I will make the land desolate because they have been unfaithful, declares the Sovereign LORD. – Ezekiel 15:8

Today's Scripture Reading (June 23, 2023): Ezekiel 15

As Christians, we sometimes seem to have a hard time accepting climate change or that climate change is at least partially our fault. As I have said at other times on this blog, we often treat God's creation as if it is given to us for our use, with little consideration for how our treatment of the environment might damage it. Of course, we also believe that Jesus will come again and take us to be with him before things get too bad. I have wondered if some of the chaotic events that we think will take place in the last days might directly result from climate change.

On the other side of the environmental coin is the idea that the human race's first job was as an environmentalist. "The Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15). Maybe the first command of God to his new creation, even before the immortal words to go and "be fruitful and increase in number" (Genesis 1:28), was an instruction to care for the earth. I believe it is a job we should be sure we take seriously.

During the days of Moses, Israel inspected the Promised Land. The spies sent in to examine the land revealed that this tract of property was a land filled with milk and honey. It was a fertile land of which everyone wanted a portion, but God had promised it to Jacob's descendants.

Often, the penalty of God on a people and land was to make it desolate; to take a fertile plain and make it suitable for nothing but growing weeds and dust. And that is what Ezekiel says God has decided to do to the Promised Land. He would take this land flowing with milk and honey and turn it into a desolate desert. The Sabbath rests that Israel was supposed to have given to the land had been ignored; a regulation that would have helped keep the land healthy would now be observed. Now the land would rest from the mistreatment of Israel, the very people who understood best that God had called them to the task of caring for the land.

We live in an interesting time. And once again, our mismanagement of the land has begun to change the landscape of our world. If we keep going in our current direction, coasts will no longer be safe for human inhabitation. We will see deserts arise in areas that had once been fertile, and floods destroy the wandering desert. And maybe we should recognize that all of this might be a direct result of our sin, whether that sin includes the mismanagement of God's gift of land to us or not.

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: Ezekiel 16