Now & Then & Etc

Does God like life on Earth?

Yes, he made life and variety of life, and he pronounced his creation good (Gn 1:31). His life flourishes in the oceans, sky, and land, and in nooks and crannies in an almost infinite variety; it testifies to the joy he feels from variety of life.

Does God need us to protect his nature and variety of life on Earth?

He doesn’t “need” us to protect it for him, and very likely he has other life-filled planets in the universe or universes, but he does “desire” us to protect it for life’s sake and for our sake. He values his creation on Earth. He values our having a spark of him in us. He desires his spirit to shine in us through our stewarding of his creation.

Loving God and Loving Our Neighbor

Jesus taught us that God’s greatest commandments are for us to love God and to love our neighbors, and we were given many ways to do this: To love God we can worship, pray, study, sing hymns, preach, meditate upon and appreciate his nature, and do many other actions that express his will through us. To love others we can be kind, give, heal, forgive, and help. Loving God and loving others are necessarily wrapped up together.

Climate change and mass extinction

Climate change and mass extinction are the two existential threats facing humankind and many species. Other times had their challenges—for example: plagues, Huns, the Inquisition, World War I and World War II—but climate change and mass extinction are bigger that them, for they threaten the existence of all humans and of many species. The rub for us and who we are is that these challenges are occurring now, for us to deal with. There were other times, but this one is ours.

We live in an Earth environment that supports many species that also support us. Plankton and plants produce the oxygen we breathe, as one example of the multitude of interlinkings of the millennia-evolved ecosytems that supports human life. It’s not all for us—our brief but destruction-filled history refutes such hubris—but we’re blessed to be here. God did provide us with free will, minds, and power by which we can care for, or extinguish, this garden of Eden, but caring for it requires us to apply our souls, too.

Engage for God’s Nature

As James teaches us, “faith without deeds is useless,” (James 2:17). The challenge is squarely before us. We either express the fullness of God’s love and work to care for his nature for all of his variety of life on Earth and for the benefit of his human children and other species, using the gifts spirit and minds, and expressing our humanness and our participation in his works, or we will have wasted his many gifts to us and not been part of the new heaven and earth, but instead been just dust recycled back to dust.

“Do what you can, with what you have, where you are.”
— Theodore Roosevelt (Quote seen on a coffee mug at the Medora, North Dakota, Old Town Theater. Medora is next to Theodore Roosevelt National Park)

“The critical issue is not what we know but what we do with what we know.”
— Admiral Hyman Rickover (father of America’s nuclear Navy; quote seen on the wall at the Navy Exchange in Bangor, WA in 2020)

            ⸺ MRM