God’s Earth: Our Responsibility

Genesis 2:4-9, 15

St. John’s United Church of Christ
Greeley, Colorado
April 30, 2023
Rev. Juvenal Cervantes

A couple of weeks ago we read Genesis 1 and we explored the question what does it mean that God has created a common home for us, given to us to live and to share and it introduced the understanding of creation with a poem. Genesis one is a beautiful poem, filled with poetic language to be read as a poem.

Genesis two preaches creation with a story and I want to read a portion of today. Genesis chapter two beginning with verse four:

These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created.

In the day that the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, when no plant of the field was yet in the earth and no vegetation of the field had yet sprung up—for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was no one to till the ground, but a stream would rise from the earth and water the whole face of the ground— then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground[b] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being. And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east, and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.

The Scripture says that God is love. We know the love of God. The crucifixion, his death on the cross is evident of God’s love for us. It is a statement of who God is in love.

For God to be love, there has always been an object of his love. If God is love, he can’t do anything unloving, everything he does is an expression of his love.

God’s act of creation is an expression of God’s love. Everything that surrounds us, air, soil, water, the lives of plants and animals, things that are visible and things that are invisible, the sun, the moon, the planets, our solar system, the stars of our galaxy, the galaxies of the universe, the invisible dark matters scientists talk mysteriously about, molecules, and atoms, subatomic particles, they are an expression of God’s love.

God himself takes joy of the work of his hands, and he loves his creation. It’s at this point, that Christian people over many centuries have often wandered astray in our thinking of creation. We have acted out of our self-centeredness and that has taken over. We’ve assumed, there’s evidence, at least since the Middle Ages, Christian people and Christian have often assumed that the creation is for us and that we are free to do whatever we please, exploit it, if we want to.

In 1967 there was a Princeton medieval historian Lyn White and he wrote an article that was widely published and it is still read now, since 1967 because of the claim that it makes. The name of the article was “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis” and he blamed Christians. He said that the development of science and technology in the western world which led to the polluting of our air and our soil and our water was to be traced all the way back to Christian thinkers in the medieval times who believed the world was created for humans and when God said “Have dominion over it,” he meant you could do with it whatever you pleased. And he said that idea permeated western thinking and resulted all these centuries later an idea that permeated our society: the world is ours to do as we pleased.

Here’s what he said:

“Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes toward man’s relation to nature which are almost universally held not only by Christians and neo-Christians but also by those who fondly regard themselves as post-Christians…

Hence we shall continue to have a worsening ecologic crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence save to serve man.”

Now, Lynn may be correct that the idea permeated Christian thinking, but he is dead wrong to call that idea Christian.

It is not what the Bible teaches, it is not Christian truth that the world was created for us and that we are free to do with it as we please. That is a mistake.

The Biblical answer to the questions what is the relation of earth to creation is a very different answer than that.

According to scripture, creation is not for us, it is for God.

There is this beautiful picture in Revelation chapter four and five in which John sees into the throne room of heaven and there is God seated on the throne and the lamb is at the right hand and all creation gathered around singing praises to him and all the redeemed signing praises to him. It is a beautiful vision that John has. And there are these four living creatures there and they give praise to God and they represent all of creation and they say:

“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things,
and for thy pleasure they were created.”

He did not make the world for us, wrapped it and gave it to us to do whatever we please. Paul’s beautiful hymn of praising Christ in Colossians chapter one affirms the same thing. It says:

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation, for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created, things visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or rulers or powers—all things have been created through him and for him. He himself is before all things, and in him all things hold together.

All of creation is for God.

We were created in it and we participate in it, but it is not created for us, it is a gift, it allows us to live in this beautiful home that we share in common with all of his creatures that he loves, but it is not for us. We were included, God made us for relationship because he loved us, but it is not for us, it is for God.

Creation is for God and our journey here is brief, just a small amount of time we’ve been on the face of the earth compared to his age. It seems like a lot of wasted time and space.

God found joy in the goodness of his creation.

Dallas Willard in his book, “The Great Conspiracy” marvels at the great joy. We sing that song, “Joyful, joyful, we adore thee” and we can sing it as we are joyful, but the truth is that God is joyful and we adore him. He enjoys his creation.

Willard said, “All of the great and beautiful things from which we occasionally drink tiny droplets of soul-exhilarating joy, God continuously experiences in breadth and depth and riches. We see a little bit of the beauty of creation and it stirs us and God enjoys all of it, all of the time.

Willard tells about a time coming over a rise in Port Elizabeth, South Africa, and suddenly encountering vistas of the beaches and the mountains and the sky and he wrote this:

“Words cannot capture the view that confronted me. I saw space and light and texture and color and power… that seemed hardly of his earth. Gradually there crept into my mind the realization that God sees this all the time.

He sees it, experiences it, knows it from every possible point of view, this and billions of other scenes like and unlike it, and this and billions of other worlds. Great tidal waves of joy must constantly wash through his being.”

Willard says, “We pay a lot of money to buy an aquarium with colorful fish swimming around, we stare at them and really be moved by that, and God sees the depths of every ocean on the planet, the coral reeves and the beauty and the color of that all the time; God takes great joy in his creation. He witnesses things that we see in small bites, but God sees constantly in his fullness.

We can get so enthralled you and I by the special effects. The first episodes of Star Wars were just amazing, now they look pretty cheesy. We are moved by special effects in movies, videos, sports, but God witness all of the time his creation as the eagle nebula.

Clouds of gas and microscopic dust that reach six trillion miles from top to bottom and it is a kind of nursey in which stars are being born, hundreds of stars emerging here and there, hotter than the sun.

One writer describes the eagle nebula like this:

The towering clouds of gases, trillions of miles high, backlit by nuclear fires and newly formed stars, galaxies cartwheeling into collision, and sending explosive shock waves, boiling through millions of light years of time and space.

Does anybody get stirred at a firework show? That

is nothing, God witnesses this all of the time, it is part of his joy in his creation. He said, “This is very good.”

Since this world is not for us, what is our assignment, our responsibility to our earth. In Genesis we find two ideas that help us keep things in perspective:

First, we are like kings and queens, like royalty, called to rule the earth as God’s representatives.

Consider this word from Genesis:

Then God said, “Let us make humans in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the air and over the cattle and over all the wild animals of the earth[b] and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth.”

So God created humans in his image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

The idea of the image of God has been understood in a lot of different ways by theologians over time. But in the ancient near east where these Hebrew people lived, the idea of the image of God was an idea of royalty, primarily. The King, whoever that was, the Pharaoh of Egypt, was the image of Rah, the son God. He was the earthly representative of Rah, the son God. That was true of every king, of every royal person on earth, they represented the God of the people.

Even in Israel, when a king was crowned. Psalm 2 is a psalm that might have been sung in one of these coronations, God says in Psalm 2 to the king, the son of David: You are my son, today I have begotten you.” Now those words were applied to Jesus baptism years later, but in every coronation, here was the affirmation that the king was like the son of God, the image of God on earth. And the king’s job according to Psalm 78 was to rule and reign over the people of God as God himself would do it, with the same compassion, and justice and mercy and love that God himself would do it.

But in Genesis, chapter one, it is not just a king who is designated as the image bearing of God, it is all of human beings. We are all declared to be royalty, we are all placed to rule over it, to have dominion over it as God himself would do it. God loves his creation, God cares for his creation.

And he says to me and you, “You are to be the image bearers of me, you are authorized to rule over creation.”

The story of Genesis chapter one says that we are God’s kings and queens, expected to rule over his creation as God would do it.

The story of Genesis, chapter two offers a different image to help us understand our responsibility to God’s creation: it is the claim that we are like farmers who are called to care for the garden, the soil, so that it would remain fruitful and healthy.

Genesis two is describes as this beautify garden that god placed with everything necessary for life in it, even the tree of life and the tree of knowledge of good and evil. Genesis 2:15 says,

The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.
The Hebrew phrase, “To work the garden” literally is to serve the garden.

When it’s used for farming and soil, is translated to till or work it, but the word literally, to serve it and to keep it.

That word “keeping” is a familiar biblical word. God is the keeper of Israel, he is the one who keeps us all the time. Cain asked God sarcastically, “Am I my brother’s keeper, am I the one responsible for my brother?” and here we are called to serve it and to keep it, that’s our intimate connection with the earth.

God made Adam, he forms him out of the dusts of the ground, the Hebrew word is Adam. He makes Adam out of “adamah.” We might say, “He made humans out of humus or he form souls out of soil.

So, we are the image bearers of God, we are to rule over it and take care of it, we are like farmers to watch it, to serve it and none of this suggests that this world is ours to ignore, to exploit, to abuse or to destroy it. We were not given a license for that.

It really doesn’t matter if we believe scientists that we are in an ecological crisis that starts 100 or 150 years ago. You may not believe it. You may believe that is it a hoax created by the Chinese government, that is your privilege, but listen to me, whether you even believe there is an ecological crisis, it doesn’t matter, as Christians we’ve been given biblical mandate to behave in a particular way, on this planet, whether there is a crisis or not. We’ve been given a biblical mandate to care for it with affection, with benevolence, with care, it is God’s creation, he loves it, it was created for him. That means taking responsible for our consumption, our greed, our habits. We can’t save the planet, that’s impossible, that’s abstract, but we can take care of our little portion of it, we can take care of our lives, that we step as lightly as possible, that we live in a way that it’s sustainable, so that other generations that follow have access to the joy of this good common home that is ours. May God help us as we care for our world and He cares for us.