BST No.2 Good Landlord, Bad Tenants

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Now the earth was formless and empty. Darkness was over the surface of the deep and the spirit of God was hovering over the waters.

And God said, let there be light and there was light. God saw that the light was good and he separated the light from the darkness. God called the light day and the darkness he called night.

And there was evening and there was morning, the first day. And God said, let there be an expanse between the waters to separate water from water. So God made the expanse and separated the water under the expanse from the water above it.

And it was so. God called the expanse sky and there was evening and there was morning, the second day. From Psalm 148, praise the Lord.

Praise the Lord from the heavens. Praise him in the heights above. Praise him, all his angels.

Praise him, all his heavenly hosts. Praise him, sun and moon. Praise him, all you shining stars.

Praise him, you highest heavens and you waters above the skies. Let them praise the name of the Lord for he commanded and they were created. He set them in place forever and ever.

He gave a decree that will never pass away. From Genesis 2 verse 4, this is the account of the heavens and the earth when they were created. When the Lord God made the earth and the heavens, no shrub of the field had yet appeared on the earth and no plant of the field had yet sprung up.

The Lord God had not sent rain on the earth and there was no man to work the ground, but streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground. And the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living being. Genesis 1, again.

Verse 28, God blessed them and said to them, 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 on the ground. Then God said, I give you every seed bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food and to all the beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the ground, everything that has the breath of life in it, I give every green plant for food.

And it was so. And lastly from Revelation 4, why were we created? For you created all things and for your pleasure they were created and have their being. Amen.

The fact that I'm wearing a green tie this evening has nothing to do with any sort of political statement. It's just accidental that I changed my shirt because I was so hot this morning, I thought I'd change my tie as well. But it's fashionable, isn't it, to go green? We're hearing quite a lot about the Green Party and it's amazing how the conservatives and the socialists in the run up to the European elections each indicated that they were in the foreground of pressing for ecological improvements as far as our world is concerned.

I'm told that the Green Party, if proportional representation had got in, would have been returning some half a dozen or so members of parliament to Europe. Well, should we be talking this evening about green ecology? Well, why not? I mean, if the world was created as the Bible indicates by God, if he's a good landlord and you find yourselves, obviously so, on planet earth as tenants, then surely it's right to work through something of the implications of what it means to be a Christian on planet earth right now. The Bible does have a lot to say about creation.

It has a lot to say about responsibility. It has a lot to say about the human pilgrimage through life. And it says a lot about the end of the human story, what's going to happen, the consummation of everything.

So I want to talk to you about the creative act and the delegated task and the ultimate account and the glorious future that faces you and me. I had a problem last week, often have a problem, but this was a rather unusual one. A baby seagull who we'd been watching from our bedroom window, actually one of three, the nest was behind the chimney stack of the neighbor's house, wasn't quite successful on its maiden flight.

And we gave it accommodation in our back garden overnight and imprisoned our cats, assuming that with a good night's sleep it would, in more than a metaphorical sense, regain its wings, cure itself of vertigo and get back up where it came from. Well, the reasoning was good, but it didn't work. It was still there, as much an earthbound person as you and I are.

So what do you do when you've got a seagull in your garden that can't fly? Well, you contact someone who knows all about flying. So I did. So Captain Gruber comes to our house and with his distilled wisdom suggests that what the bird needs is height.

So the two of us clumbered on top of, well, I got on the garage roof, he got on the main roof. We left the bird there, convinced that two hours later, with the advantage of height, it would have gone back to its nest. Two hours later, it was still stuck there.

So obviously it needed more teaching in the whole area of aeronautics. There happens to be an old people's home next door to where we live, rather judiciously placed, and there's one or two hostels or places, hospices really, for folk who've had mental sickness. I don't know what they thought when they saw on our rooftop one of BA's senior pilots slapping his arms up and down, communicating a message to this seagull to get on with it.

Now honesty here rivals modesty and therefore it must triumph. I could not honestly tell you that the seagull learned its lesson. What really happened is that it was so scared stiff as this pilot came towards it that it lunged into the air, got airborne and shot across the roof to its brother and sister or whatever sex the rest of the family happens to be.

And they're all right, they're all right, the three of them. Fly BA. Be proud of their sales gimmick from now on.

Should we be that bothered? Should we be that bothered about creatures that inhabit this world alongside us? That this whole area of ecology, is this something that really ought to interest Christian people? When Prince Charles says that he banned aerosol sprays and thus had Diana somewhat perplexed as to how to cope with her rather thin hair, was he setting an example for Christians to follow or should we have been in there in the first instance knowing that from these aerosol sprays are released chemicals into our air that affect the ozone layer? By choice I think I'd be a vegetarian. It wouldn't really be very helpful for me as a pastor because I get invited out so many times with my wife to people's homes and I guess suddenly to say we don't eat meat would be a bit of a problem. I'm really an anonymous meat eater.

Provided I haven't been introduced to the animal that's provided the flesh, then I'll eat it. I was once introduced to a goat in Turkana that was to be killed in honor of my being there with some Turkana elders and I can still hear it scream now. I am concerned, aren't you, about the cruelty to animals.

I don't mean biblically that we've any principle for not eating meat but we have a biblical principle for ensuring that animals get a decent life. So I find it myself a problem at Sainsbury's to buy a chicken unless I'm sure that it's been free range. But still I hear somebody saying, look what has this got to do with the Christian gospel? Why aren't you on a Sunday night preaching that God so loved the world he gave his only begotten son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have everlasting life? And my answer is this and it's the answer that I would give in a different context in South Africa.

It's the answer I would have given historically in a different context that I lived at the time of William Wilberforce. The ethic of the gospel affects the whole of our lifestyle. Wherever there is that that is wrong, Christian people rebel against that wrong and say no in the name of God that is not the way in which we should conduct ourselves on planet earth.

We may be looking for heaven but we're part of the kingdom of God on earth and in one sense a little bit of heaven has hit earth through the Christian community. God through a creative act made this world. In the beginning God is what William read to you from as he was also accompanied by that lovely rendering of Jesu joy of man's desiring.

In one sense if you understand those first four words of the bible you don't really need to go any further because all that follows is a commentary on that opening remark God created the heavens and the earth. There was a creative act. Some of you heard me say this morning that though I'm into the the green attitude so to speak in the 20th century I do have some reservations.

I'm a card carrying member of green peace. I have been for some years but I'm not all the way with the green philosophy. I'm there in degree but I'm not there absolutely.

I'm there as a citizen of earth knowing that God created the world and therefore believing the world should be looked after properly. But I do believe that ultimately we're answering to God. Some of the philosophies, some of the notions that are going around today in terms of the preservation of the earth have the undercurrent of the almost the deification of mother earth.

Getting back to nature. The sun and the moon almost the worship of, the veneration of, the hippie community, all that goes on at Stonehenge, that sort of thing. I'm now getting locked into that but I can say that I believe as a thinking Christian, thinking Christianly, that it is wrong to pollute our atmosphere without going all that way, without going down that road.

God created the heavens and the earth and he calls his creation good. There is nothing that excites me more, there is nothing that is more healing to my mind when I'm feeling a little stretched nervously than to go onto the downs and to look down upon God's creation or to go to the sea coast and in an electric storm to watch the waves just pound against the against the shingle. I think I've got some idea of what David was about when he said in the eighth psalm that nature spoke to him of God.

Indeed as Tim Saunders argued well the other Sunday morning, the Jews actually have no word for nature. For them to think of nature apart from God was an utter nonsense. And when David is looking on the handiwork of the Lord, he finds that that triggers off a religious experience.

Oh Lord, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth. You have set your glory above the heavens. When I consider your heavens the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him? All flocks and herds and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the sea, you have made man ruler over these things.

There was a meeting of the American Scientific Association about 15 years ago in which one leading American scientist said that the ecological problem that confronts us in the world today is largely as a result, if you please, of the Christian doctrine that man is to subdue the earth. And this scientist went on to argue almost in the style of Francis Assisi that actually the animals are our brothers. And that far from subduing the earth and exploiting the earth we should be identifying ourselves with the animal kingdom.

And the Christian church in effect has to apologize for the fact that Genesis 1 tells us to subdue the earth. And my answer to that is that Genesis 1 does not give us a mandate, neither does Psalm 8, to exploit the resources of the earth but to manage the earth in a thinking fashion in an intelligent way because we recognize that we are tenants and we know the landlord. Our Lord Jesus says, if you consider the lilies of the valley as they spin, how they don't spin and yet they're so beautiful, if you consider the handiwork of God, it reminds you of a benevolent creator.

Not only that, it underlines your responsibility. So it's not sufficient for Christians to say, I believe John 3.16, that's priority number one. But having believed John 3.16 I then recognize a greater responsibility for the world in which I live.

Because the handiwork of God becomes that much more beautiful having an understanding, having had a confrontation with heaven above is softer blue earth beneath a sweeter green. Something lives in every hue Christless eyes have never seen. If anyone should be good citizens on planet earth, it's the Christians because they recognize the creative handiwork of God behind nature.

They recognize that God and nature are inexorably or inseparably bound. So God creates and then he delegates and he tells man to subdue the earth. And as he tells man to do this, he tells him to do it in such a fashion that he has as his objective to live in a compassionate way, not only with his fellows but with his environment.

Lynn White, the American scientist who I quoted a little while ago said in that speech in 1966 in New York I think it was, no creature other than man has ever managed to foul the nest in such short order. It's quite right isn't it? The garbage, the junk that we leave around our world. Go down to the coast here for an example.

Look now out into space and you will discover if you've got a telescope all the junk that we've thrown up there in terms of disused satellites. Wherever man goes it seems as though he pollutes, he despoils. And that's against the creative principle.

When God designs there's an order behind his design. Thus Jesus saying consider the lily. Look at the delicacy of a petal.

Think through the mystery of a snowflake. Each one with a different pattern yet each one of its of the same essence. God impresses tidiness upon his world and he expects you and me to live in a tidy fashion and to use our environment to honor him and to show regard for one another and for our fellow creatures.

Problem of ecology is almost as old as the problem or rather is almost as old as man himself. Just 150 years ago they were taking samples out of the Thames and seeing its pollution. I remember quite recently looking at a cartoon in Punch magazine in 1856 of some scientist who took a phial of water from the Thames and just at the point of taking it up pops Father Neptune and he's coated with all the pollutants that were in the Thames then.

Even back in the days of Rome the Mediterranean was being polluted. Man not living responsibly although he's been given a task from the Lord to do so. God has set us in this planet as a result of his gracing creation and he tells men and women to look after the environment in which they find themselves.

Because you see ultimately there's an account to be rendered. Some of you don't own your own houses. You rent from the council, from a private landlord and you know that if you use that house wrongly then your landlord will bring you to book and rightly so.

Time and time again don't you see in the bible references made to the fact that people who have the privilege of living on planet earth are responsible to the Lord for the way they behave and for what they do. In the gospels you get a number of parables that speak in terms of of God letting out tracts of land. That there's a vineyard which actually illustrates the world and ultimately the owner of the vineyard comes back to check how people are getting on and the parable that our Lord tells indicates that they haven't been getting on very well and the bottom line is that the owner of the vineyard will expect an answer for the mistreatment of the land and the mismanagement of its products.

Matthew's gospel will tell you time and time again from the twenty-fifth chapter onwards that there will be a day of judgment when one category of humanity will be separated against another category, the sheep and the goats. And you will be asked to give an answer for the way that you've lived and as you respond to that you will discover which category you're in, the saved or the unsaved. The Lord Jesus Christ when he died on the cross of Calvary died for our sins.

He died so that we might be made pure and holy. Now having entered into an understanding of that as the majority of people here in the tab have, it does then matter how we live. The whole world is guilty before God of sin spiritually and sitting against the environment.

I know there are those who come along with their scientific notions and suggest that actually man really doesn't have much choice. You take a book by a man called Desmond Morris entitled The Naked Ape, a book that was a top-selling volume around the world and he thinks that man is one of 193 species of apes or monkeys but the only one that's not now covered by hair. Morris goes on to say by the genetic inheritance of man he has locked into a complex of behaviour patterns to which he can only submit in order to survive.

That's a load of bunk and even scientists actually were not particularly impressed by Desmond Morris's thesis. Says Colin Russell of the Open University, if this really was the message of science then it threatens not only man's destiny but also his dignity. We have a responsibility for the way that we live.

We're not just caught up in some genetic reaction to the chemistry of our bodies. We ultimately will give an account to the Lord for what we've done, for the way we've treated one another, for the way we've allowed people to be treated and animals to be treated and the world to be polluted. The Bible goes on to make it quite clear my friends that not only is there a creative act, not only is there a delegated task, not only is there an ultimate account which man will have to render to the Lord but there is to be a glorious future.

I don't believe that God is through with this world. I was trying to explain this morning that the death of our Lord Jesus on the cross has greater consequences than have been realised at the moment. Say what do you mean by that? Well you see, Jesus died on the cross to repair the ill that's been done by Adam and all of his descendants.

When God created the world he created it good. When Adam was first given a job it was the job of a botanist. He was in the garden to name the various flowers and the various animals.

He combines botany with zoology. He has tremendous abilities, tremendous intellectual gifts but then it's all spoilt. He does what is wrong.

The first pollution is when Adam and Eve go against what God decreed and the curse that is passed on them is also overflowing to the world. The world that God has made will no longer produce fruit automatically. There will be random growth.

There will be the problem of disteliology where once there was flowers and cultivation and that was natural. Now there will be random growth. There will be weeds, there will be deserts, there will be floods.

All has come about as the result of Adam's disobedience. Not only are Adam and Eve genetically affected but the world in which they have been placed is affected. So you look at our world today and you can consider the lily and you can think of God but when I think of the Sahara desert I think of the devil.

When I see people in Bangladesh in their emaciated state because of the flooding of that country I realize that all this has been caused as a result of man rebelling against God. This world is out of order, the natural world but God says he's not going to leave it like that. His son died on the cross of Calvary to put that right as well as to put men and women right.

But when will that happen? Well listen to the apostle Paul, Romans 8, 18. I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us. The creation, that is the world, the creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed.

For the creation was subject to frustration not by its own choice but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. If you want that in a nutshell what the Bible is declaring here in Romans, also in Peter, also in Revelation is that when God comes back in the form of our Lord Jesus Christ in the second advent he will rejuvenate the heavens and the earth. Eden will be regained.

That first morning will be rerun but out of the universe will be cast all that is not of God, all sin, all dysteliology, all that which is against what God wants. It will be banished, abolished forever. C.S. Lewis who says this as an old man, yet my hope is that we shall return and reassume the wealth we laid down.

He's talking about the aftermath having died. Then the new earth and sky, the same yet not the same as these will rise in us as we have risen in Christ. And once again after who knows what eons of the silence and the dark the birds will sing out and the waters flow and lights and shadows move across the hills and the faces of our friends laugh upon us with amazed recognition, guesses of course, only guesses.

If they are not true something better will be for we know we shall be like him for we shall see him as he is. It says Stephen Hawkins, we find ourselves in a bewildering world. We want to make sense of what we see around us to ask what is the nature of the universe? What is our place in it and where did it and we come from? Why is it the way it is? And Hawkins this remarkable Cambridge scientist who's just my years of age but is with such a physical condition he can only speak as a result of an incredibly delicate computer which he uses.

This man with perhaps the greatest brain in the United Kingdom goes on in his own thinking trying to make sense of the world. If we do discover a complete theory it should in time be understandable in broad principles by everyone. Then we shall all philosophers, scientists and just ordinary people be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exists.

If we find the answer to that it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason for then we would know the mind of God. That's his final sentence in his book A Brief History of Time still a bestseller around the world. My friend the end of my address on this hot evening.

Let me tell you this that the mind of God has been revealed through our Lord Jesus Christ. Behind creation there is God and the creative act brought this world and these universes into being. There is a delegated task for man to subdue the earth but the subjection is not to be done in a callous way without feeling.

There is an accountability for every son of Adam for one day we will all give to God an answer for the way that we've lived and there is a glorious future for God is not through with this world. Should Christians be green? Aye, in some sense they should but before they can become green in one sense they've got to be red washed in the blood of the lamb knowing the creator through the sacrifice of his son and entering into a new creation a state of being born again for Christian people are to be the best tenants on planet earth for they know the landlord. Let's pray.

Help us father as people searching for truth or those who humbly believe that we've arrived through our Lord Jesus to recognize our responsibility in the world in which you have placed us to live feelingfully, compassionately, in a concerned fashion. Help us never directly nor indirectly to be guilty of causing cruelty unnecessarily to animals. Enable us not to add to the pollution of our environment by using things that don't need to be used.

Help us if this is your purpose to live more simply that the excess of resources may be passed on to others. Help us father God in dealing with the spiritual needs of folk by telling them of the gospel to lead them on to a full understanding of what it means to live christianly and bless us all here to this end. And any who do not know the Lord Jesus as savior and are worried about the end of the world help them to realize that this is your world.

You've not abandoned it. You've got great things in store and may we be positioned to enter into that eternity that still is to come by yielding to the claims of the crucified savior, confessing our sins and acknowledging him as Lord for his sake. Amen.

Thank you.