We watched WALL•E at a Jam movie night tonight. It was notable not for its cute char­ac­ters or the bizarre char­ac­ter devel­op­ment of robots with AI who fol­low orders, against the back­drop of recent dystopian visions of AI as spawn­ing Skynet-like futures, but rather in its por­trayal of a future human­ity wherein con­sumer cul­ture and obesity/space-induced osteope­nia have led to an overly pam­pered human­ity, locked in rep­e­ti­tious existence.

Yet, despite this, the Cap­tain comes to a real­i­sa­tion that human­ity has a duty to care for the earth, regard­less of whether or not that is a pleas­ant propo­si­tion. It would, the ship’s com­puter says, be much eas­ier to leave things as they are… but that, to the Cap­tain, is not the point. Humanity’s duty to sub­due the earth (Gen­e­sis 1:28 – 31) is almost in accord with this idea that it is our respon­si­bil­ity to care for the earth because that’s what God has given to us as our duty. That was in very-good cre­ation before our world was even remotely sin­ful. How­ever, we see the curse of sin at work as our rebel­lion against God leads to hard work: “By the sweat of your face will you eat bread, till you return to the ground” (Gen­e­sis 3:19)

“Return to the ground” there means death, by the way — it’s not talk­ing about a return from inter­galac­tic exile! Wikipedia informs us that, in 2007 screen­ings, “Stan­ton (lead writer) felt half the audi­ence at the screen­ing believed the humans would be unable to cope with liv­ing on Earth and died out after the film’s end.” Cer­tainly the opti­mism at grow­ing “pizza plants” is mis­guided and such illu­sions are likely to be quickly reme­died! How­ever, the right state of human­ity, accord­ing to the the first instruc­tion received, is to ‘sub­due’ the earth and depend upon it for our sus­te­nance. Even rebel­lion against God, the one who gives all life on earth, does not change this intrin­sic human need for work.

It is not enough to exist as con­sump­tive, pas­sive beings. We are made for work. Indeed, we are made for wor­ship, which is a kind of work (and all work, rightly enacted, serves also as wor­ship of the Cre­ator and King of the world). To sug­gest that utopia is per­sonal trans­porta­tion, liq­uid meals, rapidly change­able fash­ions, per­sonal ser­vants, and even the abo­li­tion of eco­nomic con­cerns, is to ignore an impor­tant part of our nature as humans. Sin has cor­rupted this, and we now idol­ize work to the detri­ment of other things more impor­tant, and embrace lazi­ness (not rest) as a social norm and even an aspi­ra­tion. The earth, upon which we were set as care­tak­ers, groans under the curse of our rebel­lion (Gen­e­sis 3:17), and yet still the hunger of bil­lions is not satisfied.

Thank God that because of Jesus we can hope for a future that is much greater than space travel, liq­uid lunches, free­dom from finan­cial con­cerns, and robotic assis­tants and per­son­al­i­ties! Because of what Jesus has done on the Cross, we’re able to come freely to our cre­ator, sus­tainer, and king, with­out fear and with a hope for eternity.