The shining world outlasts us all
Most Christians (most Adventists included) agree that the earth is OLD. Really old.
Nobody wants to say for certain exactly how old -- 10 thousand years? 10 million years? 10 billion years? But whatever time frame we decide on (and by the way, scientific data does not have an agenda), we can all agree that the human lifespan, even for the oldest newsmaking Adventists, is like a flea on a camel (that is, not much at all) when compared with the time our planet has been bravely careering through the cosmos.
When we put human life into that context -- against the backdrop of the seemingly endless march of time* -- human claims of ownership of any portion of creation seem somewhat absurd. Even the great civilizations of antiquity gave way to the endless rush of days so that today, they are remembered by their colossal ruins, if at all. Time gets the better of us all in the end.
This isn't meant to be a diatribe against optimism (I'm generally a fairly optimistic person, myself). Rather, it is a sober look at a reality that is quite helpful when we talk about things like ownership of property and privatizing this and that, as though we had some enduring claim to a part of the cosmos. Guess what, you can't take it with you when you go (though the Egyptian lords certainly tried).
So what's the point?
Christianity has always claimed two things:
1. We are strangers here. We are sojourners, immigrants or wayfaring wanderers. Please notice that this does not in the least imply that we should seek to escape from this planet as quickly as possible, or that we should not be fully engaged with the world we live in. In fact, some sharp scientists and theologians have proposed that the cosmos itself is homeless alongside of us due to its origins from nothing, and that special relativity and quantum physics suggest now more than ever that we belong to this world!
2. We are stewards of creation, not owners. Scripture tells the story of our human parents receiving a mandate from God to serve and preserve their earthly home. "The LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (Genesis 2:15). It's right there in Scripture: This planet of ours isn't ours. We are tenants, attendants, servants of the earth, but never masters or owners!
It is perhaps because we have forgotton these two truths about ourselves that the earth has endured so much abuse at our hands. When we confused dominion with domination, stewardship with ownership, we at once began exploiting the earth for our own ends with no thought for all the others who have lived before us, all those who live alongside us, and those who will live once we have taken our places back in the ground, waiting, waiting for the time when theOne (only one) who owns will be fully known.
Until then, let us be faithful stewards, never acting as if we were owners.
*It's worth noting that modern cosmology does not affirm a steady-state, static universe with an endless march of time, but rather a universe with a definite starting time just before the Big Bang. That should not be problematic for Adventists who have always contended that the universe was created ex nihilo (out of nothing), in fact it should be exciting!
