What Is This?
Here’s the background behind the image on the front page…
Genesis 3 is where it all started.
The fall.
See, before the fall, man was in a perfect relationship with God, with himself, with others and with the land.
That’s exactly how God designed it to be.
And then, things started to fall apart.
We had a perfect relationship with God but we broke it by disobeying God (“… when the women saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing for the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom she took some an ate it.”)…
and like dominoes, the breaking of the rest of the relationships followed:
… when we became ashamed and hid from God (“… they hid from the Lord God among the trees of the garden”) our relationship with ourselves was broken
… then it was broken relationships with others (“.. the women you put here with me — she gave me some fruit from the tree, and I ate it”)
… and finally, our relationship with the land crumbled (“cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat it all the days of your life…”)
So here we are struggling to live under broken relationships that God intended to be “not broken”.
And that’s what the Gospel and Missions is all about — working to restoring these relationships. Putting things back to the way that God intended us to live. Bringing people back into right relationships with God, others, themselves…. and the land.
These days, we hear a lot about restoring relationships with God, with ourselves and with others and that’s important.
But what about the last part — our relationship with the land. You don’t hear sermons about it and you don’t find very many missions organizations or missions projects focused on it.
In other words, we focus on the first three dominoes but the last one, we tend to leave toppled.
And that’s too bad. Because broken relationships with the land and the rest of creation that God made to support us, feed us, and shelter us is the cause of a lot of misery in the world today.
And working these relationships out is what missions and the gospel is all about.
