Humans and Environmental Renewal

Here we are at the end of our series on Creation Care and I am grateful for this time to take a look at different stories of creation from the Bible. We looked at stories of the sky, water, animals, and how all of us working together can make sure that the way that God created our interactions with one another are done in such a way that they benefit each other as mush as possible.

Then last week we looked at the ways that our choices to focus on ourselves and our pride as humans can and has gotten in the way of keeping our world both balanced and moving in a direction that reflects the ways that God intended it from the beginning. While we looked at several stories of the negative impact we can have on the world, I have one final story that I want to share with you. That is garbage. While here in the USA we do a decent job of containing our garbage to landfills, we see the way that garbage gets around town, waterways, oceans, and therefore all around the globe. It is the convenience of single use items that has really fueled the amount of garbage we produce.

And I don’t bring this up to drag on the environmental devastation conversation but to be able to introduce to you an organization that is doing some amazing work. The group is called The Ocean Cleanup and their mission is to eliminate 90% of ocean floating plastic by the year 2040, which is just over 15 years from now. I don’t know about you but the idea of eliminating that much plastic and trash from the waterways and oceans of the world is incredible. From what I could glean they have 15 ships, or interceptors, in service right now and are building a new one to go into service in Guatemala to clean up the Gulf of Honduras. I will admit that I first learned about this project from a Youtube video by a former NASA engineer by the name of Mark Rober.

I think we can all agree that water is an important part of the entire world. All life from humans, animals, and plants all need clean water to be able to live and thrive. The cleaner the water we have the more abundant life can be. The more animal life and plant life the more sources of food we have as humans and the more in balance the world can be.

It is water that is the central focus in this part of Ezekiel’s vision. The vision portrays the restoration of Israel with a lot of focus on the placement and importance of the Temple, which we see in this part of the vision. From the temple flows a river. The river starts out just ankle deep but gradually becomes wider and deeper as Ezekiel is brought through it. What Ezekiel doesn’t notice until after he gets out of the water is that on either side of this massive river flowing from the Temple of God are an abundance of trees on both sides of the river. Out of the water an abundance of trees and the life that goes with the trees appear.

Then what is described next is truly incredible. The LORD then describes what else this river will do in areas that Ezekiel cannot see. The river will continue through the land and will go into the Dead Sea. The Dead Sea will then become fresh water and life will come to the sea so that great schools of fish will be in it’s waters and life will come to this body of water to thrive. The Dead Sea is called dead for a reason. It is the 4th saltiest body of water in the world with a salinity level of 34.2%. Compare that to the Mediterranean Sea, which is right next door, with a salinity of 3.5%. There are no living creatures in the Dead Sea, not even algae. Literally the only thing that is ‘alive’ in the Dead Sea is bacteria.

So where there is no life, the LORD says that this river that flows from the temple will bring something that is literally dead to life. It will also bring life to the whole area surrounding it so that fruit trees will grow along the river. People will cast their nets and fish from the shore from these two locations which some scholars believe were places on either side of the sea, meaning there would be abundance of life in the sea from shore to shore.

Remember that all of this flows from the temple. The source of this river of abundant life is God. We see similar imagery in Genesis 2:8-14 where God creates the Garden of Eden and how bountiful it is and that a river flows from the garden. We also see this imagery of a river flowing from God in Revelation 22:1-2, and much like Ezekiel’s vision, the river flows out of the city, specifically the throne of God, and on each side of the river is not just trees, but the very tree of life on both sides of the river producing 12 kinds of fruit and bearing fruit every month so that there is always something to eat. I use these other two examples from Genesis and Revelation to really show us that the ideal for God is shown at the very beginning of the Bible all the way to the very end of the Bible. The source of life for us on this earth is water, and the source of the water is the true source of life God.

But that’s not all. It’s not just in these three passages, but we see when God becomes incarnate in the life of Jesus, we see Jesus refer to himself as living water to the Samaritan woman in John 4:7-14. This living water is the abundant life that we receive from Jesus and this living water will make it so that we will never thirst again. Sure we’ll get thirsty for some water, gatorade, coffee, wine or beer, but when it comes to the true thirst, the thing really fills us up and satisfies the longing of our soul…that can only be our relationship with God and all the good things God provides for us.

So when or focus is on God, when we drink from the living water that is Christ, when we pay attention to the calling of the Spirit to we see the ways that we are being called to see these passages that cover the whole span of the Bible as a calling to renew our world. We are being called to be the water for others so that places that seem completely devoid of life can be brought to life, and not just livable life, but abundant life that has trees producing enough food, waters producing enough fish, and fresh water enough for us all to drink. That includes not just us but the birds of the air, the fish of the sea, and the animals that share the ground with us also.

This is God’s vision for not just us but for the entire world. A world where there is abundance of life, abundance of faith, abundance of everything good in this world so that we may all lead lives that are a praise and a blessing to God, and that God looks at this world and sees it just as God envisioned it from the beginning and how it can and will be in the future. So I encourage us all to work in whatever way we can to work alongside one another to bring God’s beautiful vision into reality, knowing that with God’s help we can co-create this world into a vast garden that meets the needs of all; from the tiniest of organisms to the largest and everything in-between. With God’s help all things are possible. Amen.