Care for Creation as Evangelization and WorshipSýnishorn

Day Two: All Living Creatures

How special are we in God’s design of creation? 

There are two main ways that people tend to look at the story of Noah. The first is as a story of sin, with man’s sin leading God to take drastic action. The second is one of hope, with God’s promise that He will never again send a flood to destroy the earth. 

This is all God’s work, but what does it mean for us? In this covenant, He never said that He would stop us from destroying the earth. 

When reading the story of Noah, we can often miss who God is making His covenant with. It is not just between God and man. It is between God and “all living creatures.” In this passage, God makes a point of telling us that He is speaking to all living creatures five times, which must mean that He wants us to take this point seriously.

All living creatures were affected by the floods, and all living creatures were then subject to the mercy and compassion of God’s covenant.  

When people hear the “e” word (“environmentalism”), they think that you’re a tree-hugger or care more about polar bears or seals than you care about human life. Just because you care about one thing (the environment) doesn’t mean that you care about another thing (human life) less. For example, I’m sure we wouldn’t say that people who have pets care about human life or their Christian faith any less than people who don’t have pets.

The call for environmental stewardship comes from the Bible, meaning that it comes from God. If God asks us to do something, surely this must be for our good: it is from the environment that we get the food that we eat and the air that we breathe, as well as a great deal of joy in its beauty and fun in exploring God’s vast creation. 

Imagine for a moment that you are Noah. You have spent forty days and forty nights on an ark filled with animals – because God told you to – while the world has been flooded, and now the floodwaters are coming down and you are seeing land again. 

Wouldn’t you be grateful to see that land again? Wouldn’t being separated from the land for so long give you a new appreciation for it? 

Throughout the Bible, we see that humans have a special relationship with God, but Noah reminds us that we are still a part of all of creation and that God has a relationship with all of His creation. 

Questions for Discussion

1. Does God making a covenant with “all living creatures” affect His relationship with us?

2. Do things such as natural disasters and global pandemics relate to God’s covenant? 

3. If we separate humanity from the rest of creation, how does this affect our understanding of what it means to be human?