I have been making the case that our lofty apologetics needs to be brought back to earth because our young people tend to prefer arguments that tug on their heart strings rather than yank the wires of their neural networks. They generally believe God exists, but want to see His footprint in the sand, and not a forensic sketch in a textbook. Since God spoke the world into existence, His creational words form the foundation of our shared human experiences. While many of us treat this rhetorical symphony like elevator music that accompanies us on our up and down life journeys, our youth tend to embrace it as the unfinished soundtrack of their lives. Sadly, instead of commissioning the Composer to complete the rest of the score, they spend most of their lives despondently In Search of the Lost Chord. I would suggest that the intuitions about the world that we share with our youth represent a fertile apologetic soil into which we can plant the seeds of the Gospel and ultimately harvest a postmodern crop. Last week I discussed the spiritual nature of the physical world; today I will investigate the general feeling that the world is good but broken.
Our young people hear the physical world speak to them in spiritual ways, but amongst the poetic nuance, they hear a cry for help. It is their sensitivity to nature’s lament that fuels their environmental passion. The problem, however, is that they think the planet speaks for itself, when in reality it is the sound of God’s creational words groaning under the weight of our sinful human grammar. We need to congratulate them on their passionate concern for the environment, but then ask them why they feel the need to hug a tree in the first place?
Our atheist friends will try to convince them that the imperfections of the world are just the way evolution does business, but that doesn’t explain why our young people feel the need to report it to the better business bureau. The majority of us, however, intuitively know that the world doesn’t operate the way it should; an idyllic standard has been violated. We share the belief that the world is a garden with a thorn and thistle problem.
The Bible has the only adequate explanation because it describes a God who sequentially creates the world good and then declares the functionally integrated whole to be very good. The world comes stamped with a God Housekeeping Seal of Approval, so even when we find it frayed and worn we still find a Made In Heaven label stuck to its side. We need to congratulate our young people on their keen sense of hearing, but then show them that the goodness they detect in nature is merely God’s original blessing echoing through time, and the weeping is the sound of a planet that has since Fallen on hard times.
For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to decay and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. For we know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. And not only the creation, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. (Romans 8: 19-24)
The Bible explains their postmodern rage at the thorns and thistles as a response to the repressed memories of the good old Garden days. Our youth not only hear the groans of the planet, but also recognize that it is mankind that has put it into bondage. They know that humans are frequently guilty of traumatizing and not tending, crushing and not caring, for the planet. While their methods for calling-out mankind can be extreme, they at least know that humans need to be fixed in order for the world to be set right. Sadly, they relinquish that responsibility to Big Brother and allow him to institute laws to regulate our outward behavior, instead of encouraging us to turn our ears to our Father’s voice. Instead of fixing the planet by claiming their place as the children of God, they settle for living like foster children in the nanny state.
We need to show them that their perception of the world as broken but blessed is Biblical. We need to praise their tending and keeping instincts in a wilderness of thorns and thistles, but then ask them who originally hired them as Edenic farmhands. We need to help them see that since God wrote the book of nature, environmentalism is merely an act of divine textual preservation. Finally, we have to congratulate them for recognizing that it is mankind that has put the world in bondage but then get them to stop the finger pointing, step in front of a mirror, and accept the fact that that they also are that man.
Adam and Eve walked with the Master Gardner in the cool of the morning, but when they chose to practice unorthodox fruit harvesting techniques they were forced to try their hand at farming wheat amongst the tares. Since our young people are astute enough to know how difficult it is to farm in the wilderness, we have a wonderful opportunity to introduce them to that timeless Gardening manual, the Bible, not because it gives them mad farming skills, but because it introduces them to the One who has already rounded up the weeds on their behalf.
Photo by Brian Ceccato at Unsplash
