From Environment to the Gospel

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Bible Translations

Unless otherwise indicated, Bible quotations on this page are taken from the NIV translation.

We're going to start of this evening with a quick quiz, to see how clued up we are on environmental issues...

Enviro-Quiz

Carbon Dioxide

Reducing CO2 emissions.

What's your best choice, over the course of a year?

A) Take the train instead of the car

B) Hang your washing out, instead of tumble drying

C) Work from home 1 day a week

Answer »The answer is A. It is estimated that one person taking the train for a year rather than driving a car would reduce their CO2 emission total by 2.9 tonnes. Hanging out your washing rather than using a tumble-dryer would cut CO2 by 0.9 tonnes. Working from home one day a week would cut 0.88 tonnes. (Estimates from the Edinburgh Centre for Carbon Management.)

Washing

Your clothes are dirty.

What's the best cleaning choice for the environment?

A) Hand-wash the clothes in hot water

B) Take them to the dry cleaners

C) Machine wash the clothes in cold water

Answer »The answer is C. The solvents used by most dry cleaners are damaging to the environment. In a washing machine the vast majority of the energy, about 90% of it, goes into heating up the water not running through the cycle. Washing clothes in hot water, even by hand, uses a lot of energy to heat the water. Keeping washing temperatures low and always washing a full load is the best policy.

Nappies

You've had a baby.

What's the best nappy choice for the environment?

A) Use disposable nappies

B) Use a nappy laundering service (which collects them & returns them clean)

C) Wash and dry your baby's nappies yourself

Answer »The answer is B. Although a laundry service will be collecting & delivering the nappies by car, those negative effects are countered by the large scale efficiency of huge batches of nappies being washed in huge machines. However, although most experts say disposable nappies are the worst choice for the environment, some argue that the necessary high temperatures and polluting detergents mean the advantage of washing nappies is not entirely clear cut.

Serious Issues

I hope you had fun with that. It was a fairly light way into some serious issues that keep cropping up in the news. Global warming, industrial pollution, nuclear power, renewable energy, fossil fuels, deforestation, destruction of the Amazon, extinction of species. Our environment faces a lot of challenges. And it raises lots of questions.

Who's
responsible?

Who does the world belong to? And who’s responsible for it? Those are important questions to answer, cos what you believe affects what you do. If you’re more into industry and economics, you might believe that any given bit of the world belongs to whoever claims it first. And so they can do with it as they think best. If you’re more into environmentalism, you might believe that the world belongs to itself, and no one has any intrinsic right to do anything with it.

So, what is true? What does the Bible say about it? What should be our view of the environment as Christians? What we’ll do is walk through this diagram again, with our eyes on the issue of Environment. We’ll look at these 4 key Gospel moments. We’ll start with Creation and Fall, then we’ll look at the Salvation Jesus has won, and the New Creation that he will bring in when he returns.

We'll work through those 4 key moments as headings.

Creation

Well let’s start with Genesis. Straight away, Genesis 1 has some very clear things to say about all this. The world doesn’t belong to us, and it doesn’t belong to itself. The world belongs to God. He created it and he owns it. He’s the one who’s got the right to say how his world is used. And he’s said some things about that already here in Genesis. We find out a bit about what our relationship with the world should be like. Look at ch 2v15:

The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.

That’s our job as humans. We’re to work the world, we’re to make use of it. But we’re also to take care of it. It’s not ours to do with whatever we want – it’s God’s and we’re to take care of it for him.

Now environmentalism is onto something here. It prompts us to ask the question: do we take proper care of God’s world? That’s how God intended us to treat his world – with care.

Three areas:

recycling
electricity
cars

recycling

Do we recycle? These days it doesn’t take very much effort to make a start on recycling. Round here the councils provide us with plastic boxes to use for card and paper and tin cans. There’s also the bottle banks for glass and plastic. All of that’s good and sensible, and doesn’t take loads of effort.

electricity

Or think about electricity. Where does your electricity come from? Choice is one of the buzz words of our society. And a lot of mainstream power companies now offer us a choice as to where our electricity comes from. We can choose between supporting the standard fossil fuel options, or supporting renewable energy by having our money go to renewable power generators instead. There’s a website – energylinx.co.uk that tells you all the options. It depends what you look at, but sometimes renewable energy doesn’t even work out any more expensive than the standard fossil fuel options.

cars

Or think about cars & motorbikes. They’re a big cause of pollution. But they’re also very useful – they give us freedom, they save us time. But they have costs too. The financial costs are the most obvious – if you add up everything: petrol, insurance, tax, service, MOT, repairs and maintenance, and then allow for depreciation as well – you might well find that even a small car cost a few hundred pounds per month, per car. The money cost are pretty obvious. I guess the environmental costs are more hidden. But it’s worth us stopping to ask ourselves sometimes: Do we need to use our cars as much as we do? Are there times when we could walk instead? Or share a lift? Indeed, do we need as many cars as we’ve got?

Recycling, electricity & cars. Those are only a few examples. But environmentalism probably has something to say to us there. As Christians, as people who know this world belongs to God, and as people who know we are responsible for how we live in it, we should be willing to make some effort to take care of the environment. Environmentalism probably feels fairly comfortable with Gen 2v15, and maybe helps us think through what that should mean.

But the Bible does say other things too. Environmentalism is probably less comfortable with Gen 1v28:

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."

God tells us both to rule over the world, and also to take care of it. He can do that because he is God. He made the world, and he made us, so he can tell us what to do, and he can tell us how the world can be used.

Even bigger
problems

Environmentalism is onto something, but it’s only half-right about it. Our world matters and we should take care of it – but it matters because it’s God’s world. And he’s the one who tells us what things are important – and what things are more important. How we treat our environment is important – but how we treat God is even more important. There are things wrong with our environment and those are important too. But there are even more important problems. The environmental problems are symptoms of the bigger disease. They’re not the disease itself. To think about that brings us on to our 2nd heading – the Fall.

Fall

Our 2nd key Gospel moment, the Fall, reminds us that everything isn’t the way it’s supposed to be. There are problems everywhere. Our world is broken, we’re broken, and the relationship between us and our world is broken. Everything is out of joint. Worse than that, it’s actively under God’s judgement, it’s under curse. Have a look at what God says in ch 3v17:

"Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life."

A world
under curse

Our whole world is under curse. The ground is cursed because of human sin. We were designed to rule over the world and take care of it on God’s behalf. And the world was designed to respond rightly to us. But not any more. Now the world resists. We can still bend it to our will if we try hard enough. We can still “eat of it”, as the verse says. But now it demands painful toil, because things don’t run smoothly. Our sin has put the world out of joint, and God’s judgement rests on it too.

Jesus says something similar in Matthew’s gospel:

6You will hear of wars and rumours of wars, but see to it that you are not alarmed. Such things must happen, but the end is still to come. 7Nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom. There will be famines and earthquakes in various places. 8All these are the beginning of birth-pains.

Matt 24v6-8

Jesus is talking about more than just the environment – he’s talking about the way our whole world is malfunctioning – wars and famines and earthquakes. All of those are in our newpapers this week. There were earthquakes in Iran a couple of days ago. There is war in Sudan, there is famine in Darfur.

But Jesus tells us that’s what this fallen world is like. Those things were going on in Jesus day, they’re still going on, and they’ll go on until he returns. They don’t mark the end of our world. That’s just what a world under curse looks like.

The book of Revelation gives us a similar picture of a world that stands under God’s judgement. Look at these verses:

7The first angel sounded his trumpet, and there came hail and fire mixed with blood, and it was hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, a third of the trees were burned up, and all the green grass was burned up. 8The second angel sounded his trumpet, and something like a huge mountain, all ablaze, was thrown into the sea. A third of the sea turned into blood, 9a third of the living creatures in the sea died, and a third of the ships were destroyed. 10The third angel sounded his trumpet, and a great star, blazing like a torch, fell from the sky on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water – 11the name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters turned bitter, and many people died from the waters that had become bitter.

Rev 8v7-11

A broken world
under judgement

These words are speaking generally of God’s judgement against our sinful world. People down through the ages have read these and recognised them as a description of a broken world under judgement, and we’d be arrogant to think that it’s only with 21st Century wisdom that we can understand them. But they are particularly poignant for us in the 21st century. Pollution is a problem all over the world. A month or so ago there was a big story in the news about a massive industrial spill into a river in China. It’s only a matter of time before there’s another mind-bogglingly big oil slick from some ocean tanker somewhere. We live in a broken world, under judgement. And we can’t save it because we’re the root of the problem. We can’t save our world because we’re the root of the problem.

Sometimes God’s judgement on us, is to give us enough room to do some of the things we want to do. But we keep wanting to turn away from God and do the wrong things, things that are destructive, things that wreck ourselves and things that wreck our environment.

Sometimes people don’t like environmentalism because it’s always talking about big problems with the world. But actually, it’s right about that. Or at least, half-right. There are big problems with the world. But they’re far bigger than environmentalism will usually admit. And we can’t fix them.

Big problems &
surface solutions

And actually, if you’re ever talking with someone who’s really into environmentalism, it’s worth being honest about that. The environmentalists are right that the problems are big – so it’s good to say so. The difference comes over whether we ourselves have the strength to solve the problems. And we don’t. We can’t solve the problems of creation, because we are the root of the problem. All our best efforts with recycling and renewable energy and so on – they’re just like band-aid, treating some of the surface symptoms. If there’s ever going to be any real hope for our environment, we need something that deals with the core disease. Something that deals with what’s wrong inside of us.

Salvation

That’s why the gospel tells us about salvation, about rescue. Not self-rescue, but God-rescue. God’s plan to save the world and us, through Jesus Christ. I guess we’re used to thinking about how God saves individuals. But God’s plans are bigger than that. He doesn’t just intend to save individuals out of creation, he intends to save the very creation itself, the world we live in.

Have a look at this verse:

19For God was pleased to have all his fulness dwell in him, 20and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross.

Col 1v19-20

You know the old Sunday School cliché? That the kids always give the same answer, no matter what the question. So if you asked, “What is the answer to the world’s environmental problems?” The kids would probably automatically say “Jesus”. And the funny thing is, even though they probably don’t have a clue what the question means, they’ve got the answer right. Jesus Christ, the Creator God become human, is only one who can rescue creation. He’s the only one who can rescue the environment. He’s the only one who can rescue us.

Band-aids aren't enough

Band-aid solutions aren’t enough. And Jesus is the only one do more than stick band-aids on the surface. He’s the only one who can deal with the core disease in each of us. In the language of Colossians, his blood was shed on the cross to restore all things. Things on earth and things in heaven. That’s a way of saying absolutely everything. The heavens and the earth, the environment, the whole shebang.

The whole of creation is rescued through Jesus. Have a look at these verses:

19The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

Rom 8v19-22

There’s a lot in those verse, and we’re only going to pick out a couple of basic things. Creation is subject to frustration, it’s in bondage to decay, it’s groaning. We’ve already talked about that. Our world is under curse, it’s out of joint. But there’s hope. Creation waits in eager expectation. Creation is going to be liberated.

That brings us on to our 4th key Gospel moment. Jesus is going to return to bring in a whole new creation. This present world with it’s decay and bondage and frustration will pass away. There will be a whole new, perfect creation – like this world, but far, far better.

New Creation

The New Creation will be an environmentalists dream. Everything will be in harmony. Everything will be right. There will be no more pollution, no more global warming, no more earthquakes, no more landfill rubbish dumps, no more building of 8 lane motorways over beautiful land. The new creation will be perfect.

So what? Where does all that leave us? Three words about thinking, and then two words about doing:

Respect, Realism & Hope;
and then
Action and Talk.

We should treat the environment with proper respect. It’s God’s and his original plan was for us to take care of it. We’re not in that perfect situation any more – the environment is broken, and we’re broken – but it still belongs to God and we should still treat it with respect because it’s his. That means those issues we looked at earlier – recycling and electricity and cars – they’re all worth looking at.

But we need a dose of realism too. Those little steps are not going to solve our world’s massive problems. They are band-aid solutions. They maybe alleviate the symptoms slightly. They might be a way of saying, “We want to see things get better.” But they’re just band-aids. They won’t cure the disease. They don’t even come close

Respect, realism and hope. Those things are just band-aids, not cures. If we put our hope in them, we’ll be tragically disappointed. The only hope for our environment, the only hope for our world, the only hope for us individually, our only hope is to be found in Jesus Christ. He has won the victory already at the cross. And when he returns he will make everything new and good and right.

That’s a tremendous hope, and it’s a hope that gives solid grounds for action. We can have a go at the band-aids on the surface, because Jesus has taken care of the core disease. We don’t have to worry about curing it, that’s not our job. That frees us up to get on with things that are our job. Things like treating God’s world with respect, things like living out the hope that we have.

And it frees us up to Talk as well. Environmentalism is about recognising the problems that human beings cause it this world, and about trying to find solutions. That gives us some common ground to talk about. As Christians, we want to say that human beings cause the problems in the world too. But we want to say the problems are deeper. It’s good to be able to stick band-aids on the surface symptoms. But if that’s all we do, we won’t deal with the true disease.

The problems of our world, they’re not just external problems out there in the environment. Those external problems spring from the internal problems, in here in our hearts. And there’ll be no ultimate external solutions for the environment, until we get an internal solution for our hearts. And that’s what the Gospel is all about. That’s what Jesus came to our world to deal with. That’s one of the things that connects Environmentalism and the Gospel.

Let’s pray.

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