Quick Quiz:
What’s more important? Savings souls or saving the planet?
Oh. I couldn’t fool you, could I? You got it right didn’t you? You said, “Stupid question, Tod. It’s a false choice. God isn’t saving either souls or the planet. God is saving the world.”
Good for you.
But for those who don’t quite get it, let me go over this one more time. Because, you see, while most of us want to think of ourselves as being kind to the planet, sometimes our theology gets in the way.
Once again, the good news is NOT that the souls of those who believe in Jesus will go to heaven when they die. The good news is “the Kingdom of heaven has come near,” that God’s loving rule has come into the world. And “world” means more than souls. World, “cosmos”, means everything.
You see, in the Scriptures, the purposes of God are about all of creation, and the unique and wonderful thing about humans is that we have the great gift and privilege of being both recipients of God’s grace and partners in his purpose to bring all things under his reign through the work of Christ bringing all things under his reign (1 Cor 15:28).
This is why Romans 8 says that all of Creation is still longing for the day when the saints will be revealed, when all the “children of God” will be adopted, when Jesus returns in resurrection glory. Revelation 21tells us that someday God will create a new heaven and a new earth and all who trust in Jesus Christ will inhabit that new Creation with God for eternity.
The gospel is not about souls on a cloud, but God’s creatures in a new Creation. There will be both continuity and discontinuity with this world and what we do here counts there. (1 Cor 15:58)
Now it is important to get this right, because if we don’t we can—even unwittingly—begin to view the things of this world, like mountains, the oceans, Labrador puppies and sea turtles as nothing but ornamentation for the stage where God is working on saving the souls of people. The rest of this, well, it’s nice and everything, but it is not necessary. It may even be commanded of us (Genesis 1 and 2 for starters) but really it’s not nearly as important as the great commission of Matthew 28 (and even that we have reduced to “soul winning.) So, eventually what happens is that of stewardship of the earth is seen as a tangential issue, at best a second-class issue, kind of like the way earlier evangelicals thought of social justice: “It’s nice if you have time for it, but it shouldn’t get in the way of sharing the faith.
Like that tired “either/or” distinction, I believe that it is time we corrected the faulty theological assumptions that lead us down paths that inevitably take us away from all God calls us to do. I believe that is time for Christians to step up and lead the rest of humanity in the charge given to all of us: To care for the world in the name of the Creator. I want to say more about this next post, but I believe that as we fulfill this task as the “image of God” we will reflect back to others the character of the Creator who is at work saving everything he possibly can.
Recent Comments