Hi, Could you explain the Romans quote a bit more please? I’m an eco artist and member of Green Christian UK, and I want to understand more about quotations that exhort us to care for the planet V throw it away?
Yes, and there are/were a number of scientist/priests.
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Romans 8 follows after Romans 7 where Paul laments over his own inner conflict between his desire to do what is right and the self-destructive habits of sin which have us in thrall.
Romans 7:15 I do not understand my own actions. For I do not do what I want, but I do the very thing I hate. 16 Now if I do what I do not want, I agree that the law is good. 17 So then it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 18 For I know that nothing good dwells within me, that is, in my flesh. I can will what is right, but I cannot do it. 19 For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. 20 Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me. 21 So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. 22 For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, 23 but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. 24 Wretched man that I am! Who will deliver me from this body of death? 25 Thanks be to God through Jesus Christ our Lord! So then, I of myself serve the law of God with my mind, but with my flesh I serve the law of sin.
Because of this we see world filled with the inhumanity of man in the treatment of other people. Romans 8 explains that it is not only people who are suffering from the insanity of our self-destructive behavior. All of creation bears the consequences of our actions when we do not act in a godly manner but continue in our self-destructive habits fouling everything around us.
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Thanks for all this, it does seem illogical that God would create the World and all it’s creatures, only to throw it away
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That came up at the Intelligent Design debate. Michael Behe was asked why, if everything is designed, God periodically destroys almost everything.
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is that debate still live, seen they are stopped after 7 days?
This particular debate at the museum was on 4/23/2002. (What a memory!)
There is no larger debate within the scientific community, if that’s what you mean.
In a different thread, I quite surprised beaglelady when I explained that God warns man that He would not bring another flood destroying so much of nature for the sake of man. When you read that story it becomes quite clear that God isn’t sure that we are worth it. We after all are the ones who are filled with thoughts of evil continually so why should nature suffer so much destruction just to redeem us from our self-destructive behavior. This is certainly not the traditional way of looking at the story. Of course a lot of people around here would prefer to believe God didn’t do such a thing at all and this story is just made up to teach us something (though most of us agree this is not a global flood even if it did really happen). It hardly matters, because what we learn from it is the most important thing whether it really happened or not.
Genesis 8:21 the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of man, for the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth; neither will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done. 22 While the earth remains, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night, shall not cease.”
Of course later on we see the more traditional understanding where it sounds more like a promise to Noah that He will not do so much destruction to people. But here when it is God thinking to Himself, it sounds like His greatest regret is the destruction of nature which He really did to save mankind from ourselves. Before making the covenant with Noah, it sounds like God’s promise is to the earth itself.
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Believe me, nothing surprises me here anymore.
But this question wasn’t about the flood of Noah.
This was more about meteor strikes and other causes of historical mass extinction events.
Really? Its not like we have God laying claim to being responsible for such events… unlike the story of Noah… so I thought the flood would be a more obvious example.
AND… the point was that my reading of the story has God far more concerned with the earth and other living things than the traditional understanding of the story. THAT certainly does speak to the main point of this thread.
Yes. I was there, after all.
Plenty of Christians think God is responsible for natural disasters.
I have occasionally heard people be nonchalant about the environment because of End Times thinking but it’s been so rare that I can’t remember where I heard someone say it. It’s already been said, but the real truth is it’s entirely political. If you are an Evangelical Christian who considers yourself a Republican (and a high percentage do) then you will probably not have a big heart for conservation (on the level it would need to be fixed which is systemic). You might not like it if your local river is being polluted and animals are dying or if your city is polluted by smog from a local factory, but you will not be interested in any efforts that involve government intervention. If you care more than the average Republican you will probably volunteer to help clean up trash and things like that - maybe donate to a local charity.
Now, of course, this is on some level a generalization, but it’s based on the communities I live in, the churches I frequent, and the platforms of Republican politicians. I once heard an extremely conservative person at our church remark that global warming is the biggest socialist scam out there. I know this is anecdotal but this has been my experience for a long time and the people we see on TV and the polls we hear about confirm that it’s at least true for a certain percentage of Evangelical Christians and probably not under 50%.
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Good to see you taking the humor show on the road.
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Many other theological terms are not in the Bible.
Rapture is one of the largely misunderstood concepts in the Bible. I guess one of the key passages is 1 Thessalonians 4: 16-17.
For the Lord Himself will descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. Then we who are alive, who remain, will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in air, and so we will always be with the Lord.
This passage tells that Christ will return and those in Christ ‘will be caught up’. This does not mean caught up to heaven, it means caught up to meet the Lord who is returning to Earth. Those caught up will return with the Lord. What you leave behind is what you will face after the return.
There are two separate flood accounts there. One of them most certainly presents God in a primitive and anthropomorphic fashion in line with ancient mythology. “God remembers Noah.” The God of Genesis 1 is not the same one we see in Genesis 2-3 or in parts of the flood. This God doesn’t seem to know what’s going on and isn’t always in control. His creation acts up so he becomes almost as a petulant child and wipes them out only to regret doing so and promising never to do it again. This is the same God that parades all the animals in front of Adam only to realize none of them are a suitable mate for him. It’s still a far better account than the surrounding myths in that it portrays the flood due to the thorough evilness of human beings as opposed to arbitrary and fickle Gods concerned with noise. It shows God heartbroken. But at the same time, God the creator is turned to God the destroyer and wipes out millions of innocents unless you think there were not children alive. It’s also absurd to take the statement “that all men were evil” as universally true but then interpret a non-universal flood from the clearly global and universal language of Genesis. That is a text-book definition of picking and choosing and making the account say whatever you want. The Bible takes known flood myths and what was conventional knowledge at the time and gives them a Jewish spin. Someone then pasted the two versions of the flood floating around together into one narrative.
And using the flood account for environmentalism does little for me. Worrying about plastic in the ocean means nothing to me after realizing God just murdered 20,000,000 people. The first book of the Bible presents us as the climax of creation. God destroyed the entire world (the environment) when He undid creation. If humans were that worthless and expendable, I could care less about a coral reef. Showing your love for nature by killing all of it is like telling your wife you beat her because you love her.
Vinnie
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The fundamentalist ideas espoused by the rapture industry (including Left Behind stuff) have little scriptural support
I don’t think it means that people will literally rise up in the air. N.T. Wright explained that it means we’re going forward down the road to meet the approaching king.
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So much for pro-life. Oh well, they were wicked. Even their unborn children.
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And what, there was no room on the ark for God to lead a bunch of innocent kids to it? Of all the miracles we have to multiply to believe the account, this one should be at the top of the list.
Vinnie
In sacred art we seldom see scenes of bloated bodies floating in the water, for some reason.
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I like the children’s cartoon version with the pretty rainbow, boat and all the colorful animals hanging out peacefully. If I were artistic I would make a child-friendly cartoon version of the Holocaust to match it.
It doesn’t even really fit in with the Christian concept of grace. Seems works based… “Noah was righteous”…
Besides, it was the flattery which swayed God not a love of nature:
21 And when the Lord smelled the pleasing odor, the Lord said in his heart, “I will never again curse the ground because of humans, for the inclination of the human heart is evil from youth; nor will I ever again destroy every living creature as I have done.
Who knew the scent of roasting animal flesh was that powerful. I mean I can spin the story and get positives out of it. Sin leads to destruction, God is our only hope and salvation. It also portrays God as heartbroken over the issue as compared to the other myths and puts the blame on humans. But in the end, mass impartial murder is mass impartial murder.If you can justify one genocide, even by God, you can also justify those by human rulers, the ones He allegedly puts into power!
Vinnie