Restoring One Another

 

God’s creation is interwoven in the sense that nothing was created to exist on its own or without a reference to something else. In other words, God created the universe in such that, fishes can’t do without the water bodies and cow or other herbivorous creatures cannot do without grasses. While birds need insects to survive, man need plants to live. Biologist call this type of relationship ‘Food Chain or food web’ which defines the relationship between creatures.

The Bible tells us that, when God look at what He created and “it was good”. This means any attempt to terminate this link or relationship will result in harm to God’s ‘good’ creation; for everything God created is to function in concord.

During the last Sunday service, Kent Hodge spoke on God’s wisdom to create a relative creation whereby everything He created complement   each other. In his message titled “restoring one another”, taken from 1Corinthians 12, Kent Hodge laid emphasis on oneness, that though there are many members in one body with various functions, they complement each other and no other part is less important than the other, no matter the difference in size. On similar note, everyone is uniquely gifted and any attempt to copy or compete with someone’s gift is as good as eliminating the person.

And again, according to Kent Hodge, killing our enemies does more harm to us than loving them. When we kill our enemies, we also harm ourselves because we need each other. He gave an example with the Fulani cows; that, we need Fulani cows for our soil rejuvenation and the Fulani cows need our lands to graze. Kent Hodge referred to this as “farming together”.

Coming to agriculture, Kent Hodge spoke on the better way to improve our soil by adding or introducing compost to it rather than using chemicals which kill the soil bio-contents. God created soil with these living organisms to complement the soil, the symbiotic relationship between the soil and these organisms is what gives life to both, this is God’s wisdom. And killing organisms in the soil by the use of our chemicals does harm to the soil and reduce crops yield, we are rather enriching fertilizer companies and making ourselves poorer.

In the same vine, most drugs manufacture for body treatments are targeted at killing disease in our system, but just like in the case chemotherapy, in an attempt to kill cancer in human system, some of the body cells are been damaged or killed. Kent Hodge stressed that instead of killing, immune system can be boosted by eating natural food from plant, a wonderful gift from God without side effect. Most of the drugs or chemicals we call “supplements or multivitamins” have side effects in the long run.

The world is now in trouble because humanity has replaced the wisdom of God with the wisdom of man. Paul put it “Since God in his wisdom saw to it that the world would never know him through human wisdom….” (1Cor 1:21 NLT), through the wisdom of man, the wisdom of God is being ignored on daily basis, people believe they can live better on processed food than natural foods, organic manure is gradually replaced by inorganic or chemicals which kill soil bio-components. The world tries to make better or improve by killing but God makes better by restoring.

This is the message we see in the gospels, “Go into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature” (Mark 16:15), the restorative gospel involves “every creature” and not just humanity. God in His wisdom did not plan to restored or saved His creation by killing it, but by restoring it, and He has given us the commission to do this to ‘every creature’; the soil, insects, animals and every other thing God has created. If we have been following God’s wisdom by restoring relationships instead of killing, the world would have been peaceful. 

Restoration brings the desired healing to our communities, we can not be whole or complete without each other's gift, we need each other to do well. In other words, we can be better or do better if we restore one another or reach out to our enemies in love to restore them.