Day: May 14, 2012

When we look at the sheer beauty of the natural world it can be easy to forget that nature is under the same curse we are. The Scriptures tell us that when humankind fell so did humankind’s environs. Even though the natural world is not intrinsically evil, as we are apart from Christ, evil has gained a foothold in nature because of the catastrophe that was and is the Fall.

We see this in destructive storms that destroy everything in their path and in droughts that exterminate flora and fauna across the spectrum. We observe it in Killer Whales that have been known to stalk and kill their prey for the sheer sport of it, leaving the carcasses uneaten and in parasites like heartworms that not only feed on their hosts, but finally kill them as well.

Even the beautiful tree outside my window could, under the right adverse conditions, fall on my home and harm my wife and me. Even the sparkling ocean can be whipped into frenzy by Hurricane or tsunami and do the same to our family members who live close to the sea.

Even that which is lovely in nature can turn deadly.

What is sadly ironic about what our own species’ disobedience has done to the natural environment is the fact that God originally entrusted the care of His creation to us. In the Pre-Lapsarian Garden of Eden our first parents were given the wonderful responsibility to tend that garden and even name the animals that inhabited it. This was, no doubt, a microcosm of what God had intended on a global scale, that is man and nature living in harmony without the shadow of death that came from our decision to choose disobedience, to choose the evil over the good.

This is horribly tragic. It was enough that our race condemned itself to the futility that accompanies physical and spiritual death; how inconceivably sad that we had to take nature down with us, the very nature we were once entrusted to take care of (and we have not even touched on what the depredations of humankind have since inflicted on the natural environment apart from the initial curse.)

Thankfully the Resurrection power of the soon-coming Son of God will not be restricted just to the final redemption of man.

When we talk of salvation we sometimes forget that what Christ had to do to save us He also apparently had to do to save the rest of His creation as well. The Bible speaks of a time when not only ourselves but nature too will finally be set free from the “bondage to decay” that has marked all of human history. The return of Jesus will mean a complete renewal of the natural world, its deliverance from an evil that it was never guilty of, only subject to.

So as we look out at that towering tree or majestic sea, both lovely and potentially lethal, we can give thanks to our Lord that He has not forgotten the plight of His natural world in the plan of redemption. When that plan has been fully realized nature herself will enter into the same perfection as we and she will, once again, be only purely beautiful….and purely life–giving.