The Earth is the Lord's Relative Natural Resources Management

When the Left talks about logging, mining, farming, ranching, hunting, or just about any other traditional form of exercising the dominion of mankind on planet Earth, a kind of unspoken quasi-religious undertone permeates all the complaints, proposals, calls to action, and wistful visions for how to make the world a better place.

It’s as though man’s original sin, in these people’s minds, was not so much eating the forbidden fruit in disobedience to God, but rather having children and filling up the world as much as we have, or extracting any other kind of material wealth from the planet, as we do, or else having nearly any environmental impact whatsoever, as it seems to me we were commanded by God to, what with the subduing part of what He told Adam and Eve, and later Noah and his sons.

But let’s take these things a little at a time, and pace ourselves, and not go too fast. Where do we suppose all of these material blessings come from which the world is full of, and which we instinctively harvest and utilize as seems good to us? To whom do these natural resources belong, if not to us and our children?

The plants and animals God created directly. That’s easy. They reproduce after their kind, and we have the right to plant, raise, grow, harvest, and consume them, as seems good to us, because God said so, whether from the beginning, or subsequently and later on.

We call oil, gas, and coal “fossil fuels,” though, for example, like they certainly must have come from death. And maybe that is why they seem tainted in our impressions, as though they can only lead to death – for us, for the plants and animals, and for the planet.

But if they really are fossil fuels, how did so much plant and animal life come to be buried so far down in the earth, and all over it, that we have the quantities of these things that we do, particularly in such a widespread fashion? Apart from a time machine, all we can offer is our best educated guess. No one save the Creator Himself really knows in the fullest, most complete sense of the word.

Yet for the Christian, who takes Genesis as being true at face value, whether these substances have an organic or inorganic origin is beside the point. As atheistic scoffers would say, we Bible believers hold in common as a given that God did it.

The Psalmist writes,

“The earth is Yahweh’s and the fullness thereof,
the world and those who dwell therein,
for he has founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.”
– Psalm 24:1-2 (ESV)

But we can go further, and posit that if fossil fuels have an organic origin, the Great Deluge we read about in Noah’s day would tidily explain how so much organic matter was buried so deep and so fast, before oxygen had enough time to break down certain components we can still find today. And nevertheless, only all the more, if the presence of deposits of oil, natural gas, and coal all over the Earth today stem from the Flood, then God put them there, since He was the one who sent the Flood to destroy all life on Earth, save what was on the Ark with Noah.

On the other hand, if the so-called fossil fuels are only fuels, not in any way even remotely due to decaying organic matter from dead plants and animals, here also, God must have set the oil, natural gas, and coal where it lies.

Or what? Do we suppose these things were made by Satan? Or did they only come into being as a part of the Curse, like thorns and thistles, or pain in childbirth?

If they come from dead plants and animals, especially those killed by the Flood, then they are, in a sense, a result of death entering the world by the sin of that man, Adam, in whom we all as a race fell.

Yet if we move on from fossil fuels, and set aside the question of original intent for a moment, as though that is the final or ultimate determiner of what is lawful for us, we know that God also told Noah and his sons that He was giving the animals to them for food as well, after the Flood, as well as putting the fear of man into the animals, since we alone were created in His image, and were put here to both fill the Earth and subdue it.

Someone might say, then, that we should not eat the animals because God’s original intent was for no animals to be our food, and for no death in Creation. Yet the later allowances and permissions are more relevant to our circumstance than the earlier intent, since the permissions and allowances now are not begrudging, as though we’ve been invited to make God’s day, and asked if we punks feel lucky.

So also with oil, natural gas, and coal, even if they were not in the original Creation in that form which we find them deposited underground as. Nowhere did God say it would be a sin to extract, refine, or utilize them. Rather, it would seem to follow more intuitively that since the earth is the Lord’s, and the fullness thereof, and since we as a race were told to fill up this world and subdue it, we therefore have been given a kind of permission to mine and drill and produce, transport and refine and burn, as seems best to us, to the end of fulfilling the Dominion Mandate, as its known.

Bear in mind the same folks who are trying to tell us we should not log, mine, drill, farm, ranch, or hunt – they are also discouraging us to marry and have children, since the surest way to reduce global consumption is to reduce the number of global consumers. Yet this works in diametric opposition to the stated purpose and command of God.

Yet a kind of consistency to the logic can be discerned, even if it is wayward. When Wyoming is mulling the slaughtering and sale of horsemeat to reduce wild populations, since they are seen as an invasive species that we introduced to the area, the proof that this or that is unnatural and should be curbed is that man did the thing, as though it was a kind of sin for man to have brought and released horses into the wilds of the Rocky Mountains. And at the same time, even godless men are not content to leave matters well enough alone from hereon, since even godless men presume they must take it upon themselves to cull the herds of wild horses, and thereby restore the suppose balance of nature.

For the same reason, no one is outraged on the internet that a Colorado mountain lion tomcat killed some woman’s dog last year. But they are angry with former NFL star Derek Wolfe for having killed the lion. Why? Because we are double-minded, and recognize instinctively that our race subjected the Creation to sin and death, including the death of dogs and mountain lions, and at the same time see the mountain lion as having more right to kill than we have, because so many of us have reversed the created order, elevating the plant and animal kingdoms above man.

Thus our population will continue to decline around the world, even as states and localities increasingly complain that they cannot find enough workers for even essential sectors of their economies.

At the end of the day, the outcomes are all predetermined based on who we believe, and what commands we obey based on who we would rather to have over us.

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