The 2022 United Nations Climate Change Conference, widely known as COP27, has just been running in Egypt. In a timely new book* Dave Gobbett of Highfields Church Cardiff helps us think through a Biblical perspective on the environment. This extract explains how Jesus’ return might impact our thinking on this issue.
‘We believe that Jesus died and rose again, and so we believe that God will bring with Jesus those who have fallen asleep in him … The Lord himself will come down from heaven, with a loud command, with the voice of the archangel and with the trumpet call of God, and the dead in Christ will rise first. After that, we who are still alive and are left will be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air. And so we will be with the Lord forever’ (1 Thess. 4:14, 16).
The language of meeting the Lord in the air has been understood by some as the grand departure (or ‘rapture’) of Christians from Planet Earth, before being whisked away to eternal pastures new. However, I’m convinced that Paul is instead describing a grand ‘welcoming home’ party as expectant believers usher the Lord Jesus back to earth. This is the return of the King! In fact, Paul’s encouragement of believers in Philippians 3 with the truth that ‘our citizenship is in heaven’ (v.20) concludes similarly: ‘And we eagerly await a Saviour from there, the Lord Jesus Christ, who, by the power that enables him to bring everything under his control, will transform our lowly bodies so that they will be like his glorious body’ (v.20-21).
This gives us a vital perspective when it comes to engaging with the environment. Four particular areas come into focus.
1. Accountability
When Jesus comes back ‘to judge the living and the dead’ (in the words of the Apostles’ Creed), we’ll have to give an account to God for how we’ve lived our lives: every word said (or not said), every deed done (or not done), even our thoughts and our motives. It will all be under Jesus’ spotlight. In the Parable of the Ten Minas in Luke 19:11-27, ten servants are entrusted with their master’s money in his absence and held accountable for what they have done with it upon his return. The parable picks up this theme of accountability and focuses on stewardship. What are we doing with what we’ve been given while the master’s away? There are a number of valid applications here, such as how well we’ve stewarded our spiritual gifts, or the opportunities before us, or the resources at our disposal, or even the amount of knowledge we’ve had of God and His ways. As Jesus explained elsewhere: ‘From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded’ (Luke 12:48). Surely our stewardship of the planet bears reflecting on. It’s as if Jesus has said to us: ‘Here, have a planet to look after. Made specially by me. Let’s see what you can do with it. I’m going away for a while, but I look forward to seeing the results’! Those of us who lean more towards passivity on matters of the environment may find ourselves looking frighteningly like the guy who shrugged his shoulders of all responsibility and decided to bury his mina in the ground.
The principle: We’ll answer to Jesus about how we used His world. Being careless with something that wasn’t ours in the first place won’t go down well.
2. Witness
When Jesus returns, everyone will have to give an account before Him – that includes our unbelieving family and friends, as well as people who’ve never heard His name. This means that we need to do all we can in order not just to be ready to meet Jesus ourselves but to help others do the same. Perhaps those of us who panic about the environment, where all things green are the only things that matter, need to be especially careful here. It’s not impossible for our understandable concern about the planet to squeeze out concern for the actual people who live here. To put it in the starkest terms, yes, failing soil quality and melting polar ice caps are a huge global worry with enormous consequences, both now and in the future. But neither the land nor the sea needs to repent and believe before Jesus returns. Countless people still need to get to the lifeboats before it’s too late. One day it will be.
The principle: Don’t allow creation care to force personal evangelism down the agenda. Sharing the hope of the gospel must always be high priority for Christians, given the Lord’s return.
3. Timescales
Much of the climate literature you read is extraordinarily apocalyptic. Remember Greta Thunberg: ‘I want you to panic. I want you to act as if your house was on fire. Because it is.’ Greta sees herself as sounding the earth’s fire alarm, because nothing less than a blaring siren will move us into the action necessary to avert the pending disaster. Granted, some of the more vocal campaigners haven’t got the best track record when it comes to pinning down their timings. Back in 2009, for example, former US Vice President Al Gore infamously predicted that ‘there is a 75% chance that the entire north polar ice cap, during some of the summer months, could be completely ice-free within the next five to seven years”. Yes, the ice caps are continuing to melt, but ‘completely ice-free’ by 2016 was some way off the mark.
More importantly, from a Biblical perspective the future is quite clear. The most important remaining date on the world’s calendar and the last great job on the Lord Jesus’ to-do list is for Him to return in glory and power. That might happen before you finish this book. It might happen next year. It might even be scores of millennia away, such that the 2020s will end up being considered part of the early church! No one knows when Jesus will return—only the Father (Mark 13:32-37). And until He does, the world will carry on.
Remember God’s covenant with creation after the flood: ‘As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease’ (Gen. 8:22). Life will carry on. When Jesus returns, He won’t be coming back to a dystopian wasteland, an empty shell of what once was. People will be alive and will be waiting to welcome His arrival (1 Thess. 4 :15-17).
The principle: As threatening as the climate crisis may be, human life on earth will not end before Jesus comes back. And God alone is privy to the timescales.
4. Continuity
When the Lord Jesus returns, He’s not going to head to some other world. He’s coming back here: this earth – purified, refined, made new. Throughout 1 Corinthians 15, Paul is at pains to draw a parallel between what happened to Jesus (death, and resurrection at the first Easter) and what will happen to His people (death, and resurrection when Christ returns). It is striking to observe that while there was definitely discontinuity between that first Good Friday and Easter Day (the risen Jesus could appear and disappear, for instance), there was also clear continuity too. The same Jesus who went into tomb came out three days later. He invited Thomas to feel his scars. He wasn’t consumed, or annihilated, or switched for a later model; he was resurrected, changed, renewed. Or, as Paul puts it, ‘… sown in dishonour … raised in glory … sown a natural body … raised a spiritual body’ (1 Cor.15:43-44).
The story of Jesus will be the story of His world – resurrection. This planet, changed and renewed. On the surface, 2 Peter 3:10-13 appears to imply the opposite. For example: ‘The heavens will disappear with a roar; the elements will be destroyed by fire’ (v.10). However, scratch beneath the surface and a slightly different picture begins to emerge. For one thing, the word ‘element’ here is actually the New Testament word for the ‘elemental’ or fundamental powers of this sinful world. This is less about zapping atoms of carbon and oxygen, and more about the destruction of everything and everyone that stands against God. All of which makes it clear that despite our best attempts at messing God’s world up, He’s not written it off. There’s life in the old planet yet! In one of the most majestic passages in all of Scripture on the supremacy of Christ, Paul explains: ‘For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in him, and through him to reconcile to himself all things, whether things on earth or things in heaven, by making peace through his blood, shed on the cross’ (Col. 1:19-20, emphasis added). There is no fudging the clear cosmic dimensions to our salvation. Whatever this means (and it’s hard to pin down exactly), it would seem to be more than just getting people into lifeboats.
And so the prudent response involves rolling our sleeves up with creation-affirming activities (for example, animal conservation or renewable energy research or reducing waste) that cut with the grain of the God who’s not planning on writing off the planet anytime soon. Or ever. When we serve the God of resurrection, no labour for the Lord is ever in vain (1 Cor. 15:58).
The principle: The fact that Jesus will one day restore and renew His world gives greater significance to any beautifying creational acts we do while we wait.
Imagine what the Lord Jesus will make with the raw ingredients of Planet Earth when He returns. It makes the spine tingle just thinking about it. And it should move us to take care of what He’s given us, for His praise and glory.
