this is an excerpt from a great book that you should read called
"velvet elvis: repainting the christian faith" by rob bell.
also visit
www.nooma.com
www.climatecrisis.net

and see the film "an inconvenient truth."





[OUR ENVIRONMENT

To look at God's restoration plans in greater depth, we need to go back to how
God creates the world and what he thinks about it. The Bible starts with God
making the ground and the seas and calling them "good." God makes land
that produces vegetation and it is "good." Over and over this word good is used
to describe how God perceives what he has made. It is all "good."

Notice what God does with his "good" creation. "Then God said, 'Let the land
produce vegetation: seed-bearing plants and trees on the land that bear fruit
with seed in it, according to their various kinds.' And it was so." The next verse is
very significant: "The land produced vegetation." Notice that it doesn't say, "God
produced vegetation." God empowers the land to do something. He gives it the
capacity to produce trees and shrubs and plants and bushes that produce fruit
and seeds. God empowers creation to make more.

This happens again in Genesis 1:22 when God blesses the creatures of the
water and sky and then says, "Be fruitful anf increase in number and fill the
water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth." Once again God
gives creation--here it is fish and birds--the ability to multiply and make
more. God doesn't make more fish; God gives fish the ability to make more.

An important distinction.

God empowers creation to make more and in doing so loads it with potential. It
is going to grow and change and move and not be the same today as it was
yesterday, and tomorrow it will move another day forward. Creation is loaded
with potential and possibility and promise.

God then makes people whom he puts right in the middle of all this loaded
creation, commanding them to care for creation, to manage it, to lovingly use
it, to creatively order it. The words he gives are words of loving service and
thoughtful use. From day one (which is really day six), they are in intimate rela-
tionship and interaction with their environment. They are environmentalists.
Being deeply connected with their environment is who they are. For them to be
anything else or to deny their divine respoinsibility to care for all that God has
made would be to deny something that is at the core of their existence.

This is why litter and pollution are spiritual issues.

And until that last sentence makes perfect sense, we haven't fully grasped
what it means to be human and live in God's world. Everyone is an environ-
mentalist. We cannot live independently of the world God has placed us in. We
are intimately connected. By God.

Not only are we connected with creation, but creation is going to move forward.
It can't help it. It is loaded with energy. It's going to grow and produce and
change and morph. This point is central to the story: The garden of Eden is not
perfect. Nowhere in Genesis does it say it is perfect. The word the Bible uses
is good. There is a difference. When we say "perfect," what we generally mean
is "static" or "fixed" or "unchanging." It has reached a state in which there is
going to be no more change. But this is not what Genesis says about the gar-
den of Eden. Good means changing and growing and advancing and producing
new things. And so these people are placed in the midst of this dynamic,
changing, alive, vibrant environment and charged with the divine responsibility
of doing something with it. Creating, arranging, ordering, caring for--doing
something with it.

These first people have a choice: to do something with it in harmony with God or
to use it for their own purposes. And not doing something with it is a choice as
well. It would be a sin to abuse creation and distort it and rape it and exploit it,
but it would also be a sin to do nothing with it. Because doing nothing with it
would be essentially saying to God, "You have made nothing of interest to me."

So the issue of easting the fruit then is far bigger than Adam and Eve simply
disobeying God. They are throwing off the whole deal. God made this magnifi-
cent world with endless possibilities of creativity and beauty and meaning, and
they miss it. They decide to steer the thing in a different direction. A direction
of their choosing.

God has given us power and potential and ability. God has given this power to
us so we will use it well. We have choices about how we are going to use our
power. The choices of the first people were so toxic because they were placed
in the middle of a complex web of interaction and relationships with the world
God had made. When they sinned, their actions threw off the balance of
everything.

Weather.

Trees.

Oceans.

It is all one, and when one parts starts to splinter and fracture, the whole thing
starts to crumble. These people cannot be separated from their environment.
One part falls out of harmony, and everything is affected. As one text says,
"The whole creation has been groaning." (Romans 8:22). It is all thrown off.

This is how the Bible starts.

Unlimited potential.

Unbelievable promise and possibility.

And then fracturing, splintering chaos.]