“Go into all the world and preach the gospel to all creation.” (Mark 16:15)
The gospel is the good news that God gave His Son to save the world because He loved it so much. The world in this sense is the cosmos which includes the earth. The Psalmist proclaims that the earth is the Lord’s and everything on it. They all belong to the earthly community which belongs to the Creator. The Greek word for this community is oikos, the root of the word oikoumene, or ecumenical, which describes our common home. We can see then that the good news of salvation is way more than just humans going to heaven when they die. Rather salvation (root, salve) is the healing of the earth by saving it from the corruption of sin and death.
Among our fellow earthly creatures, we human beings were given the special vocation to cultivate and keep the oikos of God. Before His ascension, Jesus reaffirmed that call when He told His followers to go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to all creation. Let us participate in the Lord’s redemptive work and find joy in doing it.
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