"God said, "Look, I have given you all the plants that have grain for seeds and all the trees whose fruits have seeds in them. They will be food for you. I have given all the green plants as food for every wild animal, every bird of the air, and every crawling animal." And it happened. God looked at everything he had made, and it was very good. Evening passed, and morning came. This was the sixth day."
At this stage the whole process of creation has taken place, perhaps the reason that Chapter One ends with this verse. The world is there as we know it, fully populated, and all in just six days... something which always has and always will blow my mind. Although I can cope with it slightly better with the use of my altered day lengths which you'll know what I'm talking about if you read a couple of my previous posts.
God on the sixth day, after he has made us masters of everything, wants us to know that he has provided for us. We will Never go without so long as he is there looking after us. And he's kept his promise, as long as we're willing to work together as a species, because the world has food in plenty, even when there're droughts or famines, I'm not sure I'd put the blame on God so much as the blame of the results on people not working together. Parts of the world produce excess food, and other parts can't produce enough, this shouldn't matter as long as we co-operate and share what we do have, do our very best to make it last.
An example of this which I'd like to use is a famine, which we covered for my A-level history course, that took place in Russia during Stalin's period in power. The country was effectively war-torn for most of the Soviet era and under Stalin it was no different. There weren't enough people in the rural areas to produce food for everyone, they very often barely produced enough for themselves, but Stalin came along and took what they could not give, so people burned crops rather than give them up. Most people would have seen sense at this point and tried to encourage people back to agriculture, but Stalin punished them. What resulted was some of the worst famines of modern times, and in what is technically an Economically developed country, it was one of only two superpowers in the world. However people died in their millions, they boiled shoe leather to chew and they ate their dead, in some places they deliberately killed the weak for food. The reason for all of this is Pride. Pride of just one man which wouldn't let him accept foreign aid.
I'm not saying that all the world's problems can be fixed by the giving and accepting of aid, but it certainly can help. I think that we should also try to figure out how to prevent disasters such as this, which are man-made where we can and try to sort them while we still can.
Surely that's what being masters means?
Rowen
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