I love the end of chapter 20. It kind of takes me back to God’s promise after the flood. He didn’t promise to never flood the earth again as any sort of comfort to humanity. Nope. He promised the earth he wouldn’t punish it anymore for our sake. So reading here that the Israelites were explicitly forbidden to cut down fruit bearing trees because, and I quote, “are the trees in the fields humans that they should be besieged by you?”
Yeah, yeah, he let them cut down timber trees to build siegeworks. Okay. But those trees are good for tools. Those are the trees that would get cut down to build with anyway, whether for houses or furniture or tools or whatever else.
He was ordering them not to destroy trees for the sake of destruction.
He could have forbidden them to destroy the fruit trees because he was giving them the land and the trees are part of the spoil. He could have emphasized that they were part of the benefit, part of the promise. But no. He did it for the sake of the trees themselves. He made a point of preserving the trees for the sake of the trees.
Are you still going to tell me that preservation of the planet shouldn’t be a Christian’s priority?
You want a hot take? You want to get political for a minute? ‘Green’ isn’t a strictly hippy liberal political agenda, it is our explicit responsibility as stewards of the earth. I understand that political support is given to the candidate that you agree with the most, and that some issues have a higher weight than others, and that you’re not very likely to ever find a single candidate that you agree with wholly, that ‘your’ candidate may oppose some of the causes you actually believe in, but I feel it needs to be said that Conservation minded policies don’t constitute government overreach. The necessity for them does highlight the irresponsibility of large corporations. I’ll pay more for gas if it means avoiding oil spills.