Is Jesus a greenie? (3)

If Jesus is the original greenie, what might that mean for us and how we relate to creation? I mean, how does it matter that the environment was his idea? Should it make a difference to us that, in the beginning, God made an earth that was good and thriving?

Again, opening up the Bible can help us think about these things. There are clues around the end of chapter one in Genesis:

Then God said, "Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground." So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.

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." Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food." And it was so.

God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Gen 1:26-31)

Genesis chapter two recaps the story in different words:

The LORD God formed the man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being ... The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it. (Gen 2: 6, 15)

Two big themes stand out to me from all this. One is that

God made us, like he made everything.

In a sense there are basically only two types of things - creatures and creators, the maker and the things he makes. And according to Genesis, at least, its clear which one we are: we are not God, we are not creators but creatures. This has a couple of important implications.

(i) Because the environment was originally God’s idea, not ours, it makes sense for us to listen to God about how we should treat it. It makes sense, in other words, for our spirituality to inform our environmental values. Our beliefs about God should influence our environmental behavior.

(ii) The fact that we are creatures, rather than the creators, is also something we have in common with the rest of the earth. I think this means that we shouldn’t worship the environment as some kind of divinity - like us, it was brought into being by God, like us its creaturely. So we might admire the natural environment, and contemplating it might lift our hearts and minds to the divine - but to venerate or worship the environment itself would be a mistake. It’s the creator, not the creation, that we should worship. So let’s not get carried away and treat the environment as something more than it is...