“He Created It Not in Vain” Will Earth Be Ruined in Nuclear War?
ONE reason Jehovah’s Witnesses publish this journal is to assure its readers that the world is not going to end in a nuclear holocaust. Whether one or more nations may try out their nuclear bombs, we do not know. But a nuclear holocaust—we do not look for that. That would ruin the earth. God’s work of creation would then be ruined. His Word tells us positively: “He created it not in vain.”—Isaiah 45:18, Authorized Version.
We believe that the Son of God meant it when he declared that the meek shall inherit the earth.
We believe that the Father, God the Creator, formed it to be inhabited—in righteousness.
Matthew 5:5 and Isaiah 45:18 state these assurances so emphatically that Jehovah’s Witnesses spent almost 1,000,000 hours every single day last year in personal calls on people in more than 200 lands, relieving the fears of millions of people with those Bible guarantees.
When thinking persons today realize how man has subdued the earth, they shudder. “Nature” is no longer an unquestioned master over man. Man now holds the destiny of life in his hand. Earth needs protection from man.
The present ruining of the earth is not the way man was meant to subdue it. To get man off to a perfect start, to demonstrate how man was to subdue it, “Jehovah God proceeded to take the man and settle him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to take care of it.”—Genesis 2:15.
It is rewarding to look more closely at that marvelous beginning in paradise: First, “Jehovah God proceeded to form the man out of dust from the ground and to blow into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man came to be a living soul.”—Genesis 2:7.
There man stood before his Creator, physiologically adult and mature but lacking in experience and education. God also made the woman, fully developed.
Here were the ultimate life forms on earth, divinely destined to carry out a grand purpose: “Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness, and let them have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and the domestic animals and all the earth and every moving animal that is moving upon the earth.”—Genesis 1:26.
Logically, education began with Lesson Number One: ‘The way of life depends on responding to what I teach you. I have made everything for a purpose and according to fixed principles. Everything you need to know I will teach you. Do not determine within yourselves to direct your course. The way that may seem right in your own determination leads to death.’ (Psalm 36:9; Jeremiah 10:23; Proverbs 3:5, 6) The whole tenor of the Bible bears out that this was the essence of what the man and woman should have discerned from the simple mandate: “As for the tree of the knowledge of good and bad you must not eat from it, for in the day you eat from it you will positively die.”—Genesis 2:17.
No matter how many billions of years the earth might have whirled in space; no matter how many aeons of time God spent in preparing its life processes, the time came when he turned over its keeping to man. He knew this sentient creature of thought and will was capable, sooner or later, of attaining the ultimate power over the earthly creation. But now man has laid hold on such a power with destructive intent.
If you were earth’s creator, what would you do? Would you abandon it to a world of men who imagine that one form of political sovereignty is more important than the well-being of God’s handiwork?
The decision to drop atom bombs does not have to be made by the deliberate and determinate council of well-meaning men. It can be started by a deranged dictator. Or a handful of terrorists. Or even by accident. Three times in recent years American forces have been alerted to an attack threat. Twice it happened because of a faulty chip in a computer. Once somebody mistakenly inserted a test tape depicting a missile attack into the sound system—it scared the North American Air Defense Command into thinking it was for real!
Yes, if you were earth’s creator would you abandon it to caretakers who hang its fate on blind, precarious, frivolous chance?
Men and nations stand guilty before earth’s Owner. They willfully and with violent intent hang the peril of nuclear destruction over the planet. Not one of them is freed of guilt by claiming intent to drop nuclear bombs only in ‘defensive retaliation.’ “It is another nonsensical feature of the nuclear predicament that while each side regards the population of the other side as the innocent victims of unjust government,” observed magazine writer Jonathan Schell, “each proposes to punish the other government by annihilating that already suffering and oppressed population.”—The New Yorker, February 8, 1982.
God will not allow earth’s ruination. He will interfere. He will do so even though that angers every nation on the planet: “The nations became wrathful, and your own wrath came, and the appointed time . . . to bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”—Revelation 11:18.
You may hear some scoff at the application of Revelation prophecies to modern times. Well, let them challenge the application. Let them put matters to the test. But just as men cannot survive an all-out nuclear war touched off by themselves, neither can they survive “the war of the great day of God the Almighty.”—Revelation 16:13, 14, 16.
That war rids the earth forever of beastly political systems along with “the kings of the earth and their armies.” When it is over even Satan the Devil will be abyssed. It is a discriminate war. It preserves the meek of the earth. They inherit a cleansed earth, not a polluted, irradiated cinder of an earth. Yes, an earth to beautify under a righteous new order ruled from heaven.—Revelation 19:19–20:3; 7:9, 10, 13-17.
Why are Jehovah’s Witnesses confident that the earth will not be ruined by a nuclear holocaust, or by any other means at man’s disposal? Because, even though Adam’s children have on the whole subdued the earth in a disapproved way, there are those who are meek and teachable and amenable to the Creator’s way. They are willing to carry out his purpose to inhabit the earth and take care of it in the way he purposed.—Psalm 37:34.