God’s creative work is outstanding, but we are failing to look after it

Elaine Storkey looks at what the Bible says about God’s love of creation, his ownership of it and what our responsibility towards it should be

I have a friend whose family has owned a large estate of land for some centuries. A few years ago he and his wife became Christians, and almost immediately he started to ask fundamental questions about what attitude he should have towards his land. Reading the biblical account of creation, as well as many of the Psalms, brought him into a deeper understanding of his relation both to God and to the land he had inherited. Now his sense of responsibility has changed. It is no longer one simply of respecting past generations of his family and maintaining the economic viability of what they had handed down to them. It is one of using the land – and everything else he possesses – in a way that honours God. For him, this means not producing waste that goes to landfill, or flushing sewage into the river; it means being careful about the health of the soil and the tree roots and maintaining the wildlife that lives in his forests; it means not producing greenhouse gases by unnecessary use of vehicles.