What is the purpose of the universe? The way we normally talk about our relationship with God could just as easily be accomplished by an entirely spiritual creation. Why did God even create a physical reality in the first place?
The seventh-century theologian, St Maximus the Confessor, argued that every last created thing has an important purpose as part of God’s greater plan. What is the purpose of a cabbage butterfly or a katydid? Or a lynx? Or a tube worm? Or a peacock or a musk ox?
And how are we supposed to relate to all of these other creatures? While we can surely come up with some superficial ideas here and there, honest attempts at complexity leave us without anything approaching firm answers.
Given our lack of knowledge, perhaps we should tread carefully. Is it God’s will that we drive His creatures to extinction? That we fill His rivers with garbage and chemicals? That we destroy the beauty and biodiversity of His oceans?
Psalm 19:1 says that “The heavens declare the glory of God, and the sky above proclaims his handiwork.” But how many of us can barely even see the stars anymore?
Among other things, nature points us to God and fills us with worship. The gospels say that when money changers and vendors prevented people from worshiping by doing business in the Jewish temple’s Court of the Gentiles, Jesus overturned their tables and drove them out with a whip, recalling the Jewish Scriptures, in which God says, “My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations.”
If we look at creation around us, we see that there are money changers in this temple – exploiting God’s good work and standing in the way of the world’s worship, keeping people from experiencing God through what he has made.
“My house will be called a house of prayer for all nations,” yet we are trashing it daily in a spirit of carelessness and selfish concern.
In Genesis the Bible says that we as human beings are in some sense charged by God with the care of the rest of His creation. By any measure, we are failing this task spectacularly. Instead, we are precipitating a mass extinction event the likes of which the earth has seen only a handful of times over the course of the last 500 million years, with scientists estimating that around one million of the planet’s eight million species will soon face extinction from manmade causes, primarily the rapidly warming climate caused by greenhouse gas emissions, especially from the burning of fossil fuels in various forms. While we have known about the dangers of greenhouse gasses for decades, 50% of the carbon dioxide (one of the most common greenhouse gasses) that has been released into the atmosphere since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution has been done so since 1992.
Neither will we as a species created in the image of God escape the consequences of our own destructive practices. Climate change is not only warming the atmosphere and the ocean, killing marine life and rapidly melting ice and permafrost, but it is already altering weather patterns, magnifying the severity of heatwaves, droughts, storms, and flooding, and making some coastal areas increasingly uninhabitable (including the entire island nation of Kiribati, which has suggested that it may soon be time to evacuate its citizens) and contributing to rising global food insecurity. Furthermore, these consequences fall most heavily on the poor and marginalized, “the least of these” with whom Christ identifies.
Psalm 24:1 says that, “The Earth is the Lord’s and everything in it,” but how are responding to that idea? How will we respond to it going forward?
We need to take caring for the environment seriously in a way we have never had to before and be willing to make sacrifices to do so. We may be standing on a precipice, but hope is not lost. We believe in a God who heals the world and calls on us to do the same, and it is time to take up the task before us.
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