In America today, liberals call out conservatives for destroying creation. Conservatives call out liberals for denying creation. But the reality is both denying and destroying creation are utter folly.
Paul makes it clear in Romans 1:18–32 that it is folly to deny God’s natural revelation in creation. “Claiming to be wise, they became fools” (v. 22), says Paul in reference to people who know God is real but do not honor him or give thanks to him (v. 21), exchanging the truth about God for a lie and worshiping the creature rather than the Creator (v. 25). It is significant that Paul’s illustration of this is homosexual behavior, for few things show the rejection of God’s created order more vividly than men or women “exchanging natural relations [with the opposite sex]” for same-sex relations that “are contrary to nature” (v. 26). This rejection of God’s natural revelation is especially egregious because in rejecting God’s male-female, “one flesh in marriage” design for sexuality, we are rejecting an aspect of God’s creation that Paul says is a profound reflection of Christ’s relationship to the church (Eph. 5:31–32).
Transgenderism and contemporary gender theory are other examples of how we deny creation today, when convenient. Attempts to free the concept of gender from any connection to biology is a brazen rejection of the goodness of creation. So is the suggestion that male and female are nothing more than interchangeable, indistinguishable psychological constructs.
Denying the good gift of creation is folly, but so is destroying it.
To shrug at the pollution of God’s natural creation, and the precious image-bearing humans within it, is to scoff at God and reject the beauty and wisdom of what he has made. Christians must see that our apathy about the degrading of creation contributes to the Romans 1 style of moral confusion that arises when the truths that nature speaks are muffled or damaged. I agree with Gavin Ortlund when he says, “Christians should be the best environmentalists on the planet,” in part because we know how much can go wrong when the symphony of creation is muted or silenced. I love how Tim Keller puts it, commenting on Psalm 19 (“the heavens declare . . .” v. 1):
The Bible says creation is speaking to you. The stars. The waterfall. The animals, the trees. They have a voice. They are telling you about the glory of God. And it’s your job as stewards of creation, as stewards of nature, to make sure they keep speaking, to not let that voice go out.
It is folly to do anything—either intentionally or by neglect—that silences the voice of creation. To do so is to cut ourselves off from a key source of wisdom, but also a key context for worship. As Francis Schaeffer writes in Pollution and the Death of Man, “If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made.”
Loving what God has made involves both accepting its reality even when it constrains our expressive individualism (e.g. our given biology when we wish we were another gender), and stewarding its given goodness even when it constrains our unfettered business and economic expansion.
Christians should lead the way in both areas: not denying but celebrating the givenness of God’s good creation; not destroying but protecting and preserving creation for future generations to learn from and love.
This post is an adapted excerpt from my book, The Wisdom Pyramid: Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World (Crossway, February 2021).