all-creatures.org

ARCHIVE OF

COMMENTS AND DISCUSSIONS
QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS

Our subjects cover: religion (Christian, Jewish and others); diet and lifestyle (vegan and vegetarian); and other miscellaneous subjects.

Loving Nature

To us, a person cannot fully love God unless he or she also loves God's creation:

whether it's expressed in the form of Mary's painting at the top of the page, or in Carol Vito's photo of this winter wonderland,

or through the gentle beauty of this mother and child drinking water,

or the beauty of this spotted touch-me-not,

or through this cat and rat who prove that Isaiah's prophecy of a peaceable kingdom (11:6-9) is a reality,

or through this peaceful encounter with a mouse in a tree.

Comments by Rod Preece - 11 Jan 2003

I would not for a moment suggest that we should love humans alone. But John 3:16 does not suggest that we love either evil, or sin, or corruption. And Romans 8.20ff makes it clear: "It was not for its own purposes that creation had frustration imposed upon it, but for the purposes of him who imposed it - with the intention that the whole creation itself might be freed from its slavery to corruption, and brought into the same glorious freedom as the children of God.  

We are well aware that the whole creation until this time, has been groaning in labour pains." It is in this way that we should love the whole of creation but not the laws of nature which have, after the Golden Age of the Garden of Eden, become corrupt, and have corrupted creation itself.

There is, I would suggest, a significant difference between loving nature (perhaps better expressed to meet my meaning as 'the laws of nature'), whose laws the Bible teaches us to abhor, and the individual constituent elements of nature, which the Bible teaches us to love, and perhaps even more importantly to respect as an equal creation of the topsoil (Genesis 2).

I think, however, the difference between us, Frank, is probably more semantic than real, since when you refer to creation I think you mean the sum total of the beings who constitute creation whereas in my original submission I was referring to Nature as its laws.

Rod

Go on to Comments by Maynard S. Clark - 11 Jan 2003

Return to Loving Nature Table of Contents

Your Comments are Welcome:

| Home Page | Archive | Discussion Table of Contents |
Watercolor painting by Mary T. Hoffman - God's Creation in Art
Left panel photos from Works of the Creator with enlargements
(d-4)


| Home Page | Animal Issues | Archive | Art and Photos | Articles | Bible | Books | Church and Religion | Discussions | Health | Humor | Letters | Links | Poetry and Stories | Quotations | Recipes | Site Search | What's New? |

Thank you for visiting all-creatures.org.
Since date.gif (1294 bytes)