This week there was a remarkable film in the news of an
injured dolphin apparently deliberately seeking out human help and waiting
patiently whilst a diver gave it assistance. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-21176914
For a lifelong wildlife fanatic like me, it was fascinating footage but it also
seemed to me to give a brief glimpse of how things might have been between man and beast, had it not been for
the Fall.
As the chief among God’s creatures, man was not only the pinnacle
of God’s creative achievements but was
also set apart by being given a conscious mind, vastly superior intelligence
and spiritual awareness – being ‘made in the image’ of God. The Genesis account
portrays the role God had in mind for man as manager or steward - to ‘subdue’
the earth and make it fruitful, for the glory of God and the blessing of all man’s
fellow creatures.
Instead, man has used his gifts to exploit his
fellow creatures and abuse the earth’s resources. Far from making the world
fruitful, man’s selfishness has resulted in famine, drought, species loss and desertification. The vast majority of animal species regard
man as a threat and either flee or respond aggressively to his presence.
I don’t go for the gaudy, sentimental pictures of man and
beasts together in Eden that you sometimes see. Even before the Fall, I suspect
man’s role as manager of God’s creation would have required all the strength, mental
ingenuity and spiritual wisdom with which God had endowed him. Personally I do not picture Adam spending his
days in sleepy idleness with a lion on his lap, as some of these images
suggest! But I do believe the relationship would have been very different, with
animals viewing man as a benevolent authority figure rather than a threat, and
man in turn treating God’s creatiures in a responsible way.
Although creation will now never be as God intended
until he ‘makes all things new’, (Revelation 21:5) Christians can still make an impact today by
taking this ‘steward’ role seriously. Only this week I was reading about ‘integral
mission’ projects which use principles from the Bible about looking after the
earth, crop management and community relations to help poor communities develop,
at the same time as proclaiming the gospel to them. As Evangelicals, I fear we
have been prone to make an artificial distinction between ‘the Gospel’ and the
rest of life, forgetting that God has given us a framework of glorious
principles that speak to every aspect of our communal life. We have left the
platform entirely to a largely atheist environmental lobby, the new pagans,
liberal ‘Christian’ organisations and secular humanitarian organisations and I
have no doubt this has been to the ultimate dishonour of our Creator God and the obscuring of his Gospel.
{NB – in the above post, my use of ‘man’/’he’/’his’ is
deliberate as, although in many senses we are talking about the roles
and responsibilities of all human beings, this stewardship role was specifically
laid on Adam, the man, and therefore substitution of gender-free terms like ‘humankind’
does not sufficiently reflect the Biblical nuances involved. Very happy to
discuss further in ‘Comments’! }
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