thinking, "Stop telling me about your compost heap. What about the Aral Sea? What about Chernobyl? What about global warming?"
We've only just looked at the beginning of the story, haven't we? We still have a huge problem, don't we? The fact is, we don't rule the world properly. We've stuffed it up, big time, and all around us is the evidence.
Does the Bible tell us why? Well, yes. And in the next couple of articles we will look in more detail at that terrible circumstance. But we will also see what God has done about our crazy broken world.
Lionel Windsor
Lionel Windsor is an assistant minister at St Michael’s Anglican Cathedral, Wollongong. Lionel is planning to study further for the sake of theological education in Australia and Malaysia – he’d love your prayers and support!
This article is based on a talk that Lionel gave at the Wollongong ECU Reload Conference in 2009. To read the full text of the talk click here.
[1] Lynn White, 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis', Science 155 (1967): 1203-1207.
