A Theology of Ecology

by Dave Wilkinson

January 18, 1998

I started this sermon at a study retreat at a beach house near Refugio. It was a beautiful day. Six dolphins swam by right beyond the surf line. Flights of gulls and pelicans flew over in chaotic seagull swarms and neat pelican rows. There were oil rigs in the distance but they weren’t leaking as far as I could see.

When I glanced up from my books I noticed that a new "rock" had suddenly appeared in the ocean. A seagull stood on its back pecking at it. It was drifting slowly to the east. It obviously wasn’t a rock. Rocks don’t drift. But I didn’t know what it was. Through the telescope I could see that it was brownish gray in color. It was rounded on the top but somehow carved away at the bottom. A large round object like an old fishing float sat on the top.

About an hour later, I took a walk along the beach in the direction taken by my "floating rock." I found it after a couple of hundred yards -- slowly drifting offshore. I waited for the tide to bring it in. But curiosity soon got the best of me and I waded out chest deep. I found myself looking into the sightless face of a large sea lion. The eyes were gone. The flesh around the bottom was eaten away by fish. A large moon snail cruised on it’s back. There was the blank face looking at me -- waiting for something better. Was it shot by a fisherman who resented the competition? Did it die of natural causes? Did a shark bring about its death? Who knows? But in the midst of a picture postcard beautiful day, here was this dead thing.

The world was never meant to be this way. The world was created perfect. Genesis 2:31 says that God "looked at everything he had made and, behold, it was very good." There is an intimate relationship between the natural order and its Creator. God created nature to reflect His glory. "The earth declares the glory of God" the Psalmist sings. And, according to scripture, praise is also the desire of creation. We find the "morning stars singing together" at the creation and the "hills clapping their hands for joy" at the coming of their Lord. Jesus Himself declared on Palm Sunday that if the children and the disciples were quiet as He entered Jerusalem, "the rocks and the stones themselves would start to sing." Of course we are talking in figurative language here. But God’s figurative language reveals lasting truth.

God created good. And at the head of the natural order, God placed humanity. Humanity was given both dominion and stewardship over the lower creation. Humanity was made responsible for the well being of the earth and its creatures. But the Eden story tells us how people fell from a whole relationship with God through an act of self-enthronement. And -- get this, it’s central -- -- because the earth was created for humanity, the earth also fell from wholeness. In Genesis 3:17 God said to Adam: "Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you will eat of it all the days of your life." A few chapters later in Genesis, in the story of Noah we read: "The Lord said, "I will blot out man whom I have made from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things, and the birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them. But then we read, "Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord."

In the Genesis record, we find three great truths about our earth.

First, the earth was created good and desires to praise its creator.

Second, the earth shares in the penalty for human sin.

Third, the earth also shares in God’s favor to a righteous person. Because Noah found favor in the sight of the Lord, the creatures found safety in the Ark.

These three facts are the foundation for a biblical understanding of creation and ecology. In Romans 8:19-22, Paul declares that the good earth was subjected to corruption because of humanity’s sin. The only way to keep the earth pure after the fall of Adam and Eve would be to remove people from the earth. When God decided to give Adam and Eve a continued life and countless descendants, God condemned the earth to share the penalty for our corruption. You can’t have white carpets and kids with dogs in the same house. You cannot have sinful people on earth and expect to keep the planet spotless. The white carpet and kids with dogs analogy doesn’t really paint the picture of what God has done. It’s more severe than that. It’s actually more like letting a heavy metal rock band or the Dallas Cowboys live in your beautiful home and saying "just be yourselves." Because not all of the damage is innocent. Some of it is willful. And you wouldn’t allow that -- you wouldn’t put all your precious things at risk -- unless for some strange reason you really loved the people in that group -- as God loves us.

You may remember the PBS series, "Cosmos" and the powerful image of Carl Sagan standing before a large screen on which there is a display the night sky and saying in nearly mystical tones, "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be." Sagan is a portrait of an unbelieving person, standing on the very tips of his toes, peering off into the distant and mysterious heavens and declaring with a certain blind arrogance, "This is all that is." Some people deify creation, virtually worshipping it as an ideal -- Mother Earth or Gaia.

But Paul gives us a very different picture in Romans. He also pictures something on tiptoe staring off into the distance. That is the literal meaning of the words "waits in eager expectation." But, according to Paul, it is not man who is on tiptoe looking. It is creation. If Carl Sagan could see as the Christian sees, he would say that the entire cosmos is actually looking beyond itself to God. And what creation is earnestly waiting for, Paul says, is the "glorious freedom of the children of God" that it will share. As the earth shared in God’s favor to Noah, so the earth will also share in God’s favor to us. The world is standing on tiptoes for this because right now the world is hurting. Some of that is our fault. People cut down entire forests, allowing the earth to erode uselessly away. Or they poison their water, killing the fish and endangering their own health. Or they pollute the air, damaging the protective ozone layer around the earth and exposing themselves and their descendants to the sun's destructive rays. It’s not all bad news. In the nations of the West, nearly all the environmental indicators are now positive. Air and water are getting cleaner because most anti-pollution initiatives are working very well. But ecological problems are real. If it’s not one thing, it’s another. If it’s not the ozone layer, it’s the rain forest. People who were to be the stewards and guardians of the earth have become the ruiners and despoilers. Our reign over the animal creation is superficial. We achieve it by intimidation. "Obey me or I’ll wear you or eat you."

Now Paul’s words in Romans 8 were written long before the modern ecological crisis. But we see how they have worked out in our own time -- how the whole world truly is groaning under the weight of our sin. Where one there was beauty, rivers catch on fire. We have sought ways to combat the ravages of insects at the risk of deforming our own children.

But this text makes clear that the problems of creation, are not only those that the human race has inflicted on it. The world has also been subjected to troubles as the result of God's direct judgment. Paul uses three words to describe the result..

First, frustration. This is the feeling we have when we know we should attain some goal and are trying to reach it but are repeatedly thrown back or defeated. Paul says that nature experiences frustration.

Dr. Martyn Lloyd-Jones writes in his commentary on Romans: "Nature every year makes an effort to renew itself, to produce something permanent. In the Spring it seems to be trying to produce a perfect creation, to be going through some kind of birth-pangs year by year. But it does not succeed. For Spring leads only to Summer, whereas Summer leads to Autumn, and Autumn to Winter. Nature tries every year to defeat the "vanity," the principle of death and decay and disintegration that is in it. But it cannot do so. It fails every time. What a vision impaired observer might regard merely as a geological phenomenon, a Northridge quake, or as the effect of changing weather systems like El Nino, Paul sees as slow animal-like writhing -- birth pangs. He sees creation's discomfort at its present alienation from what might have been and will yet become in Jesus Christ.

The second word Paul uses is bondage. Bondage literally means slavery. Nature does not want to be as it is, but it is powerless to do anything about it. The creation needs to be delivered by God.

The third word Paul uses is decay. Now nothing that Paul says about creation is as obvious to today's scientific observers as this: that the cosmos is decaying or running down. This is called the second law of thermodynamics. Though for a while something may seem to grow it eventually dies. This seems to contradict that popularly held laws of evolution -- the idea that the simple naturally evolves into the complex. It would be nice if we could set a pile of bricks and boards and nails over by the volleyball court and watch them evolve into a Christian Education wing. But it won’t happen. All they’ll evolve into is dust. They would decay. The world, in Paul’s phrase, is "subject to futility."

Now Paul never took Physics 101 at the University of Tarsus. Paul would not have known about the law of entropy or the dissolution of matter. But he knew about death. It is not only the sun that is dying. Living creatures die too. And Paul saw, as we still see, the mystery of animal pain. Annie Dillard writes in A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, "A couple of summers ago I was walking along the edge of the island to see what I could see in the water, and mainly to scare frogs. Frogs have an inelegant way of taking off from invisible positions on the bank just ahead of your feet, in dire panic, emitting a froggy "Yike!" and splashing into the water. Incredibly, this amused me, and, incredibly, it amuses me still. At the end of the island I noticed a small green frog. He didn't jump; I crept closer. At last I knelt on the island's winter-killed grass, staring at the frog in the creek. He was a very small frog with wide, dull eyes. And just as I looked at him, he slowly crumpled and began to sag. The spirit vanished from his eyes as if snuffed. His skin emptied and drooped; his very skull seemed to collapse and settle like a kicked tent. He was shrinking before my eyes like a deflating football. It was a monstrous and terrifying thing. I gaped bewildered, appalled. An oval shadow hung in the water behind the drained frog; then the shadow glided away. The frog skin bag started to sink.

I had read about the giant water bug, but never seen one. "Giant water bug" is really the name of the creature, which is an enormous, heavy-bodied brown beetle. It eats insects, tadpoles, fish, and frogs. Its grasping forelegs are mighty and hooked inward. It seizes a victim with these legs, hugs it tight, and paralyzes it with enzymes injected during a vicious bite. That one bite is the only bite it ever takes. Through the puncture shoot the poisons that dissolve the victim's muscles and bones and organs--all but the skin--and through it the giant water bug sucks out the victim's body, reduced to a juice.

We find in nature both beauty and cruelty. Naturalist John Muir was in serious error when he wrote that nature is "unfallen and undepraved" and that only man is a "blighting touch."

Some of the sentimental environmentalists of our own time advocate living in some relaxed and easy "harmony with nature." Some people cry for the government to take us back to living in teepees like the American Indians when. they assume, people and nature were in harmony -- which they weren’t.

Now it is true that industry has brought trouble to the environment. But industry has also largely shielded us from other troubles. Disease and death, and exposure to the natural elements and disasters, was much greater in the past. When people were supposedly living nearer nature, they had less comfort, more pain, harder times, more disease, and died younger. Yes we have problems today. But the good old days weren’t all that good.

In the old hillside graveyard in Virginia City, Nevada is a grave marker of four children from the same family who died within a few days of each other in 1876. The marker lists the children’s names and ages, the word cholera, and the sad words from the grieving parents: "We loved them."

The point is that this is not a friendly earth but a violent and dangerous one. It is an unbiblical fantasy to think it is not cursed and that it naturally yields a comfortable life. It’s a hard place. That’s the biblical truth. But that is not the end of the biblical story.

There is another phrase that is important in our text -- that while God subjected the world to futility because of humanity’s sin, He subjected it "in hope." - in the expectation of the day when the proper stewardship of the children of God will be reestablished on the earth -- so that when we realize our potential as God’s children, the earth will also realize its wonderful potential as our home. The Bible makes it clear in Revelation 21 and in other passages that the future home of a glorified and redeemed humanity is on a glorified and redeemed earth. This is why, after reading our text from Romans 8, Martin Luther turned to his little dog and announced, "and you too will have a little golden tail."

So in verse 19 Paul declares: "For the whole creation waits on tip toes for the revealing of the children of God."

"Revealing" translates the Greek apocalypse, which refers to an uncovering, unveiling or revelation. Paul tells us in Colossians, "when Christ, who is our life, is revealed, then we also will be revealed in glory."

The U.S. Army has the recruiting slogan, "Be all that you can be." If we were all we could be, we wouldn’t need an army.

But one day in Christ we will be all that God meant us to be when He made us. And when that happens, the earth will share in the blessing.

If you have seen the movie Gettysburg, you will recall Jeff Daniel’s portrayal of Joshua Chamberlain who won the Medal of Honor for heroism on Little Round Top.

Fifty years after the battle, the real Chamberlain returned to Gettysburg and reflected on the graves of the men who had died there.

He closed his account with these thoughts on Romans 8: "The earth itself shall be its treasurer. It holds something of ours besides graves. The whole creation, travails in pain together, in earnest expectation.

And so these Gettysburg hills, which lifted up such splendid valor, and drank in such high heart's blood, shall hold the mighty secret in their bosom till the great day of revelation and recompense, when these heights shall flame again with transfigured light. For they, too, have part in that adoption, which is the manifestation of the sons of God!"

Chamberlain knows that it is not just the dead who wait at Gettysburg. It is also the landscape. For nature’s destiny is inseparably linked to ours. Because we sinned, the rest of creation was corrupted with us. Likewise, when our glory is divinely restored, the natural world will be fully restored as well.

What’s the point? What’s the bottom line for us?

I believe that through this text, God is calling us to a Christian perspective on this life and all we know in it -- what theologians call a world-and-life view. Paul tells us all this because knowing the true nature of creation and re-creation will lead us to rearrange our values and change our approach to suffering and the disappointments of life.

We will not be surprised when things go wrong in this life. This world is not a good place We live in a fallen environment. Your plans will misfire, you will often fail, others will destroy what you have spent long years and a lot of work to accomplish. This will be true even if you are a Christian and are trying to follow Jesus But your temporary successes are not what life is all about. What finally matters is your love for God and your faithfulness.

Second, we will not place our ultimate hope in anything human beings can do to improve this world's conditions. We will do what good we can do in this life and encourage others in their efforts to do good. But we will not fool ourselves into thinking that the salvation of the world's ills will be brought about by mere human efforts. We will feed the poor, but we will know that Jesus said in Matthew 26, "The poor you will always have with you." We will pray for our leaders, but we will know that they are sinful men and women and that they will disappoint us. We will care for the environment but we won’t believe that we can reverse God’s judgment. We won’t be easy prey for the environmental doom criers. We will know that when the end does come for the old world it will be because it is time for the creation of the new earth. It won’t be because of ecological crisis but because God has said, "It’s time."

Finally, we will keep our eyes on Jesus. Where else can we look? Only Jesus is worthy of your trust. He has promised to return in His glory, and we know that when He does return and we see him in His glory, we will be like Him. When we are made like Him in His glory, the creation that is also straining forward to that day will become glorious, too.

So it is no wonder that the whole creation -- what you see out these windows -- prays with us the ancient Christian prayer, "Maranatha." Come, Lord Jesus.