DON’T SHUN WORDLY WISDOM: Test all things.
Dr. Barry Commoner defined the four laws of Ecology some 70 years ago. They have stood the tests of time. To me they rate as biblical.
These four laws are easily understood, and memorized. I see them as ‘gospel truth’.
Here they are:
1) Everything is connected to everything else (interdependence),
2) Everything must go somewhere (conservation of matter/energy, no “away”),
3) Nature knows best (human intervention often causes harm), and
4) There is no such thing as a free lunch (all actions have consequences).
So, what is so biblical about them?
These principles highlight the interconnectedness, their cyclical nature, their limits, and costs within ecosystems. Actually, they emphasize that humans are part of God’s Creation, and that we must believe and confess and experience its holiness.
Total Interdependence.
J. H. Bavinck, in his The Riddle of Life, points out, years before Dr. Commoner formulated his laws, that “We live in an interdependent world, in which the butterflies serve the flowers as much as the flowers serve the butterflies”. He writes: “These little plants cannot think beyond their nature. They have no inkling that they serve just as much as they are served by others. They serve the miniscule seeds they now carry and that later will form new plants. They serve the animal, looking for food, or they need to help other plants using them as a crutch to climb higher.”
In manifold ways they serve other creatures that require support or shade or nourishment or moisture.
God’s entire creation serves this way.
The entire creation is all about serving. Jesus himself said that “the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve.” (Matthew 20:28). Writes Bavinck: “The law of serving is at the heart of every creature: it is the overarching purpose for every being. That law makes it possible for the entire world to exist. Without that law nothing else can be. This serving, therefore, is not a sacrifice, is not a duty, but an inborn act, without compulsion, without intent. Each single creature is there according to its nature, but everything together is so oriented that the existence of the one supports the other and maintains it.”
That’s what the first law tells me. How about the second one?
2) Everything must go somewhere.
In other words: Nothing ever disappears. It will take on another form, show up in a new combination, but we live in a closed system.
Take our beloved automobile, and the fuel it needs to propel it at a good speed, making long distances disappear. That same fuel is burned, and then re-appears, broken into GHG, the abbreviation of Green House Gases. The same happens to what we do and think, and write: Nothing disappears: All our actions are written in God’s book, and someday – soon I should add – we will have to give account when God reminds me – written on black on white – what we have done or failed to do.
3) Nature knows best.
There is an important text in the Bible, pointing to God’s Primary Love. I cite – again I should add – John 3: 16: “God so loved the World”. The Greek word for ‘world’ is COSMOS, the all-comprehensive entity, including everything we experience and observe, often through giant telescopes.
It is ruled by God’s grace, and it is our task to love it, with God’s example – God so loved – always in mind.
Basically, this world represents God for us, in the same way Shakespeare’s plays portray him to us. (We are what we do). That is why we must listen to “Nature”, now, in agony, because we have compromised its divine origin.
4) There is no such thing as a free lunch (all actions have costs/consequences).
Again, the similarity with biblical givens. The Bible pulls no punches: “The wages of sin is death”, says Romans 6: 23. The word ‘judgement’ appears numerous times in the Bible. All our actions are recorded: a celestial camera follows us wherever we go: an instrument far beyond AI, because this divine instrument also records our thoughts and intentions. It does all this stealthily, without us having an inkling.
Revelation 20: 12 says at all:
And I saw the dead, great and small, standing before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book of life. The dead were judged according to what they had done as recorded in the books.
Now that we are approaching the End Times, it also signals the zenith of human achievements, both positive and negative, witness our engineering marvels, but also our cosmos destroying devices. The Bible is quite explicit that not God, but we will cause the ultimate holocaust.
Don’t shun worldly wisdom: Test all things and hold fast to what is good.
(1 Thessalonians 5: 21)