A Pepper Grinder Post
It Was Very Good
I thought of calling this piece something like, Confessions of a Christian Tree Hugger. However, I thought that might be a little deceptive. While I have some similarities with many environmentalists, I also have some differences.
Let’s start with the similarities. I have loved nature as long as I can remember. When I was a child, I would come home from school and go walking behind my house. There were streams and meadows, glades of pine, and stands of hardwoods. Beyond them was a reservoir with a huge dam at one end and deep shale gorges below that, complete with cliffs and waterfalls. I walked for hours, day after day, alone and soaking it in.
Perhaps the happiest and saddest memories of my childhood, though, were the trips we took to a remote pond in the Adirondacks in northern New York State every other summer. We would drive many hours, pulling a trailer with a motorboat packed with gear and with a canoe on top of the car. When we reached the parking lot where we could launch our boats, we would fill the canoe and motorboat with gear and food until there was barely room for my parents and me to sit. Then we would start our trip, towing the canoe behind the motor boat. It took around 2 hours, as I remember, to get across a big lake, and to find a small waterway choked with water lilies that snaked through swampland and led to the pond where we camped. (Pond is a relative term—this 192 acre pond would be called a lake in many other places.) Once on the pond, we would start the search for a campsite. When we found it, we would start setting up camp.
I think that setting up the camp might have been what my father loved best. It satisfied the latent pioneer in him to fashion a comfortable living area for us out of just the things we had brought with us and the natural materials at hand. For me, though, I just loved being surrounded by nature. I walked in the woods, sat on the rocks looking at the pond, swam in the pond, and canoed. The high points of the trip for me were the one or two times that we climbed one of the nearby mountains. Then, as now, being on top of a mountain, with miles of lakes and forests spread out before me, gave me an incredible feeling of exhilaration mixed with some kind of indescribable longing.
The reason these trips were also the saddest memories of my childhood has to do with the way I felt the last day or two of the trip. There was actually a rock at the edge of one island where we often camped that was known in my family as “the crying rock.” That was because it was where I went at the end of our camping trip to weep over the impending separation from this world that I loved.
I can hear some of you thinking, “Sounds like a sentimental tree-hugger to me!” And yet, when I hear many environmentalists talk, I don’t like some of what I hear. Some talk as though nature is good, but people are bad. What I hear even more often than that is a personification of evolution or nature that I find truly odd. Nature becomes our kind and bountiful mother, while Evolution becomes the all-wise father who has designed such an incredibly complex yet perfect world. Phrases like “Nature has timed this perfectly,” or “Evolution has provided us with …” are very strange when you realize that people are talking about things which are supposed to have happened purely by chance, with absolutely no intelligent guidance.
Something that struck me in the Get Smart movie was when the bad guy swats a fly that has landed on his neck. The two techies in the room blanch when he does this, because he has just ruined the thing that they had spent tens of thousands of dollars and countless hours to develop. And yet, even if we could create something as small as a fly that acted just like a fly, it would still need to be recharged, and there is no way that it could produce more little flies. My point is that the very best fruits of our intelligence and hard work have not been able to produce things that even come close to the world that is supposed to have sprung into being through happenstance.
At the other end of the spectrum are the Christians who seem to adopt a pietistic attitude toward nature. Since the only thing that matters is getting as many people into God’s Kingdom as possible, we shouldn’t waste too much time or thought on nature. They have a certain point. I do believe that people and their eternal salvation are more important than nature. On the other hand, I can’t help remembering that when God put man in the Garden of Eden, he commanded him to take care of it. You could argue that that was before the Fall of Man, and now, everything has changed. But there is no place in Scripture where God said, “I used to want you to cultivate and care for the earth, but now I just want you to bring people to Jesus.”
The other thing that strikes me was what God said after he was done with his creation.
God saw all that he had made, and it was very good. (Genesis 1:31 NIV)
There are two extremes that we need to avoid. One extreme is ignoring Creation. I am not a great carpenter, but I do enjoy building functional things from wood. If I built a new bookshelf, working hard to get it just right, and my wife came in the room, glanced at it, and then started talking about something else, I would be hurt. In the same way, I believe that God wants us to enjoy his creation and to tell him how much we enjoy it.
The other extreme is to love Creation, but to ignore its creator. In this scenario, God’s creation takes the place of God. It is true that Creation is amazing. It seems to me that the more people learn about the world and universe we live in, the more astonishing we find it to be. But why is it amazing?
Let’s say you love your smart phone. Would you ever in a million years assume that this wonderful device gradually evolved, without guidance, from single-circuit devices which had, in turn, evolved from random wires and other stuff? You may talk about how great your phone is, but you know that the reason it is so great is that an excellent team of engineers and designers, building on the designs of other excellent engineers and designers, created it. You may not say it, but you know that when you are praising your phone, you are praising its creators.
Is Creation good? Yes, it is very good, and we should enjoy it. But it is very good for a reason: because it was created by an awesome God.
- Pepper
Posted 2019-11-10