How does God want us to care for his creation? How does he want us to tend our farms or gardens?
Well, if we look at Genesis, when God first gave the assignment of caring for his creation to man, and placed him in the garden, the instructions he gave him were to care for and work it. Another way to look at it is that his management was to be both sustainable and fruitful.
Sustainable refers to man’s job to protect, maintain, tend, and help supply the needs of the resources he is caring for. He is not supposed to use up or destroy the resources of creation to his own benefit. Instead, he realizes that creation doesn’t belong to him, that he is caring for it out of love for God and service to others, so he seeks to maintain and preserve creation for the benefit of those who come after.
Fruitful refers to the man’s job to fully utilize creation for increased productivity. Just as in the parable of the talents, man is not to simply preserve the ‘talents’ of creation, but he is to put them to work to produce fruit. It is part of our job to work with our hands, so that we can have to share with those in need.
In agriculture it is easiest to be either just ‘sustainable’, or just ‘fruitful’. Many times it is easier to primarily seek to preserve our resources and produce only what it takes to live. However, that is selfish because it is wasting, for the sake of our laziness, the potential fruitfulness of the land that could be used to serve other. And most of the time it is easier to seek to produce all that we can at the expense of the resources of creation. However, this is selfish because it is robbing future generations of what they need to be fruitful.
In the past, we can see that many farming methods tended to stray from Biblical, sustainable fruitfullness. In America, for instance, many of the early ‘Indians’ were very sustainable, but were not very fruitful. They just existed from one generation to the next, rarely leaving anything more to the next than they had received. And the European settlers, although Christians, tended to be very fruitful, but not very sustainable. They established a pattern of using up the land and moving west, ruining the inheritance of their descendents.
If we want to redeem our dirt, then we need to seek to farm in a way that is sustainability fruitful. Both caring for and working creation. It’s a lot easier to be either sustainable or fruitful. But, because it’s not about us, we need to purpose to be both. Sustainably fruitful is the harder path, but anything less is bad stewardship.
Well put! 🙂 A nice concise way of putting what we should be striving for
Excellent article. Concise and very true. Thank you for sharing it.
Great article, for too long the mindset of many, believers included, has seen the fruitfulness/sustainability as an either/or proposition when it needs to be both/and.