It is not to angels that he has subjected the world to come, about which we are speaking. – Hebrews 2:5

Today’s Scripture Reading (February 17, 2015): Hebrews 2

I am disturbed that in some Christian circles we seem to believe that an interest in ecology, or a belief that as Christians we should be on the frontline of the efforts to protect the destruction of our planet, is somehow evil. And it doesn’t seem to match with the biblical story. In some ways, the Genesis story of the creation of man almost seems like an afterthought. According to Genesis 1, creation was complete before God decided “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground” (Genesis 1:26). Humans were created to be the caretakers of all that had been created, and to accomplish that task they were made in the very image of God. We are to rule over all of creation. Except that apparently we have interpreted “rule” to mean “do whatever we want with, even if it is destructive,” or in a real twist, to ascribe what is destructive to be of God, while attributing the act of caring and restoring for creation to Satan. And I am just not sure how we ever got there.

But God has placed this world into the hands of – us. It didn’t have to be that way. He could have placed the world into the hands of the angels and given to them dominion over this world, but he didn’t. He created humans and gave to them dominion, for better or worse, over the earth. There is maybe nothing that we can do that more reflects our original purpose on this planet than is found in the act of caring for creation,

The author of Hebrews offers this concept as the first step toward the proof that Jesus must have been fully human. If he was an angel, then he could not have been given influence over the world, because God had already declared that the world belonged to the human race. Christ couldn’t have been an angel, so he must have been, like us, fully human.

But also hidden inside of this idea is the concept that Christ was the perfect human. For Christ, that meant that he have been given dominion over the earth, which in turn Christ defined as meaning the restoration of this word which “God so loved.” This was the task that only a Messiah that was “fully human” would ever be able to accomplish.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Hebrews 3