“And God saw everything that he had made … and it was very good … The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to work it and keep it. - Genesis 1:31; 12:15
Waking up early is a blessing that the younger me did not fully embrace … at least not often. If I had to get up at some “ungodly hour” for something I did not want to do “there would be hell to pay.” Now that I am older, getting up at 5:30 is a blessing - a quiet time to read, to think.
I began this day, not with the Word of God, but with Wendell Berry, which is a close second. Berry has a God-centered world view holding the Creator in awe through the lens of His Creation. He sees our relationship to Creation as a religious matter though he is uneasy using the term “religious” for all the destructive practices so-called religious people have had upon Creation - people who should have been most aware of its value. It’s Berry’s estimation that the pursuit of salvation (not salvation itself) has led to a “destructive schism” between body and soul, heaven and earth, where Creation is seen as unimportant. I agree with the “Old Kentuckian.”
There is too much of this “Rapture business,”1 as I call it, especially in American evangelicalism. This leads people to see the earth as something foreign, something to abandon, a sort of “layover” between heaven and heaven. Far too often I have heard people say, “The Earth is not our home.” But it is. God created it to sustain life - all life - and He put us here to live life and care for His Creation, not to treat it like a candy wrapper that one tears open and discards once the “good part” is consumed. To be frank, the rest of Christianity does not do a better job of it either.
Too many Christians want to grab onto Creation as proof of God’s existence in what they see as an assault upon faith by science, but then soon forget the importance of that Creation and God’s command to tend to it.
Prayer: Lord God, thank you for the big and beautiful World you have given us - this world that gives us life and joy. Forgive our short-sightedness and our abuse of your gift. Cause us to cherish Creation and live in it as stewards, until the day you restore it to its former its perfect relationship with Heaven, through the coming of Christ, in whose name we pray. Amen.
A theology also know as Pre-millennial Dispensation that claims God’s elect will be taken out of the earth into heaven and the world will be “Left Behind.” This leads many to disregards the Genesis command to care for Creation, and to misunderstand Revelation 21:1, where the relationship between Heaven and Earth, which was broken by sin, is restored: “Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more.”