The inevitable end of this world shows itself to us more and more every day. I am not thinking about epic battles in the Middle East, or the attacks of “Gog and Magog” from the book of Revelation.
No. Our looming Armageddon surrounds us already. Yet, too many remain too blind to see and too hard-hearted to care.
I think of these things whenever I walk with my granddaughter through my wife’s flower garden. As a child I had a meager butterfly collection. I still recall the abundance of brilliantly colored butterflies flitting around my boyhood home every spring and summer.
Last week I told my granddaughter about how I once collected shimmering specimens of God’s most unlikely aerial acrobats. (How in the world DO those wings work, anyway?!)
But I won’t teach this 5 year old how to begin a collection of her own. Nowadays, butterflies are a rarity — at least, in comparison to their past abundance. Many species, such as the glorious monarch butterfly, are
nearing extinction.
The day is approaching when wild butterflies visiting a child’s flower garden will be a very rare treat, enjoyed by only a few.
We are destroying our world.
The earth is on its last legs. Global warming is an indisputable scientific fact. Climatologists tell us that we have past the tipping point. The current
trajectory of intensifying heat is now irreversible.
More and more areas of this globe will become uninhabitable. Rising sea levels will flood coastlines around the world, displacing millions of people. Intensifying droughts will create more emigrant farmers, such as the thousands of Honduran immigrants fleeing to our southern border in part because their parched, cracked farmlands will no longer produce crops.
I now read Revelation 16:8-9 from a new perspective:
The fourth angel poured out his bowl on the sun, and the sun was allowed to scorch people with fire. They were seared by the intense heat and they cursed the name of God, who had control over these plagues, but they refused to repent and glorify him.
I share these thoughts by way of introduction.
My friend Suzanne McDonald, theology professor at Western Seminary, has
written an excellent chapter for the recent book, Human Flourishing (Pickwick 2020). Her important chapter is entitled, “Waiting with Eager Longing: The Inseparability of Human Flourishing from the Flourishing of All Creation.”
Suzanne pulls together and highlights the numerous Old Testament texts where God commands — yes, COMMANDS — his people to carefully tend his creation. Human beings were given the direct responsibility to ensure the environment’s longevity by focusing on sustainability. Not exploitation, but sustainability.
Here is an excerpt, but I encourage you to buy the book and meditate of the entirety of Suzanne’s wisdom. Our future literally depends on it. (All emphases are mine):
One of my passions outside of theology is birding, so the final command to which I will draw our attention is irresistible to me. It is Deuteronomy 22.6-7, “If you come on a bird’s nest, in any tree or on the ground, with fledglings or eggs, with the mother sitting on the fledglings or on the eggs, you shall not take the mother with the young. Let the mother go, taking only the young for yourself, in order that it may go well with you and you may live long.”
Once again, very evidently this command is not simply about how to treat birds. It is about what we would call today “sustainability,” and the message is simple. If God’s people keep on killing mother birds as well as baby birds, eventually there will no longer be any mother birds, and then there will not be any more baby birds either. So, leave the mother birds alone!
We might well consider this to be completely obvious, and so it is, but it should not escape our notice that we are doing the equivalent of what God forbids in this command all the time. We are overexploiting natural resources of every
kind. We are destroying habitats and driving species to extinction at an alarming rate. In addition to extinctions, the sheer number of other living creatures has dropped precipitously in recent decades. The World Wildlife Fund’s Living Planet Report in 2018 indicated a sixty percent drop in the overall numbers of animals, birds, aquatic creatures, and reptiles since 1970. This means there are sixty percent fewer creatures in the chorus of creation’s praise to God within many of our lifetimes.
In other words, to return to Deuteronomy 22.6-7, we are taking the mother birds as well as the baby birds, so to speak, and God know that if we continue to do that, it will not go well with us, and we will not live long in the land. . .
. . . The implications for us are the same as they were for ancient Israel: requiring us to put limits on our perceived needs, and to stop our willful exploitation of the rest of creation for short-term gain, and to look instead to the flourishing of the whole of creation, and of the poor, and [of our] own longer-term flourishing too. And the flip side of this is clear in scripture as well. Sinful disobedience to God’s commands leads to devastating consequences for the rest of creation as well as for us. . .
. . . Intentionally seeking the flourishing of the rest of creation, even when that is costly for us and pushes against what seems to be our immediate self-interest, should not be a matter of indifference to Christians, still less of the kind fierce resistance which is a lamentable feature of the current political polarization in the United States and elsewhere. Wise earthkeeping should be an intrinsic element of Christian discipleship, as part of what it means to love the triune Creator God will all of our being, and to love our neighbor as ourselves (54-55).