Genesis 1 : 28 And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it: and have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth.

My dad told me when I was young, humans would pay for taking from earth and not replenishing all we took from it. I have shared many times I was an environmentalist before I really knew God. I tried to support anything trying to save something, from animals to water. Then in a court room in Montana I saw it was the heart that needed saving not the wolf. “Dominion over,” was used that day...

Crude oil has caused and causes wars , killed animals , people , destroyed the water and ground. In the 1940s many things changed and one was the fight for oil. The message this morning from Daniel shows the different time we are in from the day of Daniel.
Everything we did to earth mattered. Every way we made money mattered. Nothing about earth was ours to destroy. Our lives are not our own, much less the lives of others. Long ago greed and selfishness took the words “have dominion , “ to do whatever we wanted for personal gain.

We went from crude oil to nuclear waste. God's instructions was very clear “dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth. “

“Every living thing...”

“Genesis 2:5 And every plant of the field before it was in the earth, and every herb of the field before it grew: for the Lord God had not caused it to rain upon the earth, and there was not a man to till the ground. “ 9 And out of the ground made the Lord God to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight, and good for food; the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil.

God our creator loved His garden and all He created. As I said this morning what if we did not have planes , trains and automobiles? We are a generation that has took from earth unlike any of the past. That crude oil was never ours to take because we can not replenish it. Some predict by 2050 or sooner there will be no more oil. It took millions of years for oil to form.

“Psalms 89:11 The heavens are thine, the earth also is thine: as for the world and the fulness thereof, thou hast founded them. “


If we believe Psalm 89:11 or Genesis 1 and 2 ,then we understand we where only stewards of what belongs to God. When we stopped believing that ,we stopped giving back. We were to never kill anyone for what is not ours. We were to never to take from earth what we could not replenish. God created a great system where earth always gave us what we needed, if we gave back to Him.

“Genesis 4: 3 And in process of time it came to pass, that Cain brought of the fruit of the ground an offering unto the Lord. 4 And Abel, he also brought of the firstlings of his flock and of the fat thereof. And the Lord had respect unto Abel and to his offering: 5 But unto Cain and to his offering he had not respect. And Cain was very wroth, and his countenance fell.”
Giving back to the Lord was never just money in an offering plate. We were to hand earth back to God as we were given it.
We have not even gave as Cain gave, Lord help us...