Ask Jesus

Global Warming - A Christian Response

We received an interesting question about a Christians response to global warming. The specific question was about what America should do but as a group of people based in the U.K. it’s probably best for us not to comment too much on what our American cousins should be doing. Instead, let’s look at the issue from a slightly broader perspective.Global Warming is a hot political topic at the moment; is it really happening? Who’s fault is it? Can we do anything about it? What can we do about it? Etc etc . I’m not really going to enter into this debate here. I think we should approach it from the from beginning. When God created all things the world and everything in it was entrusted to the stewardship of human kind. A quick read of Genesis 1 & 2 will give you the picture that God created the world and humans were charged as the stewards of it. We are to work it for food, maintaining it’s beauty and sustaining it for the enjoyment and necessity of ourselves and future generations.

The things that we do which do not fulfill this mandate are also the contributory factors in Global Warming. It’s not only the level of emissions but also the destruction of the natural world which are leading (have led) to an imbalance in the Earth’s natural recycling system. Essentially the Earth can no longer process the rubbish we are pumping into it.  A Hollywood style catastrophe aside, the people that are affected most by this situation are, as always, the poorest people in the world. This is obviously an undesirable side affect.

The common get out here is the “what can little old me do?” card. “How can I change anything?” On the face of it we are not going to change to world over night, but we still need to take our personal responsibility to the first task God ever gave us seriously. Put simply, we need to look at where we can save fuel and energy, where can we recycle, and how we can encourage others to do the same. On a grander scale we can get involved in the debate. Encourage our politicians to take our responsibility to stewardship seriously.

God entrusted this amazing planet to our care. I’m not sure about you, but I don’t want to be the person to have to explain to him how we screwed it up. *smile*