29th January 2025

‘Did you enjoy my creation?’

An old Jewish rabbi once wrote that the first question he expected to be asked by God on entering heaven was: ‘Did you enjoy my creation?’ In the Genesis accounts there is no specific instruction to Adam about this but the care with which the Garden of Eden is planted and laid out surely implies this: everything is there for Adam and Eve’s nourishment and pleasure, something compromised by their disobedience which places labour and toil alongside enjoyment.

But this is reversed by Jesus’ teaching and practice and his emphasis on living the abundant life enjoying to the full God’s good creation, not falsely limited by religious regulations as the Pharisees demanded with their rules about Sabbath-keeping. But we may ask ourselves whether there is in our discipleship a distorted puritanism, a mistaken call to a life of [total] abstinence, rather than holy engagement which leaves space for all God’s children to enjoy what he has created.

All that is good but enjoyment must never become an argument for exploitation, for contemporary history shows us how this is in danger of putting God’s handiwork at risk leading to the need for us to learn a new vocabulary, deploying concepts such as climate change, ocean contamination, deforestation, environmental degradation, air pollution, intensive agriculture, soil destruction, species extinction, etc. The list is threateningly long and much seems irreversible, with the warning that in places it is already too late to witness remedial change. To enjoy must never mean to destroy, so as one writer succinctly puts it, because we live in God’s creation, ‘matter matters’.

When, however, the writer of the Book of Revelation [chapters 21 & 22] spurs us on to think of the ultimate global crisis, he invites us into a world where we will find a new heaven and a new earth, where all pain and tears will be wiped away and where there will be no more death. The city streets will be irrigated with sparking streams of life-giving water which will sustain the riverside trees whose leaves will be for the healing of the nations, providing once more a creation to be loved and enjoyed.

John Briggs