Kindle Notes & Highlights
We’re part of the world; we’re not God.
it’s good for God, and was good even before we came along (if you want to know more, have a look at Psalm 104).
Ruling the world is all about serving: serving God (who made the good world), and serving the world itself by ‘keeping’ it, or taking care of it.
Here, at the beginning of the story of the world, we see that human beings are good for the world.
one of the things about being righteous is that you have regard for the life of your beast.
While we eat the eggs and the chicken kebabs, we also take care of the chicken while it’s alive according to what God has made it, not just what we can get out of it.
(Deut 20:19-20)
Adam ends up living in a state of war with the world God has made.
Our world is in mourning, because we, its rulers, have turned our backs on the creator by not living for him, but living for ourselves, worshipping what we can get out of the world. As a result, we hate each other, we are greedy, we lie, we steal. Our natural state is that we are in rebellion against God. And this is a disaster for our world.
If you don’t know Jesus, there’s not much point in finding out about the environment, actually! You need to do business with God, to get your relationship with God sorted out first.
Jesus died on the cross to reconcile all things to God. To make peace between God and all things!
If you know Christ, then every day, in the little things, you should be putting greed to death. As you get up, switch on lights, turn on heaters or the air conditioner, decide to buy a new phone, use your car or get busy at work, it is right to think about how your actions will affect other people and the world they live in.
Judgement is not the end for us. We can and should start living for our new home, even now. The judgement of the world should lead us to positive ethical action, not to despair or complacency.
Loving your neighbour isn’t something that is meant to be bound and limited. There is a wider sense to the command—a sense that bursts through the boundaries we like to set up for ourselves. Part of working out how to love our neighbour in this wide sense is to listen to the wisdom of those who get together to study how the world works.
Of course, when human beings collaborate, they will get things wrong, because they are sinners (Rom 1:21-23) and they are finite (Job 28). Yet they will also get lots of things right, because they are human beings made in God’s image, however broken that image is. People who know things about ecology and economics and politics will have some good advice about how to love our neighbours, and how our actions might affect others who aren’t directly in our line of sight. We should listen to them.
