CHRIST-APP by philtierneyblog

3.    Trump violates the Creation Covenant and shows contempt for the Creator.

In the second chapter of the Book of Genesis, as soon as God created Mankind, this is what God said: “The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.  The Lord God commanded the man, ‘You are free to eat from any tree in the garden; but you must not eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, for when you eat from it you will certainly die.’” (Genesis 2: 15ff) The most basic covenant, the one integrally connected with the inception of human existence, was that God created humans to work and care for God’s creation, planet Earth. God created humans to care for the planet and its resources. No other species was given any such mission by the Creator.

In exchange, God gave humans permission within limits to avail themselves of its resources for their livelihood, but not to misuse. Human use of nature’s resources was never intended to be pursued at the expense of our reason for being – preserving and caring for Creation. Using up Creation for prosperity is greedy and unfaithful stewardship. It violates the Creator’s prime directive and indicates distrust in God’s provision. It also happens to be shortsighted. That’s why God gave the Hebrew people so many instructions about crop rotation and other agricultural practices. Those rules were given by God to advance their stewardship of Creation.

Creation does not belong to humans. It belongs to God. It is written that the Lord said, “The land must not be sold permanently, because the land is mine and you reside in my land as foreigners and strangers.” (Leviticus 25:23) Creation was not made for us. We were made to tend Creation as resident stewards and caregivers. It was not created for our enrichment, but for our survival. We were created to help it thrive. God cares not only humans, but for all of His creatures.  Many Christians seem to believe that God created this unimaginably vast universe merely as a stage to provide for us and as a backdrop for our salvation. Many American Christians seem to have been taught that the Creator of everything is only concerned to provide us with material prosperity in this life and eternity with Him, hereafter. That seems conspicuously self-serving.

The fact is that we have been unfaithful stewards. That’s an image Jesus used in a number of His parables. Faithful stewards, resident caregivers of an owner’s property, serve their master by always promoting the wellbeing of the property for the sake of the owner. Unfaithful stewards use the owner’s property to promote themselves at the owner’s and his property’s expense. We have despoiled and decimated God’s web of life on Earth. We have used God’s Creation for our own prosperity, and the effects of our carelessness is responsible for what will be the extinction of more than one million species during the next hundred years. That’s the epitome of unfaithful stewardship, and the Creator of all that is greatly displeased. It is a grave sin that will gravely be judged by the natural consequences of the effects of the unfaithful stewardship.

In the face of the cumulative effects of human depletion of God’s Creation, Trump is supported by a critical mass of American Christians in his dismantling of protections for Creation. From the outset of his term of office as President, Trump did everything possible, and by unilateral executive order, to undo all the efforts that were made to conserve and preserve God’s Creation. Even with one million of the species that God has created anticipated to become extinct within the next two generations, Trump is presiding over the most significant removal of protections of Creation in the past two generations. 

Why would Trump or his Christian followers lead efforts to continue to destroy God’s Creation? Those who claim to love the Creator should love God’s Creation. Why do they not?  It could be that Trump and his Christian followers don’t love their Creator and so don’t love God’s Creation. Trump is very likely not to love his Creator. And yet, it’s unlikely that his Christian followers don’t love their Creator and the Creation because they say they do. Perhaps that’s a lie, though.

It could be that they don’t believe Creation is damaged by humans. The highest number of people of any group in the world, who don’t believe that Creation is damaged by humans are American Christians.  To be more precise, it’s white Evangelical Christians that most consistently deny that we humans are destroying life on Earth. Sixty-five percent of American Evangelical Christians choose to believe that the destruction of the Creation is either not a problem at all or that it’s not caused by humans.

Some say that they believe it’s God’s doing it through natural cycles. And yet, studies indicate that the rate of extinction currently taking place is one to ten thousand times faster than previous natural climate driven extinctions. It’s happening so fast that many of God’s creatures simply can’t move or adapt quickly enough to survive.

Some say that the destruction of Creation can’t be a real threat because God has given humans dominion over the earth and all its creatures (Genesis 1:26). The word dominion simply means control. God gave humans control over the creatures of the Earth. Control isn’t something magical, though. It comes with responsibilities. People have dominion, control, over their bodies, but that doesn’t mean we can do whatever we want with them. Say that you have had the urge to fly and so, one day, you decide to jump off a cliff several hundred feet off the ground. All the way down to the ground below you can say, “I have dominion” all you want. You can even shout, “God help me.” But you’ll still experience the consequences of the way you chose to use your body. Claiming dominion also claims responsibility. If we humans have dominion then we should use it to make changes to our behavior to rescue the Creation that our Creator gave us to steward.

Some say that concern for God’s Creation is nothing more than pagan nature worship. Is that all the Torah’s (Pentateuch’s) laws about the care of land and animals were – pagan nature worship? To claim that concern for giving care to God’s Creation is nature worship is tantamount to claiming that concern to take proper care of a car or a tool is worship of that device. To neglect to do so is unfaithful and irresponsible stewardship, not the rejection of nature worship.

Some say that God loves us and would never let the negative effects of the destruction of the planet by us humans hurt us. Quite apart from the lack of compassion for other people and creatures that attitude betrays, it’s almost superstitious in its wishful thinking. Weren’t as many as 50 million people killed by the plague in the 6^th century Roman Empire and as many as half the population of Europe killed by the bubonic plague in the 14^th century and as many as 100 million people killed by the Spanish flu in the 20^th century and more than 60 million people killed by the Mongolian invasions in the 12^th century and as many as 200 million people killed in 20^th century wars? Causes have effects and the effects of natural or humanitarian disasters include widespread death, and that includes Christians, their children and grandchildren and great grandchildren. God loves us and, like Jesus, weeps when creatures suffer. 

Some say not to worry because the destruction of the Earth and extinction of a million species must be part of God’s plan in the lead up to the End Times and Christ’s return. Some will even add that Christians will be protected from the worst of the horrors of the End Times because Christians will be raptured out of the world by then. Be that as it may, Jesus taught that no one knows when that time will come. We are to keep living our ordinary lives. We’re to spread the Good News that Jesus came to announce. We’re to stay vigilant in faith and in loving others as ourselves, especially like the Good Samaritan, those who are strangers and different from us. Since no one knows when that time might come, our vigilance must also include restorative caregiving for God’s Creation.

To think or act otherwise can appear to be seriously self-centered. People, including Christians, when they sense the threat of being seen as self-centered often resort to defending themselves. One primary human defense mechanism is denial. Even children will defend themselves from suspicion for some malfeasance by claiming, “That didn’t happen,” or  “I didn’t do it.” And that is exactly what many American Christians have been saying. But the destruction of Creation has been happening and many of our fellow creatures are becoming extinct. We have all had a hand in it. And Trump and his followers do want to further reverse protections of God’s Creation.

Why would any person who loves the Creator and/or God’s Creation want to be complicit in its further destruction, though? As I’ve already mentioned, it could be motivated by contempt for the Creator of all that is. That makes no sense. It’s like having contempt for one who gave you the house you live in. It could be contempt for Creation. That also makes little sense. It’s like having contempt for your home, itself. You may not like it, but then you’d want to fix it up. What else could it be then?

The only other possibility is that people who don’t care about the Creation are preoccupied with some other vested interests that compete with Creation. Jesus and some of the writers of the Old Testament Scriptures had occasion to say that we humans are like sheep. Sheep get lost.  Sheep get separated from the flock. Sheep get caught in dangerous situations. Sheep can even be oblivious to predators. Those are only symptoms of a more basic problem that sheep have. The basic problem is that sheep are so preoccupied by satisfying their appetite that they keep their heads down, their eyes glued, their noses close to the ground constantly consuming one clump of grass after another. Their fixation with satisfying their hunger make them oblivious to what’s going on around them and when they’re heading toward danger. They certainly are unaware of the consequences of their behaviors.

Humans tend to be that way, too. That’s why the biblical writers liken us to them. The problem is that we’re not just preoccupied with food and resources for here and now, but we’re also driven to accumulate more than we actually need, just in case we might run out. More than that, the more we have the more we’re inclined to think we need.

We Americans are like the planter in Jesus’s parable. “He thought to himself, ‘What shall I do? I have no place to store all my crops.’ Then he said, ‘This is what I’ll do. I will tear down my barns and build bigger ones, and there I will store my surplus grain. And I’ll say to myself, You have plenty of grain laid up for many years. Take life easy; eat, drink and be merry.”’ (Luke 12: 17-19) We have vested interests in material things. Understandably, we need food to eat and enough to pay the rent and utilities. We want the comfort of heat in the winter and air conditioning in the summer and entertainment available during down time and convenient transportation every day.

All of those things take money to pay for, natural resources to provide and have byproducts or waste. Money is generated by jobs. Jobs are generated by the things and services we sell and buy. Those things and services take natural resources that we take from the earth. The waste and byproducts generated by the things we produce and the services we provide harm the Creation and other creatures. Like the sheep of the fields, we’d rather keep all that going as it is than go to the trouble and expense of producing and getting those things in ways that are less harmful to Creation and God’s other creatures.

We don’t want to jeopardize ourselves or the sources of the necessities, comforts and conveniences that we’ve come to rely upon. We don’t want to think that about certain realities. We don’t want to think that the comforts and conveniences that we Americans currently enjoy began to take shape only about as much as 200 years ago. Before that, there was less food to eat, communication, mechanical transportation, and heat or cooling. During the prior tens of thousands of years of human existence necessities were few and far between and the comforts and conveniences that we take for granted didn’t exist. We don’t want to think that we humans only began to have harmful impacts on God’s Creation 215 years ago. We don’t want to think that the optimum sustainable population of the world is less than three billion people when there are now 8.25 billion people on Earth.

We don’t want to think of those facts because we don’t want to suffer the discomforts and inconveniences or less income than we have or want to have. We have more than fulfilled the mandate of the first Creation story in Genesis, chapter 1, to be fruitful and multiply and fill the Earth and subdue it. But we have not fulfilled the mandate of the second Creation story in Genesis, chapter 2, to take care of the Earth.     

Christians have the responsibility to love God enough to love His Creation. Christians have the responsibility to trust God enough to understand that the stewardship of God’s Creation is more important than short-term material prosperity at its expense. Trump dishonors God by his willingness to systematically dismantle the protections of God’s creatures for the sake of mammon. Trump’s Christian followers are complicit with Trump’s eagerness to degrade Creation. That poses another stumbling block for receptivity to the gospel, especially among young people both in America and around the world.