Sermon Tone Analysis

By Pastor Glenn Pease

David did not need a telescope to consider the heavens and the wonders of God's creation.

What he could see with the naked eye left him in awe at the majesty of God.

Today we go far beyond the vision of David, not only into the macrocosm of the vast universe, but because of new instruments we know what David could never imagine.

We know of the microcosm that God has created that is even more basic to life on earth.

Back in the late 80's Sallie Chisholm, a biological oceanographer at MIT made a mind-boggling discovery about how God runs this world.

She and her colleagues discovered billions of trillions of zillions of plants that man never even dream existed.

Man never dreamed that plants could be so small.

It was only a few years earlier that Bob Guillard, the researcher who built up the famous Bigelow collection of phytoplankton, said of these single cell plants of the ocean that he discovered, "A hundred years of oceanography and the most abundant being in the world wasn't recognized by anybody."

But like some kind of sports record it soon fell, and is no longer the record holder, for Chisholm discovered plants and even greater abundance.

There are as many as 3 million of them in every ounce of ocean water.

They were not discovered by a powerful microscope, but by a new tool called the flow cytometer.

Sea water is compressed into a thin stream and the cells are marched single file two thousand per second past an interrogation point where they are bathed in laser light which causes them to fluoresce.

The color of the florescence indicates what pigment a cell contains.

The cells then can be separated into species much like you would distinguish a flow of Japanese and Swedes without looking at them if you had information about their size and hair color.

If you had a flow of people all of whom had red hair, and none of them over 4 feet tall you would know you had discovered a new people.

That is how Chisholm discovered the new plant.

They are 30 millionths of an inch across with a unique type of chlorophyll.

You might say, "Who cares, and what difference does this make to us?" First of all, God made them the most abundant form of life on this planet.

Secondly, they keep us alive.

They harness the energy of the sun, and by the process of photosynthesis they produce the food of life for all the creatures of the sea.

They also take out of the air half of the carbon dioxide we put into it.

If they didn't do it the planet would warm up by the green house effect, and we would be the ones frying instead of the fish of the sea.

The point of all this is that man is ever learning of the delicate balance of nature, and of how God has made all of life to work together so that every part of nature is dependent upon every other part.

If man throws a monkey wrench into this beautiful living machine he makes a mess of it, and he risks serious damage to his own well being.

Christians are as likely to throw the system of nature into imbalance as anyone.

Christians have been major supporters of the philosophy that says nature exists for our benefit, and so if we want to abuse it and misuse it that is our privilege.

Much like the Christian slave owners in early America, they feel they have the right to use what is their property anyway they please.

And they feel they have Scripture to back them up.

Here in Psa.

8:6 it says clearly, "You made him the ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet."

Man is made the ruler of nature, and he is made king of creation by the Creator Himself.

If we go back to Gen. 1:28 we read these first words of God to man: "Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.

Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves over the ground."

The lion is not king of the beasts.

It is man, and he was put in charge by God and told to rule.

None can argue with this clear revelation.

The problem comes because of the fall of man.

He did not become the kind of ruler over nature that God intended.

Just as many of the kings over his people led them astray from his will, so man as a ruler over nature abused his God-given power, and he became an enemy rather than a friend to nature.

If we look at Adam before the fall we see the proper role of man in relationship to nature.

In Gen. 2:15 we read, "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it."

You will note that it is a perfect sin free world, and God has said of everything that it was very good.

And yet in this perfect environment nature needed to be taken care of.

The implication is clear that even a perfect nature will deteriorate without care, and man was to provide that care.

Man was made to benefit by nature's abundance, and to reap a harvest for his labor, but he was made to be a benevolent dictator over nature and not a ruthless tyrant exploiting nature for himself with no concern for it as a part of God's creation.

In other words, though it is true that God made man the ruler of nature, he made him to be a benevolent ruler who would cooperate with God in keeping nature good, beautiful, and beneficial in the way God intended.

Man in his fall became a rebel and decided that his will was what mattered, and he would use nature as he saw fit for his own good regardless of how God designed it.

In other words, man became an irresponsible ruler.

He abused his power and position.

It is the same story as in every other area of man's dominion.

God gave man dominion over women for the benefit of both husband and wife.

But man abused the power of his position and made women slaves.

He turned tyrant and robbed women of the benefit of a benevolent leader and perverted the purpose of God.

No ruler is ruling as God intended unless the ruled are greatly benefited by that rule.

Any ruler who exploits the ruled for himself and does not make those ruled happy to be under that rule is a rebel ruler and not the responsible ruler that God intends.

This can be applied to nations, tribes, and families, or as we are considering in this message, to nature.

God's intent was that man would rule nature in such a way as to make man and nature mutually beneficial.

Unfortunately, Christians often feel that power means that you have the right to do as you please.

If we rule nature, then we can do whatever we want to it, for it has no rights whatever, and it is our slave.

Francis Schaeffer in his book, Pollution And The Death Of Man: The Christian View Of Ecology, agrees with the critics that say Christians have been a major cause of the problem in our world today.

Christians were duped into believing the philosophy of Plato was more Christian than the Bible.

Plato said that the material world is not important.

All that really matters is the spiritual.

This sounds so good to be anti-materialistic and pro-spiritual that Christians felt it was the superior view of life.

What this led to was Christians who felt no responsibility for caring for the material world that God created.

Christians became notorious for their indifference to the balance of nature.

What do we care about nature was their attitude.

"This world is not my home, I'm just a passing through.

My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue."

So why should I care if we pollute and damage the ecosystems that keep the earth in balance so that all life can thrive?

Under this false world-view man was permitted to destroy the handiwork of God.

Christians did not care for the world, for it was all going to be burned up anyway, and so why bother to protect and preserve what was going to pass away?

The whole idea of nature having any rights was as foreign to Christians as was the idea of blacks having any rights to Christian slave owners in the old South.

Schaeffer said that he sighted with the hippies in the 60's, for they had a biblical view of respect for nature.

Christians, on the other hand, linked up with modern technology, which said that man has the right to exploit nature regardless of the damage.

Nature is not a friend we need to respect, but a slave we can use or abuse as we please.

Schaeffer wrote his book to get Christians off that wrong track of following Plato and back to a biblical view of nature and ecology.

God created all things and said that it was very good.

Creation is the handiwork of God, and just as we respect the works of men, so we are to respect the work of God.

We have something in common with all of nature.

We are the handiwork of God.

We are one in our origin, and one in our ultimate destiny, for God will create a new heaven and earth to replace this fallen world, and all creation will be a part of God's eternal kingdom.

This means that a biblical view of nature is not one of indifference to it, but it is one of respect.

Our dominion over nature is not just so we can exploit it, but like Adam, care for it.

We are to keep it operating according to the laws God has built into it so that it benefits man and is a piece of art for God to enjoy.

Matter is not evil as Plato taught.

It is a good work of God.

Matter is so good that God sent His Son to become flesh to redeem flesh and take the fallen body of man into the kingdom of God where it will be made new, pure and eternal.

God did not reject the material world in favor of the spiritual world.

He sent His Son to become a part of the material world that it might be saved and be a part of the eternal world.

It is heresy to reject the material world, for God made it co-equal with the world of spirit.

It is anti-Christ to reject the material world as evil, for nothing God has made is evil.

The whole physical world is an object of His love and plan of redemption.

Nature is good, and a biblical view of it leads to responsible rule where man cooperates with God to care for it and respect it.

Schaeffer wrote, "A Christian is a man who has a reason for dealing with each created thing on a high level of respect."

Only after man came to realize that he was poisoning his own environment by his disrespect for nature did Christians begin to realize the sinfulness of their disrespect.

Only in the last few decades have Christians begun to address the theological issues for respect for nature.

The first Earth Day was on April 22, 1970.

Since then there have been many conferences on the theological issues in environmental ethics.