Ravaged World
RAVAGED WORLD
ROMANS 8:18-21
Paul calls us to look seriously at the created world around us.
After writing about adoption, Paul abruptly brings the subject back to earth, for humanity, after all, sure though our heritage may be, lives here on earth, this dying planet, this polluted world. The adopted children of God must endure, in a spoiled and alien environment, all kinds of testing until God claims his own.
The argument then begins to tangle with a piece of extraordinary insight. That the very planet suffered with humanity is implicit in the Old Testament (Genesis 3:17; Isaiah 11:9). Paul pictures the ravaged globe, and the suffering of its humbler creatures finding pause and healing in God’s consummation of his creative and redeeming project.
We need to make peace with nature, politicians remind us, but no true peace can be made with nature, except by those who make their peace with God. How menacingly demonstrable is the truth that humanity involved the planet in our fall and ruin. Our mastery of nature shares the bend and twist which sin has given to all of our other God-given qualities. In the hands of a rebellious creature it has become a force of destruction. C.S. Lewis pictured the Un-man in Perelandra walking through the newly created Paradise, and tearing open the colored frogs, ripping leaf and flower from the trees, destroying, sadistically, instinctively. In exact proportion to our so-called “progress,” the human race has become a devouring force before whose onslaught nature has wilted. During three to ten centuries nature can build an inch of fertile topsoil. During one reckless century we have used up all nature’s stored resources over vital areas of the world’s surface. Greedy farming and selfish exploitation have taken no thought for the future. So we have bared hills, choked streams, dustbowls, famine, disaster, polluted air, fouled rivers and dead lakes, as nature answers back. “The whole creation has been groaning in travail” because of humanity.
Why, when all else forms a scheme that is harmonious, does humanity give the impression of disharmony? We need look no further than the penetrating explanation behind the Genesis story. Humanity fell, and from our fall came our pain, toil and exile.