Thursday, December 11, 2008

Blessing the Mountains

When Ezekiel prophesies against the mountains of Israel (Ez. 36), the curse levied against the mountains is that they will be desolate, no one will walk on them. A sign of the reversal of the curse is cities being rebuilt on the mountains and people walking on them.

Seems like an ecological or environmental reading of Scripture would need take passages like that into consideration when developing a biblical conservationism.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

There are a great number of passages in Scripture that require man to change the actual face of the Earth, morphing it into something different. One of my favorites:

Every valley shall be filled,
and every mountain and hill shall be made low,
and the crooked shall become straight,
and the rough places shall become level ways,
and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.

I am very open to a more iconic or poetic reading of these, although I hope there is something in them that speaks plainly. The Earth is being made inhabitable, more inhabitable: places where man could not live become places where man can live. Some holes in the earth are made to be filled.

This is, of course, at odds with some kinds of conservationist thought, which require man to leave no mark on the land. But we change that which we love.