It’s not every day you’re threatened with hospitalization by a circus clown.

I was once a budding environmental activist, and some friends and I were protesting outside a circus that (so we’d been told) was mistreating a captive elephant. So there we were, four or five of us, standing by the roadside next to the entrance with signs and placards. We weren’t doing anything illegal or uncivil, but our presence naturally gave some members of the public reason to rethink whether they wanted to purchase a ticket, and before long one of the performers—the head clown, he informed us (and thankfully not yet in costume)—made it clear that if one more car turned away, he’d personally send us to the emergency room. As if any of us needed further reason to be scared of clowns.

We had to decide, then and there, whether to continue or call it a day. Did we care enough about the issue of animal cruelty to risk harm to ourselves? Not really, it turned out, so we made our way home. We weren’t quite the committed eco-warriors we imagined ourselves to be. In our defense, we were only 16.

I’d long wanted to be an environmentalist. I joined Greenpeace and was involved in a number of their campaigns and activities. I cared about the planet. This was in the early ’90s, and we were then talking about things like acid rain and the ozone layer. Global warming was an issue, but climate change as a matter of international urgency wasn’t yet part of the mainstream media diet.

When I turned 18, I became a Christian. In the space of just a few weeks, I’d realized that if God was real, I didn’t know him—and I was probably supposed to. I learned that Jesus had come to “seek and save the lost” (Luke 19:10), and I put my trust in him.

Sometime later, I talked to one of my fellow wannabe environmentalist friends about my recent conversion. He was discouraged. As far as he was concerned, me becoming a Christian was going to be a loss to the green cause.

Which raises a question: Was he right? Does the gospel pull us away from environmental concerns and toward more weighty and eternal matters? Does the health of the earth matter less to us when we come to know Jesus? As a teenager, I’d planned to be an environmental activist. Instead, I ended up becoming a pastor and a preacher. Had I let the planet down?

As a teenager, I’d planned to be an environmental activist. Instead, I ended up becoming a pastor and a preacher. Had I let the planet down?

Many voices would say becoming a Christian is bad for the planet: that the Christian faith itself is one of the drivers of environmental exploitation and degradation and that the creation mandate incentivizes abuse of the physical world.

The secular world increasingly insists we should express environmental concern with near hysteria––that nothing can be more important than preserving our home. Parts of the Christian world, on the other hand, insist the physical world doesn’t matter at all, that it’s perishing. Therefore, because a new and better world is coming one day, we may as well drive as big a car as we can because the planet’s going to end up in smoke anyway.

I haven’t found these two views compelling. And for the same reason: Jesus. His relationship to the physical world shapes his people’s.

Creation Belongs to Someone

In the 1994 movie The Lion King, the king, Mufasa, is trying to prepare his son, Simba, to one day receive the throne. At one point, they look from a perch to an amazing, expansive view of the savanna, and Mufasa says, “Look, Simba. Everything the light touches is our kingdom.” Simba, in wide-eyed awe, asks, “And this will all be mine?” “Everything,” Mufasa answers.

Twenty-five years later, when a live-action remake of The Lion King came to theaters, the scene had been changed. The setup was the same; both of them were there, looking over the same view. But when Simba asks whether everything the light touches will be his, Mufasa says, “It belongs to no one.”

We can imagine why that change has been made. In the Western world, especially, we’re sensitive to the problems that can come when people presume absolute ownership of the earth. Better (we might think) to attribute ownership to no one.

But the Bible presents a different perspective. The physical world doesn’t belong to no one; it belongs to someone—and that someone isn’t us. “The Son is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For in him all things were created: things in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or powers or rulers or authorities; all things have been created through him and for him” (Col. 1:15–16, NIV).

Jesus isn’t simply God over creation in some abstract way, as if this world were one among many things in his portfolio. He isn’t only the Creator, the One through whom all things were made; he is the purpose of creation. All things were made for him.

The same idea is expressed by calling Jesus “the firstborn over all creation.” This doesn’t mean Jesus was the first thing to be created. Jesus is the Creator. The language of “firstborn” isn’t about chronology but primacy. The firstborn is the One who will one day inherit all of creation. In other words, creation is his. It all belongs to Jesus. It has been made for him. And this changes everything.

While Christians may disagree over what level of responsibility and agency we should exercise over creation, we must realize the physical world around us isn’t neutral. (The word “environment” sometimes implies the physical world is nothing more than the setting in which we happen to exist.) It isn’t ours, as if we can do with it whatever we choose. The earth hasn’t ultimately been created for us (though our God-given responsibilities for it are significant); the physical world we interact with and affect belongs to the Christ we worship. Recognizing Jesus’s ownership over creation should be the truth that makes us most mindful of caring for it.

We can’t be consistent worshipers of Jesus if we’re indifferent to the health of the physical environment that belongs to him. How you treat something that belongs to someone else says a lot about how you regard that person. We can’t say, “It’s only the environment—it doesn’t matter” if, in fact, the planet belongs to the One we claim to love above all else.

At the same time, Colossians 1 challenges many of our environmentally aware friends. We can’t hope to truly care for the physical world if we ignore the One to whom it belongs. We won’t properly understand the environment or account for why it matters unless we know the Jesus who is Lord over it all. Even well-intended efforts at environmentalism will profoundly misunderstand what creation is. It’ll become a matter of utility—we need the planet to be well for our own survival, as if we were the ultimate bottom line—or a matter of false worship, treating the earth as if it’s ultimate, with humanity being seen only as a threat to it that needs to be curtailed. This will be a place where a Christian’s commitment to the physical world will differ from a non-Christian (e.g., in cases where in the name of environmentalism, we resort to “population control” as a means to “save” the earth).

Stewards, Not Owners

In several interviews and talks, well-known environmental activist Greta Thunberg has repeated a question that she says has often puzzled her: Why do humans have a unique capacity to affect the planet? Out of all the different species and animals in this world, why are the actions of our species uniquely consequential?

We can’t hope to truly care for the physical world if we ignore the One to whom it belongs.

The Bible answers this question. We have this unique capacity to affect the planet because God has given us that capacity. The Bible’s opening chapter, Genesis 1, talks about us being made in God’s image (vv. 27–31). We’re to be God’s representatives to one another and to his creation. Humanity is given the task of filling the earth, subduing it, and ruling over it. In Genesis 2, we’re told to work the garden and to keep it (v. 15). This unique responsibility is given to all of us image-bearers.

Tellingly, even secular voices who might decry the notion that humanity has a privileged position in creation nevertheless assume we’re uniquely responsible for attending to the ecological challenges around us. Whatever the environmental crises, it’s down to us to resolve them. In 1967, Princeton professor Lynn White Jr. wrote an influential essay in Science titled “The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis.” White blames Genesis 1 for much of his day’s ecological crisis. According to White, the chapter teaches us that we’re superior to nature and therefore encourages us to be contemptuous of it, using it for our slightest whim. White understood Genesis 1 as a mandate for abusing creation.

But looking at the text of Genesis 1 and 2 shows us this isn’t at all the case. The message isn’t so much that we’re superior to creation but that God is superior to us and (as we’ve seen) everything has been made by him. We’re here to steward creation on his behalf. If we have an ecological problem, it’s because we have a spiritual problem. And the way to have a healthier attitude toward the planet is to have a healthier relationship with the Creator.

The word “stewardship” helps us understand our role. Being a steward isn’t just having care of something—it’s having care of something that belongs to someone else.

In my 20s, I shared an apartment with two friends, one of whom was very musical and had a number of guitars, one of which I’d often pick up and play. When the time came for us to move out, he handed me the guitar to take with me. I gratefully received it. Several years later (and I’m still not sure how this happened), it fell to the floor and its neck completely snapped. Figuring this was the guitar equivalent of a terminal diagnosis, I reluctantly threw it out and didn’t think much more about it. Until about six months later, when that same friend reached out and asked if he could have it back.

It turned out it wasn’t a gift but a loan. So it wasn’t my guitar I broke––it was his. And to make it worse, he added, “It’s a family heirloom.” Ah.

Needless to say, I felt utterly awful. He was gracious about it, but it still stings all these years later as I think about it.

If I’d broken my own guitar, it would have been a shame. But to break someone else’s felt far worse. Stewardship can carry a greater sense of responsibility than ownership. So knowing that the Bible gives humanity a unique role in caring for creation only heightens our responsibility to do so diligently. We have more reason—not less—than a secularist to care for this physical world.

Earth’s Heavenly Future

God has eternal plans for his physical creation. God hasn’t made it and let it be ravaged by the consequences of the fall only to abandon it and move on. His plan for redemption goes far beyond us, embracing the very cosmos itself.

One of the early indications of this comes in the account of the flood in Genesis 6–9. This has become one of the most familiar episodes in biblical history: God punishes runaway human sin by sending a cataclysmic flood, but spares Noah and his family, along with pairs of creatures to then refill the earth once the waters eventually subside.

If we have an ecological problem, it’s because we have a spiritual problem. And the way to have a healthier attitude to the planet is to have a healthier relationship with the Creator.

But the choice of a flood as punishment isn’t just dramatic; it’s profoundly meaningful. As we read the account of rushing waters, it’s clear that what we’re seeing is the reverse of the process God had originally used to create the world.

The creation account had started with watery chaos (Gen. 1:2). God then separated the water into water above and water below and provided dry land for habitation (vv. 6–10). The flood narrative reverses this sequence. The water comes not just down from the sky in the form of torrential rain but up from underneath the ground (7:11). The waters that God had separated are rejoined. The land is engulfed from above and below, and once again all is watery chaos. The world hasn’t just been flooded; it has been de-created.

So when, after the flood, God makes a covenant promising never to again destroy the world like this, he isn’t just promising to withhold watery destruction from the planet (while keeping other options open). He’s promising never again to uncreate his creation. However he intervenes to punish human sin, creation will not itself be collateral damage.

This is underlined by the fact that God is making this covenant not just with humanity but with creation itself (9:9–10). God is promising this physical world a future. He’s committed to it.

We see this in Romans 8, where we’re told creation waits with eager expectation for the revelation of the sons of God. When God at last completes our redemption, creation will be freed from all the effects of our sin (vv. 21–24). So this physical creation isn’t some unfortunate setting we need to escape from but something God will fully redeem for our eternal future.

This is why the Bible ends in Revelation 21, with the wonderful vision of a new Jerusalem coming down from heaven to earth (vv. 1–2). Our final destiny isn’t heaven above but a renewed earth below. We aren’t, ultimately, going to be taken up to heaven; heaven will come down to earth. Creation will not be vaporized but “heavenized.” That’s what we’re waiting for. Every time someone says, “The world shouldn’t be this way,” what he’s really saying (without realizing it) is that earth isn’t heavenly enough.

Creation will not be vaporized but ‘heavenized.’

Jesus tells us to pray for God’s will to be done on earth as it is in heaven (Matt. 6:10). And God gives us a sign he’ll do just that. In Genesis 9, the sign that God will keep his covenant with creation is a bow in the sky (vv. 12–13). God is hanging up his war-bow; there will finally be peace between God and this world. And as Charles Spurgeon pointed out, the bow isn’t aimed down toward earth but up toward heaven. The next time God comes to punish sin, heaven—not earth—will take the hit. And that’s what we see in the coming of Jesus. Just as a rainbow is light broken into its constituent parts, Jesus, the light of the world, was broken for us.

It may seem like a subtle detail, but there’s a reason Jesus wore a crown of thorns during his crucifixion. When the first humans sinned in Genesis 3, the sign of how that would affect nature was that there would be thorns (v. 18). As Jesus went to the cross, even the crown on his head was a way of him bearing our curse, bearing creation’s curse, so that one day creation could be set free.

If you really want to care about the environment, you need to know Jesus. And if you know Jesus, you really need to care about the environment. Becoming a Christian hasn’t overridden my concern for the physical world; it’s breathed new life into it. I’ve never had more reasons to care for the planet.