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| August 2008 |
| Billie Silvey |
| My Father's World |
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| As a Christian, I believe that God made the world, and he made it good. Over and over in the biblical account of creation in Genesis 1, God tells us that each aspect of the world is good. God created a world of breathtaking beauty, mind-bending intricacy, and an emotionally satisfying interdependence. Isaiah tells us that God made the world “to be inhabited”: For this is what the Lord says-- he who created the heavens, he is God; he who fashioned and made the earth, he founded it; he did not create it to be empty, but formed it to be inhabited. --Isaiah 45:18 He wanted people and animals to coinhabit the earth, so he made all that was necessary to sustain our lives. Then God did something very risky. He made people responsible for it all. He created male and female in his own image, and God blessed them and said to them, "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground." --Genesis 1:28 Recently that passage has been misinterpreted by Christians and by those who oppose Christianity alike as justifying the abuse and misuse of the environment. But most Christians know that, when God entrusts something to our care, it involves a grave responsibility to nourish and cherish, not to exploit. After all, God gives us our children. They come into our lives helpless and dependent on us. No one, Christian or non-Christian, would contend that that means we can treat them any way we choose. One word scripture uses for such responsibility is “stewardship.” A steward or manager is someone responsible for something that belongs to someone else, and there are numerous examples of stewards in scripture. In the book of Luke, Jesus tells about a rich man whose manager was accused of wasting his possessions. So he called him in and asked him, “What is this I hear about you? Give an account of your management, because you cannot be manager any longer.” --Luke 16:1-2 God wants us to make wise and careful use of the responsibilities he’s given us. If we fail to, we will be called to account. As Jesus put it, “Who then is the faithful and wise manager, whom the master puts in charge of his servants to give them their food allowance at the proper time. It will be good for that servant whom the master finds doing so when he returns.” --Luke 12:42 But, the passage continues, the manager who fails to care for his master’s possessions will be punished. As a Christian, I can be a more effective and pleasing steward of the beauty and wonder of God’s creation by limiting my use of its natural resources as much as possible, by being content with less, and by considering that God's care and blessings are for everyone on earth as much as they are for me. We are all his people, and God has entrusted each of us with the responsibility to preserve and protect his creation so that all his creatures, now and forever, can enjoy the beauty and bounty of our Father's world. |