Stewarding Nature Well

Genesis 1 is famous for its telling of the creation of everything. Toward the end of the chapter, there’s an important moment that doesn’t attract as much attention as the rest of the chapter. In verse 28, after God creates humans, he looks at them and says, “Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it. Rule the fish of the sea, the birds of the sky, and every creature that crawls on the earth” (emphasis added). From the beginning, God planned for us to have responsibility for the Earth and everything in it. This means we have to be accountable, at least on some level, for the things happening on the Earth.

Whatever position we hold on this Earth, God created it. He is bigger than us, and everything is His.

Now, when we are told to “rule” and “subdue,” there are a couple of different ways we can understand that command. We could take that to mean that we are in charge, our desires matter most, and land, sky, and sea should fall in line behind whatever we think is most beneficial for us at the moment. Without formally stating this idea, many of us, for much of our lives, act as if this is how we understand that command, if we’re even aware of that command at all. We don’t really think about the welfare of anything but ourselves. We like our comforts, and we aren’t open to the idea of letting anything compromise what we have. If we step back and look at the whole of Scripture, though, we see that it presents a different understanding of how we are to steward creation.

First, if we look more closely at how the Bible talks about ruling and wielding authority, we see pretty quickly that domineering is not presented as the right way to go. On one occasion when Jesus was talking with the disciples in Matthew, he said to them, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and those in high positions act as tyrants over them. It must not be like that among you” (Matthew 20:25–26). And Paul, following this pattern that Jesus had established, even wrote that masters were supposed to work with their slaves “without threatening them” (Ephesians 6:9). And although these passages directly reference how humans are interacting with one another, we should be the kind of people who live consistently in all areas of our lives, so if we aren’t domineering over another person, we shouldn’t be domineering over the planet either.

It’s also important to remember that whatever position we hold on this Earth, God created it. He is bigger than us, and everything is His. He put us here to take care of everything on his behalf. If a friend lets us borrow their car, while we have that car, we’re in charge of it. We use it for our transportation needs, but we know at the end of the day that it isn’t ours. We want to be careful with it because we don’t want to ruin something that belongs to our friend. How much more should we want to take care of the things that belong to God?

So we should take the role of being a steward seriously. The world is complex, and it isn’t always easy to figure out what actions are involved with being a good steward. But if we seek the guidance of the Holy Spirit, and remember that we are not just here for ourselves, that will turn us toward the right path.