Curse.  This frightfully negative term brings up visions of some evil witch tossing lizard livers and toad feet into a pot of magical potion by which she plans to bedevil some good person—pronouncing an awful curse.  Yet curses are found in our Holy Scriptures:

To Adam He said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19)

So what’s a Harry Potterish activity like this doing in the Bible?

Ecology flag

To answer that, it’s helpful to understand that the only real supernatural biblical curses are related directly to the actions of our good and loving heavenly Father.  Seems odd, doesn’t it?  The purpose of curses was to create hardship and loss—to reduce something of significant value to its lowest, most menial dimensions—to even turn something good into something apparently bad.  Curses were pronounced as a punishment, and Israel’s priests would make them in passing judgment on sinful behavior (Deut. 27:14-26).

In God’s curses, though, there is no magic; only His eternal power.  And His most significant curse still affects us today: the curse on the earth brought about by Adam and Eve’s sin of disobedience.  That curse, however, was not some sort of revenge on God’s part.  It was an act of loving discipline—the creation of physical discomfort and hardship to remind people every day of their lives that something is not right with the earth.  It’s in the grip of sin, and we suffer because of it.  And don’t we know it!

Earth Day Canada

But there’s a remedy for this curse—for any of God’s curses: the cure is  faithfulness to His commands and a return to obedience.  One key aspect of obedience is our being good stewards of the earth (Genesis 2:15). One day, as the carol “Joy to the World” declares, Jesus will return, and we who have placed our faith in Him will sing with new understanding, “No more let sins and sorrows grow, nor thorns infest the ground; He comes to make His blessings flow—far as the curse is found!”

The angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations. No longer will there be any curse. The throne of God and of the Lamb will be in the city, and his servants will serve him (Revelation 22:1-3). [Emphasis mine.]

Earth Day flag

We don’t have to wait idly for that day, though.  We can be involved right now in helping stop the needless degradation of the earth created by human abuse of God’s good creation.  We can make our annual, local Earth Day activities a sort of forward-looking sacrament that anticipates the wonderful final Earth Day when Jesus returns to restore it to the paradise it was before the curse.  And by so doing, we can live out our faith and demonstrate our hope in the presence of those who are feeling more and more hopeless every day.  Today and from now on, we can use Earth Day as one of the most significant opportunities to witness to the lost—not by condemning it, but by redeeming it.

Why not share J. B. Phillips beautiful paraphrase of the Romans passage on creation’s hope with your community?

The Peaceable Kingdom

In my opinion whatever we may have to go through now is less than nothing compared with the magnificent future God has planned for us. The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own. The world of creation cannot as yet see reality, not because it chooses to be blind, but because in God’s purpose it has been so limited—yet it has been given hope. And the hope is that in the end the whole of created life will be rescued from the tyranny of change and decay, and have its share in that magnificent liberty which can only belong to the children of God!

It is plain to anyone with eyes to see that at the present time all created life groans in a sort of universal travail. And it is plain, too, that we who have a foretaste of the Spirit are in a state of painful tension, while we wait for that redemption of our bodies which will mean that at last we have realized our full sonship in him. We were saved by this hope, but in our moments of impatience let us remember that hope always means waiting for something that we haven’t yet got. But if we hope for something we cannot see, then we must settle down to wait for it in patience (Romans 8:18-25).

See you outdoors!

Dean