We do not worship the creature, but the Creator.
Redemption through Biblical Law restores us to our natural place in Creation. There is a sense in which we return to Eden by passing through the Flaming Sword of revelation. It restores our feudal grant of dominion over the natural world. We are able to recover some measure of Adam’s original management mission in the Garden. That business of the Curse in “living by the sweat of your brow” was a departure from how Adam did things before the Fall. Creation is meant to be our ally and subject to our moral management.
So there’s nothing wrong with using natural resources, but Biblical Law does require that we respect Creation as a person. We aren’t conquering nature, and we can’t treat natural resources as inert and undeserving of any personal consideration. Most of what Americans have done with natural resources is a hideous insult to God. Not in the choice to use it, nor specifically how it is used, but the fundamental approach that lacks respect for Life.
In the lingo of American economics education, you should not externalize the costs of your activity. Go ahead and extract petroleum from the ground, but find a way to transport it without the blatant contempt for the natural world we’ve seen with most oil companies. It’s not that there should be no accidents; nature can bear some limited pollution. But those accidents should not arise from cut-throat cost-cutting that guarantees spillage is measured entirely in terms of monetary profit and loss. The so-called tolerable rates of loss are not nearly so tolerable to the other parties in the spillage — everyone and everything that isn’t a party to the transaction. And it’s not just farmers and ranchers whose lands are polluted; it’s bad enough oil companies are contemptuous about that. It’s the total lack of conscience about polluting countless non-human living things.
We could do a lot better, but we won’t as long as America reserves a high place for Mammon in the pantheon of worship. Once the punitive financial losses are paid to select parties, the court case is closed. Nobody gives a damn about those who have no lawyers, whether it’s marginalized humans or other living things. Our legal system is wholly unjust in God’s eyes. American legal justice bears no resemblance to Biblical Law. In the Bible, title ownership to physical property does not in any way reduce feudal accountability to the Creator.
Unlike the Green religion, we do not regard humans as inherently evil. The solution is not depopulation; the solution is returning to an Eden far different from the perverted demonic religion of the Green environmentalists. We seek to reunite mankind with Creation as a living community. We rightly dominate and use natural resources, but we do it wrongly without the guidance of Biblical Law.
Back up to the previous chapter for a moment: It’s not a question of objective reality, but of your individual perception of what you experience. If Creation is alive, both in the whole as well as all the individual entities as we experience them, then why do we not communicate directly with the natural world through our hearts?
We could. Some of us who have been involved with Radix Fidem for a while are convinced that we have heard the voice of nature around us. Not so much with our ears, but in our hearts. Unlike the Greens, we do not revere nature from afar with fear, but up close and personal as friends.
We reject the notion that biblical language about such things is a mere figure of speech. When the Bible says the trees clap their hands, it’s because tress do clap their hands in the ears of our hearts. More, the rocks and stones do sing His praises, and the wind calls our names. This isn’t some dark pagan magic; this is from the Bible. If Jesus could speak to the storm, surely the storm answered to Him, as well. It’s not just wild imagination, but replacing the dark and fearful suspicion of Western minds with an open communion as indicated in the Bible.
Nobody can tell you what your mind is supposed to make of such communication, but a good starting place is to recognize that Creation celebrates the glory of the Creator. Care to join in? Wouldn’t you like to restore that fellowship and communion with the rest of Creation, as God intended? Let your heart teach your mind that this is not only possible but obligatory. The creatures know your name.
Do this long enough and the mind gets used to it. It’s the natural order of things that you would walk through this world in full awareness of creatures everywhere rejoicing in the Lord. And while you are encouraged to speak to nature with your vocal chords, and observe the response with your five senses, it’s also a communication channel on the heart level, as well. Do you not know that the birds, trees, flowers and clouds know that your heart is aware? They can tell when you are walking the heart-led path. As Paul says in Romans, the natural world groans and cries out in anticipation that we will awaken our awareness of the heart in communion with Christ.
Nature can’t wait to have a conversation with you about the wonders of our Lord.
