And It Was Good

A two-week Bible Study on the Christian's responsibility to care for the environment.

All Christians should care about the environment and ecology. I’m not saying that we should all spend eight hours a day volunteering in an organization dedicated to preserving the environment or defending plants and animals—although these are good causes—but we should at least be more aware in our daily lives about how to better care for our planet and the species who inhabit it.

In Genesis we see that everything God made was good, and then He put us, human beings, in charge of creation. He gave us authority over all the animals and all the plants, so we can rule over them. But with this authority also came responsibility. The whole world and all that’s in it belongs to God. We are mere “stewards” (i.e., administrators) of creation, and as such we must take care of it and preserve it so it can also be enjoyed by future generations.

Tony Campolo was the first preacher I heard talk about the environment, and he said non-Christians had stolen the issue from us Christians and we shouldn’t have allowed it! We, the children of God, should have been the first and the most zealous supporters of this issue. We should be the ones most interested in fighting so none of the precious species of animals and plants the Lord created become extinct. We should be the first to work so the ozone layer that protects our beautiful planet doesn’t get ruined, and the majestic glaciers that God placed in the polar regions don’t melt. We should be the ones most concerned with stopping manmade pollution in our rivers and oceans, when people who care only for financial gain throw their factories’ waste into the water without decontaminating it first. And the examples could go on …

We can control how much water we use at home, we can recycle, we can avoid buying things that we don’t really need (in order to avoid generating unnecessary trash), we can choose to buy and use products made with care for the environment, etc.

So, yes! It’s good for a Christian to care about the environment. It’s wrong not to care. The Lord made us stewards of the earth and all that’s in it, and each one of us should think about what we’ll tell the Lord when He holds us accountable one day.

Lucas Leys, 101 Tough Questions, 101 Straight Answers (Grand Rapids, MI: Vida, 2012).