Ruth Valerio, mission and the environment

On this month’s podcast we have a chat with Ruth Valerio. Ruth is the Manager of A Rocha’s Living Lightly project, which encourages us to live greener and simpler lives. She’s the author of L is for Lifestyle: Christian Living that Doesn’t Cost the Earth, and regularly speaks and writes on issues of justice and the environment.

I can certainly relate to what Ruth said about how environmental concern falls into that category of things you don’t see in the Bible until you see them! As I mentioned on the podcast, my eyes were opened when I got to the end of 2 Chronicles. There it makes the fascinating statement that ‘[Nebuchadnezzar] took into exile in Babylon those who had escaped the sword, and they became servants to him and to his sons until the establishment of the kingdom of Persia, to fulfill the word of the Lord by the mouth of Jeremiah, until the land had made up for its Sabbaths. All the days that it lay desolate it kept Sabbath, to fulfill seventy years’ (2 Chron. 36:20-21)

This is a fascinating addition to the Kings account, which simply stated that the exile was due to idolatry and immorality (2 Kgs. 17:7-23).

For 490 years Isreal had abused the land God had given them. They had ignored God’s command to rest the land every seventh year (Lev. 25:1-7). As with the daily provision of manner (Exod 16:21-26), God promised that the land would produce enough food during six years of harvest to cover the year of rest.

Israel, it seems, had never once observed the Sabbath rest of the land. Their greed and lack of trust in God meant that the land was worked continually; they squeezed every last bit of fertility from it, in order to gain as much as they could. Rather than being good stewards of the land (Gen. 2:15), they exploited it. And so in response, God removed them from the land so it could enjoy the 70 Sabbath rests it had been denied.

So the exile wasn’t simply an act of judgment against Israel’s abuse of God (idolatry) or the abuse of themselves and others (immortality), but it was also an act of judgment against the abuse of the environment.

Once I’d seen this, I began to see this theme woven throughout the Bible. God is working to renew all things, our relationship with him, with ourselves, with each other, and with the environment within which we live. I believe that’s why environmental concern should be at the heart of Christian living and mission.