Psalm 8 tells us that the world's creator, its ultimate owner, has placed everything into our hands. "You made them rulers over the works of your hands; you put everything under their feet" (v. 6). This amazing statement is anchored in the primal story of creation. In creating humankind, God made them in his image. In part, this means God created us to rule. We share in God's kingship over all he has made. "Then God said, 'Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground'" (Gen. 1:26, italics added).

This concept of human rule over the earth is then refined in Genesis 2, where it says that "the Lord God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it" (Gen. 2:15, italics added). Human rule over God's creation involves the task of taking care of it, or being stewards of everything God has made.

So human beings do not merely live in God's grand creation; they use it, develop it, cultivate it, and create things from it. That's the story of human culture---creating, preserving, and caring for the things bestowed on us by a loving God.

But, of course, the story soon turns ugly with human rebellion. As typified in the sin of Adam and Eve, human beings take the world God entrusted to them as rulers, and abuse it. Humans hoard, they destroy, they use the world's resources to make weapons, they spend their creative gifts on useless things. Every advancement in human culture now has a shadowy side by which evil and destructiveness also advance.

On a recent trip to the American West, I was reminded of this human destructiveness. Instead of accepting the gift of the millions of square miles of grasslands, studying the nature of its ecosystem, and working with it for the welfare of the earth and its inhabitants, pioneers plowed much of it under in often-failed attempts to coax crops out of land they were not suited for. At the same time, they destroyed millions of the marvelous beasts that roamed the land, often for the mere sport of it.

But it's not just people in the past who failed to steward the resources of our land. Are we being stewards of the beasts of the fields when agriculture gives way to factory farming, and we squeeze cattle into crowded feedlots and breed chickens in tiny cages so that we can more efficiently exploit their meat?

We have also recently become aware that the heedless exploitation of fossil fuels, from coal to oil, may be a major factor in bringing about a shift in climate that some say could bring untold and ruinous change to our planet.

Plowing the prairie, breeding cattle, and filling our cars with gasoline aren't bad things in themselves. These resources are God's gifts to us. The problem is that human greed and sin lead us to think only of our own wealth, comfort, and advancement, forgetting that God also entrusted these resources to our care.

Christians today are called to declare the good news that we are both rulers and caretakers, owners and stewards. We accept this calling for the good of God's world, for our own welfare, and ultimately for the glory of God.