God’s Good Creation
The creation story sets the scene for our next six studies. God created the heavens and the earth with humanity as the crown of creation (Genesis 1). God’s blessing involved being fruitful and multiplying with dominance over all other living creatures, and humanity found little difficulty in deciding what was intended.
With enlightenment, came responsibility. Dominance was not a licence for anything and everything but neither scholars nor readers ever doubted that human beings were in the driving seat. Then, quite recently, came the realisation that God had never suggested that human beings were meant to control the rest of creation for their own advantage. Somebody spotted ‘a correction line’ which has never been given the attention it deserves.
Genesis 9 (the covenant with Noah) recognises human weakness — ‘the inclination of the human heart is evil’ (8:21) — resulting in a new covenant (the Cosmic Covenant), this time not just with humanity but ‘with every living creature’. Everything has its place which is not the same as saying ‘everything has its uses’. The whole of creation is to be protected and in times of climate change, limited energy resources and other aspects of ecology and the environment, this emphasis is finding a new audience with several aspects.
One day at school a classmate turned up with a tiny toy dog with fine string running through its limbs and when you pressed the bottom and eased some of the strings the dog collapsed into all kinds of funny shapes. We had never seen one before and it became the wonder for a day. Then somebody suggested showing it to the head, a dour scientific character. ‘No’, said another. ‘He’ll just look at it and say, “Hm. But what does it do?” and it doesn’t do — it is.’
John Muir once complained that people were always asking ‘what are rattlesnakes good for?’ as if nothing had a right to exist unless it did something for human beings. He thought it a mistake to assume that ‘our ways are God’s ways’ and wondered why we could not simply allow things to be and exist in God’s eyes for their own sakes.