To Adam [the Creator] said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19).

I have a theory.  Think it through with me as I try to squeeze a lot of theology, philosophy, and sociology into a short space.  One of the most significant aspects of man’s fall into sin was our Creator’s curse.  Because we know that God works out all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, and because we know He loves the creature made in His image, we can believe this curse was for a beneficial purpose and was ultimately an act of love.

It is pretty obvious that the while the curse made a great impact on the natural order, nature itself did not sin.  Man is fallen, not nature.  Nature is cursed, but it is cursed to discipline sinful man—sending him out of the Garden where the living was easy and life perpetual into the wider world which would now resist his efforts to wrest it to his own glory, selfishly hoard it, and destroy its fruitfulness.  Sinful, self-centered man having perpetual life and easy access to all the fruit of the earth was a disaster in the making; so God did two other things to protect His creation from the evil of sinful man: He closed the Garden and prevented re-entry with His armed angelic host, and He took away our access to the tree of life: daily sustenance that would give mankind unending life (and which, praise God, we will once again have access to according to the last chapter of the Bible) .

Here’s my theory: God said we will make our living by hard labor being reminded of our sin by facing a natural world that would in many ways be hostile to us; and we said “No way.”  So immediately we put our creative powers to work to make “labor-saving” and “time saving” devices.  The rest is history, as they say.

We have saved so much labor by our cleverness that we’re now destroying the earth with it:  Creating chemicals that are a lethal influence in our environment.  Burning fossil fuels to run our powerful engines each doing the work of hundreds or thousands of people and fouling our air, fishing out our oceans, and wiping out our forests.  Creating huge machines that do the “gardening” for us and turning them over to irresponsible corporations motivated only by monetary profit, while we cocoon ourselves in our cities with purblind eyes that do not bother to see what is happening to our soil.  Making appliances that keep families out of the kitchen and keep us from working side by side with those we love to make our meals and wash our dishes.  And we leave all that and take our children to restaurant chains the purpose of which is to make money for stock holders and which waste millions of pounds of food and paper every day.

And what have we done with the labor and time saved?  Where to find clues: Facebook, sports, entertainment, TV, video gaming, perpetual travel, shopping temples, and . . . .

I’m going to leave that there for now—just to keep your mental gears in motion.  I’d love to have many readers of WOC take up this idea and start a good discussion on this post in the comments box.  Do you think that we have become a fat and loveless culture in part because we have spurned the love of our Creator, who was wise enough to know that our avaricious nature needed the discipline of the curse that we have worked so hard to overturn?  Dig into your Bibles for this one.

To be continued (with apologies to Shakespeare for snitching his title).

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:

“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

” ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem.’ “ (Ezra 1:1-4)     [Photo source]

In this fascinating historical account from the Hebrew Scriptures, Cyrus, a pagan king, heard the command of God and obeyed by releasing the captive Judeans to return, according to the prophecy of Jeremiah, and rebuild the temple and eventually resettle their homeland.  Dr. Richard Wright, emeritus professor of biology from Gordon College, coined the term “the Cyrus Principle” to indicate the process by which God often uses unbelievers to accomplish His purposes.  In his book Biology Through the Eyes of Faith, he speaks of this principle in reference to the many non-Christians who have worked diligently to preserve the wonder and integrity of God’s creation and have in essence done what God’s children could have and should have at least been actively involved in.

A prime example of this is the church’s almost universal hostile reaction to the protestation of “hippiedom” during the late sixties directed toward construction, mining, industrial, and agricultural operations that were polluting our waterways—such pollution eventually becoming so great that flammables on the surface of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River actually caught fire in 1969.  The very next year Tyndale House Publishers released the book written by the influential Christian pastor/theologian and pop philosopher Francis Schaeffer, aptly titled Pollution and the Death of Man in which he sided with the hippies and pointed out that the church was both complicit in its lack of care for God’s good creation and negligent in its teaching on the theology of nature.

These protests along with mounting evidence that we were killing the life of our rivers and lakes resulted in our Federal clean water acts of 1972, 1977, and 1987.  A visible and financially beneficial result of such protection for many major cities is that many of our urban rivers now provide great sport fishing and safe water recreation.  I recall as a kid in the fifties that our local Grand River was not grand: it was mostly an industrial, agricultural, and sewage drain that sent huge plumes of crud out into Lake Michigan immediately adjacent to a major swimming beach.  Today anglers fish below the high-rise buildings downtown and land large salmon and steelhead.

[Photo source]

I love seeing that and knowing how much cleaner the river is; but I have to confess that for the first three decades of my adult life (sixties through the eighties) I was, as a political and social conservative, opposed to nearly all environmental regulation and scoffed at the claims of environmental scientists.  And though I was greatly influenced by Schaeffer’s earlier works, I refused to read his book on the Christian view of ecology.  That changed in 1989—a story I will tell later this week.

Now I am ashamed of both my attitude and my behavior and am glad God moved many “Cyrus’s” to do the work that I could have and should have been actively involved in.  I wonder how different things would be today with the Body of Christ if we had given heed to Francis Schaeffer:

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then.  It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling.  God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature—just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality—is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

[Photo source]

You will go out in joy and be led forth in peace; the mountains and hills will burst into song before you, and all the trees of the field will clap their hands (Isaiah 55:12).  Then the trees of the forest will sing for joy before the LORD; For He is coming to judge the earth (1 Chronicles 16:33).

In a Lebanon cedar

I have to confess that I’m a tree hugger of the first degree.  Trees give me joy.  And since the writer of Genesis noted that the first thing evident about the trees in the Garden of Eden is that they were beautiful, I feel my delight in trees is biblically justified (Genesis 2:9).  In fact, after humans, trees are among the most mentioned living creatures in the Bible. 

[This and many other biblically significant matters regarding trees are examined in two RBC resources: the Discovery Series booklet “Celebrating the Wonder of a Tree” and the Day of Discovery four-part series on “The Wonder of a Tree.”]

Eucalyptus curves

So it was with great joy that I had the opportunity a little over a week ago to get a major “tree fix” in visiting California’s Bay Area and Sacramento, places where our family lived from 1975 to 1982 while I served as administrator with two Christian schools.  While visiting with friends in both areas I got to see once again the big trees that so impressed me when we lived there: the towering coast redwoods, the massive sequoias of the Sierra, the impressive sugar pine, and the introduced “big tree” of Australia, the eucalyptus.

My friend Maynard Wright chauffeured me to Calaveras Big Trees State Park, not too far from Angel’s Camp, the town made famous by Mark Twain in his story “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County.”  I had not been there since our two oldest boys, Greg and Eric, were just starting school in the mid-seventies.  Maynard also agreed to be my “man scale” as I made photographic records of the size of the sequoias there—plus the massive stump of the Discovery Tree, the first sequoia come upon at that location by backwoods hunter August Dowd whose accounts publicized the existence of such massive trees to the rest of the nation.  A year later 5 men with auger drills took 22 days to fell the giant tree.  Eventually the stump was planned smooth to serve as a dance floor and the trunk was leveled off to make a bar and a two lane bowling alley.  To John Muir, that act was a profanation of one of God’s great creations:  “God has cared for these trees, saved them from drought, disease, avalanches, and a thousand tempests and floods.  But he cannot save them from fools,” Muir said.

I can empathize with Muir.  I believe he saw these and other wonders as Job was made to see them by God after he and his “comforters” attempted to bring the infinite Creator’s  handiwork into finite human measure—a dangerous and arrogant act that we’re all too quick to attempt.  Job’s response to God’s enumeration of the wonders of His creation was apt: “I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”  [Read the entire dialog in Job 38-42.]

I wonder if in all our attempts to reduce so much of God’s creation to mere human utility we are diminishing our souls.  In writing about Muir’s spiritual understandings of the natural world , Richard Cartwright Austin said:

The sequoia is not the root of our faith, but the sequoia lays claim to our protection in Christ’s name.  Though its size and manifest beauty make it easier for us to respond, they are not the claim.  Quite simply, God made the tree and delights in it; and for this reason we are asked to bear towards the sequoia—and towards all nature—the image of God: protector, not destroyer.

Celebrating the Wonder of Creation (Part 2)

The Lord is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made. . . . The Lord is faithful to all His promises and loving toward all He has made. . . . You open Your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing. The Lord is righteous in all His ways and loving toward all He has made (Ps. 145:9,13,16-17 NIV).

I have been surprised to discover how many times the psalmist declared that God has “love” and “compassion” for all the things He has created. Some of the Hebrew terms indicate that God cares for the creation in a similar way that a mother cares for the one she has given birth to. To get a rich picture of God’s compassion and care for man, the animals, the plants, and the lifeless but dynamic forces of the earth, read Psalms 65, 104, 145, 147, and 148.

While the Sermon on the Mount expressly states that God values man above the creatures (Mt. 6:25-34), the entire thrust of Scripture—from paradise lost in Genesis to paradise regained in Revelation—is that God treasures and takes pleasure not in man alone but in everything He created.

Itinerant preacher John Woolman, years before the American Revolution, expressed this in his journal after a long ocean voyage that resulted in the disregard and needless death of domesticated fowl:

I often remembered the Fountain of goodness, who gave being to all creatures, and whose love extends to caring for the sparrows. I believe where the love of God is verily perfected, and the true spirit of government watchfully attended to, a tenderness toward all creatures made subject to us will be experienced, and a care felt in us that we do not lessen that sweetness of life in the animal creation which the great Creator intends for them under our government.

Psalm 145:9 declares, “The Lord is good to all; He has compassion on all He has made” (NIV). In The Treasury Of David, Charles Haddon Spurgeon concludes, “The duty of kindness to animals may logically be argued from this verse. Should not the children of God be like their Father in kindness?” (p.379).

How can we celebrate the wonder of God in creation?

By acknowledging God’s care and compassion for the entire creation and seeking to do all we can to demonstrate that care— especially by refraining from abusing what He loves and cares for.

See you outdoors!

Dean

Celebrating the Wonder of Creation (Part 1)

The bittersweet celebration

Fall is the most dramatic season of the year in the north and east regions of the US.  It’s like the creation is holding a party, celebrating its making by the hand of its Creator and coming Redeemer—just before it turns down the light and crawls under the billowy comforter of snow to sleep and dream of the joy that will come at its reawakening.  For the next few days, I’d like to offer a series of posts on how followers of Jesus can best understand and celebrate the wonder of creation. Wouldn’t it be awesome if the world leaders who will be meeting in Copenhagen in December to discuss the world’s climate issues were unified around these understandings?

God Made the Earth and Owns It

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth (Gen. 1:1). The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is Mine and you are but aliens and My tenants (Lev. 25:23 NIV). The earth is the Lord’s, and all its fullness, the world and those who dwell therein (Ps. 24:1).

The Word of God tells us that “God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). And according to the New Testament, the same Jesus who came into this world to rescue us from ourselves is the One who first made our world and everything that is in it, for “He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him” (Col. 1:15-16).

George MacDonald wrote, “If the world is God’s, every true man and woman ought to feel at home in it. Something is wrong if the calm of the summer night does not sink into the heart, for it embodies the peace of God. Something is wrong in the man to whom the sunrise is not a divine glory, for therein is embodied the truth, the simplicity, and the might of the Maker.”

The aster celebration

This 19th-century writer obviously believed and understood that we live and breathe in a world that shouts the reality of God from every piece of matter and every natural event. Almost without question, the most significant difference between the worldview of the Bible and the beliefs of secular humanism is the Christian understanding that God made the earth and it belongs to Him. What comes of this belief is significant. When we are users and occupiers of property that belongs to someone else, we rightfully consider the interests of the owner as well as our own. In fact, as tenants and stewards, our own interests are secondary to that of the owner. Our challenge in any use of the land, air, water, and the earth’s living matter that belongs to God is to ask how we can use what He has made so that we will honor Him and in the process  find joy for ourselves.

More than a hundred years ago, Adam Clarke saw the practical implications of God’s ownership when he wrote:

The works of the Lord are multitudinous and varied. They are so constructed as to show the most consummate wisdom in their design, and in the end for which they are formed. They are all God’s property, and should be used only in reference to the end for which they were created. All abuse and waste of God’s creatures are spoil and robbery on the property of the Creator (quoted by Charles Haddon Spurgeon in The Treasury Of David, p.335).

“All abuse and waste of God’s creatures are spoil and robbery on the property of the Creator.” How that reality should awaken us to a fuller awareness of our high calling to care for what God cares for!

Those words take me back to my late twenties when, as a frustrated squirrel hunter one fall, I shot a porcupine high in a huge oak—merely because it was there and I had an unspent shotgun shell in my gun! Porcupines are common in Michigan’s north woods, and they are virtually unprotected by game laws because they are considered “nuisance animals,” like woodchucks, gophers, and chipmunks. I believe that God, who notes the death of a common sparrow, watches over all that He has made. Now I realize that the shame I felt looking into the lifeless eyes of one of God’s creatures I had thoughtlessly wasted might have been a reflection of God’s own heart. But at the time, I passed it off as an unmanly emotion. [Porcupine photo by yathin]

How can we celebrate the wonder of God in creation?
By acknowledging that as the Creator’s landholders, we are to examine the Word of God and prayerfully consider how we are to occupy His territory and manage His works in a manner that glorifies Him. The same Jesus who came into this world to rescue us from ourselves is the One who first made our world and everything in it.

See you outdoors!

Dean