A Biblical Ethic of God’s Creation

“The Earth is God’s and all that is in it;
we shall not destroy the Earth nor despoil the life thereon.”

Since the earliest days of the environmental movement, its leaders have sought a succinct and comprehensive ethic of the environment. For thoughtful Christians and Jews the Scriptures already provide this ethic. This ethic is written plainly across many books and passages, but nowhere is it made explicit. Like the environment around us, this key to a right attitude toward Creation is dispersed throughout the entire Bible.

The ethics and worldview of Western civilization derive primarily from the Ten Commandments. These ten central command-principles express the core values of Western society. Because values shape society, and because the power to affect the natural world for good or ill has grown exponentially in recent centuries, the time has come to clarity our human responsibility for the care of the Earth that is only partially conveyed in the Ten Commandments.

The rationale for this action is simple. Humans have three great relationships: to God, to one another and to the land. The serious ecological problems facing the world demonstrate a need to raise awareness of our human responsibilities to God for this third great relationship, so that our civilization might better comprehend the moral mandate to address environmental problems.

An examination of the Bible, especially its first five books – Genesis through Deuteronomy – reveals that the rabbis from ancient times identified 613 different commands from God. These were divided into three sets of obligations: duties to God, duties to neighbor and duties to the land. When Moses descended Mount Sinai, the rabbis teach that the Ten Commandments did not comprise the entire revelation. These other teachings, equally called commandments, are interspersed throughout the five books of Moses. Of these 613 commandments, 200 address behavior that relates to the natural world. These commandments are further divided into 89 mandates and 111 prohibitions and deal with issues such as food purity, water quality, trees and the use of land, and they require a recognition of the sacredness and integrated nature of creation. Significantly they explicitly and repeatedly forbid the desecration and misuse of the land.

The overriding implication of these two hundred commands is that God is central to Creation and that everything within it belongs first to God. It follows that whatever belongs to God must not be defiled, degraded or destroyed. An understanding that a right relationship to God presumes a right relationship to the land is repeatedly found in Scripture and based upon explicit biblical citations and requirements that humans not destroy the earth nor despoil its life.

The 413 other commandments that do not refer to the natural world are equally significant because they emphasize human responsibility to remember God and to respect all people. Thus the 613 commandments in aggregate represent a seamless and integrated worldview that establishes a Law for human behavior so that human society and all Creation might flourish together in harmony.

Jesus affirms this Mosaic Law and commends this codification of responsibility to God for care of Creation to all who follow him. For Christians and Jews alike, therefore, our responsibility to God is summed up in this two-part phrase:

The Earth is God’s and all that is in it; Thou shall not
destroy the earth nor despoil the life thereon.

This phrase accomplishes four key tasks of:

summarizing human responsibility to God to care for the land and all that is in it;
providing a moral test of whether or not an action is right before God;
establishing an easily communicated spiritual and religious basis for a sustainable and just society, and
revealing a vision of how society must transform its attitudes in order to integrate itself into the ecosystem of the planet.

For these reasons, the National Religious Coalition on Creation Care has adopted as its slogan this summation of our Biblical heritage in its relation to the Earth and urges all individuals and religious institutions to include this ethic of the environment in every process of decision-making.