welcome to this video, which has been produced by the charity Arosha. The video's main purpose is to explain the biblical directive to care for God's creation. This perspective, while shared by many of our forerunners in the faith, has been largely lost in our Western world. But today, people all over the world are recognizing the environmental devastation that is occurring and are concerned to do something about it. Yet, an appropriate response can be made only from a strong biblical foundation. This very contemporary concern is also a fertile ground in which Christians can speak of a loving and redeeming God whose interest and involvement embrace all that he has made. For over 20 years, I have been an enthusiastic supporter of Arosha, and I take this opportunity to commend to you their practical and educational work around the world. They are, in my judgment, a very fine organization which is worthy of our support. Why should Christians care for the environment? I think the Book of Genesis says something very important here. What

was Adam called to do when he was placed in the Garden of Eden? Answer: to tend it, to care for it. And the point we need to make very clearly is this: this is God's creation, not ours. We are here as its stewards. God has given us the immense privilege, but also the immense responsibility, of living in this world and passing it on to others. It is not something we have made; it is not something that we own. It is something that God has entrusted to us. And so we're being asked to care for God's creation and pass it on to those who follow us. Now here's the really important point: if God made the world, then it's something He cares for. As Christians, we are called to love what God loves, and that means if we love God, we must love what God has made. And that means other people, but also means this environment in which we live right now. Anybody who ever prays the Lord's Prayer and says to God, Your will be done on Earth as it is done in heaven, has to

be concerned about their environment. That prayer is about the earthing of Heaven. It's about bringing Heaven down to earth. It's about doing God's will on Earth as it's done in heaven. And the point is that God intended the Earth to be like the Garden of Eden. And so we should be as concerned as God is for his creation. After all, it came into being through Christ and for Christ. And to desecrate God's creation is ultimately not just a crime against humanity but a blasphemy because it's to undo God's creative work in Christ. And that's why we're called to do God's will on Earth as it's done in heaven because creation belongs to Christ. The origins of environmental responsibility take us right back to the first two chapters of Genesis. And there we read that God created man, male and female, in his own image and likeness and gave us a responsible dominion over the earth and its [Music] creatures. This word dominion does not mean that God gave us a license to destroy what he

has made it. It would be absurd to imagine that God first created the Earth and then gave us an instruction to destroy it. So, what is meant by this word dominion is that we are given a responsible stewardship to care for the creation as God himself does. We're going to go around this way in my judge. AR Russia is an extremely important contemporary movement of Christians in conservation because of the Dominion or responsible stewardship which God has given us. Christians should be in the Vanguard of those who are seeking to arrest climate change and seeking also to protect habitats where Wildlife lives. So, AR Russia in neor Ables us to share in God's care for the [Music] environment. I think there are two important points here. First of all, it is absolutely true that the gospel is about God reaching out to us as people. It's about conversion. It's about atonement. It's about transformation. It's about God changing the way we are as people. But we need to bear in mind that God's changing

of us as people means a changed lifestyle, a changed attitude to other people, to God, but also to the world in which we live. Therefore, part of our discipleship as Christians is right behavior towards the environment. So, in effect, becoming a Christian means changing the way we see the world. It is no longer simply the world; it is God's creation for which we must care. But secondly, caring for God's creation is also an act of witness. Every time we care for the creation, we are proclaiming the Creator to the world. Therefore, environmentalism on the part of Christians is actually part of our evangelistic calling, by which we are called to reach out to the world and bring the good news of God to it. In my own ministry, in my own Christian life and experience, I want to say I've moved considerably from being rather skeptical about ecology to being 100% committed and actually recognizing that to be a true Christian in this day and age, you need to be committed to saving the planet. There are lots of ecology

movements and lots of groups doing excellent work, but I personally support Christian ecology movements because they, for me, sum up the core of my faith. I mean, I believe that God made the planet, He created the Earth, and He's made the stewards of all that He has made. I'm a great fan of the work of a russer because what I've seen them do here is by like the manette country Park, actually take a piece of unkempt land and make something beautiful of what was a total mess before. In doing that, lots of people have said, Why did they do that? and when they ask that question, they begin to discover that our ecology is based in Our Gospel and Our Gospel is based in our Jesus. So, I believe the link between Theology and Mission is very strong, and no one here in the UK is doing that better than the [Music] laia. It's a bit like asking a poor mother whether she should not bother about her children's education because feeding her children is more important. Hello, certainly there are contexts in

which the first priority may be to save lives and not conservation, but in most of our contexts, war and poverty and ecological degradation go hand in hand. Poverty leads to ecological degradation, but ecological disasters also affect the poor disproportionately and are often the causes of conflict within countries and between countries. So, we have to deal with all of them together. The rural poor depend directly on the natural resource space. This is where the pharmacy is. This is where the local supermarket is. This is, in fact, their fuel station. It is their power company. It is their water company. What would happen to you if these things were removed from your local neighborhood? And this is really what happens to the rural poor when environmental degradation takes place. And therefore, we really cannot afford not to invest in Environmental Conservation because this is how we enhance the ability of the rural poor to have an option. This is how we provide for them ways of getting out of their poverty trap and generate even the utilities that they need for their own daily livelihoods. As a biologist, I know that the

environmental crisis is really serious. I see things changing all around that are unnatural. The birds are coming to the UK in Spring a week early, and the flowers at places like the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew are flowering a week earlier. And you see this phenomenon worldwide. There is a huge extinction of amphibians and frogs. I visited Costa Rica one time and loved this little golden toad. The next time I was there, it was extinct, and that was due to a dry climate in the summer. I've been to many places in the world, and wherever I go, people talk about exceptional climate happenings, droughts or floods or freak storms, and those are exactly the things that the climate change modelers have predicted. And then I go to places like the Andes, and they talk about receding glaciers. And I read in the literature that this is happening in the Alps in the same way. Plants are beginning to colonize areas of the Arctic that they never did before. The polar bears are threatened by the breaking up of the ice.

there, and the penguins are threatened by a huge iceberg that has broken off from Antarctica. So, from the Arctic to Antarctica, from Europe to Asia, there are these things that really convince a biologist or a physical scientist that there is something drastically wrong with our world today. The world is certainly facing the worst environmental crisis that there ever has been. All the data show a major reduction in biodiversity, species extinctions at a rate that's completely unparalleled. We have 12% of birds, 23% of mammals, 32% of amphibians threatened with extinction. The data show that these trends are getting worse, not better. We have climate changing more rapidly than at any other time before. We have increased pollution, especially increased nitrogen deposition around the world. We're moving into a phase that's completely uncharted territory as far as the future is concerned, and the future impacts that this could have on human life are very uncertain. But it's an experiment that we should never have

been uh uh conducting in the first [Music] place. The misconception is that we always uh read the Bible as just a collection of isolated texts, and we don't read the Bible from beginning to end as one story that leads from creation to the new creation. And the new creation is the old creation renewed, restored, transformed, so that every part of this creation is now filled with the presence of God. And that's the goal towards which God is taking human history, so he calls us as his redeemed people to live today as if the future is already present, to live as signs of that future Kingdom, which is the restoration of all things. And because that restoration includes the non-human creation as well as the human creation, our care for the non-human creation is a sign of God's coming Kingdom. And in that way, we are witnessing to the Lord of all [Music] creation. Russia makes a significant difference to the conservation movement because it is Christians who are practicing conservation. And as our Russia now operates in many countries, it is wonderful to see that there are

Christians that have had the vision of AR Rushia to do something about the environment are doing it because they believe there is a Creator and that they should do something and combine their faith with positive action. That's what AR Rushia is all about. I have known the work of AR Rushia almost since its beginning, admired it greatly, and it's in many ways my favorite charity because I see the sort of results that are happening, change happening in a small way in each of the different places where AR Rushia works. I'm particularly excited to see that it's beginning to take off in some of the developing world, places like Ghana, Brazil, Peru, because those countries really need that, and there's not much tradition of scientists and Christians working together for environmental problems, and AR Rushia is giving this opportunity for scientists who are Christians to do something very positive for the environment. I think it's very important that we have a Christian environmental organization because Christians bring something very distinctive to the conservation movement that otherwise

wouldn't be there. Christian theology is based on the premise that Jesus Christ reconciles all of creation, all of nature, everything that has been made. He reconciles things to God, and so that human beings, cooperating with Christ, can be agents in the restoration of nature, of the nature that we humans have messed up. So, it's an enormous hopeful message that Christians bring to what is otherwise a very bleak and desperate environmental situation.

A Rocha: Why should Christians care for creation? (15:28 minutes) - Melissa Ong & Daniel Tay

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