Death is not natural.
We know this. What you see as a beautiful color change, a shift in colors from
cool greens to warm yellows, oranges and red, we feel as a slow—but
temporary—death. We were not created to die. We cry out for the redemption of
the earth—our home—our body. We desire life everlasting, not a continuous cycle
of life and death.
The trees
speak to us, and tell us of their desire for Heaven. I feel the same. My true
Home is Heaven. I was made there, I belong there, and I will be going back
there when the present has passed away. However, non-human creation’s true Home
is also Heaven. It is only damned to this earth and to imperfect partnership
with humans because of our sin, our Fall. To Adam he said, “Because you
listened to your wife and ate fruit from the tree about which I commanded you,
‘You must not eat from it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through
painful toil you will eat food from it all the days of your life. It will
produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the
ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will
return” (Genesis 3:17-19). The curse on the earth in Genesis related to a
broken relationship between man as image of God with dominion over God’s good
creation and creation itself.
But, there is hope! Hope for our
world, hope for our relationships, and hope for our Home. Romans 8: 18-22 says,
“I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory
that will be revealed in us. For the creation waits in eager expectation for
the children of God to be revealed. For
the creation was subjected 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 freedom and glory of
the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in
the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.” Therefore, God did not
come to Earth in flesh just to save the beings created in His image, but to
make all relationships perfect in the way they were intended. God took on material
creation to save all of His Creation.
And through His second coming, He
is making ALL things new. That doesn’t mean the world will burn so take and use
what you can now (YOLO), but instead that all things will be made in the way
God intended them, in the Garden. Creation is not only at the service of God’s
kingdom, but also is God’s kingdom waiting to be revealed when it beholds the
glory of the Lord with unveiled face, with no broken partnership in the way,
and is transformed… just as we are waiting to be transformed.
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