The Life You Can Choose
THERE is another life that you may now choose. It is a life that does not fade as the flower at the end of spring or wither as the grass at the end of summer. It is not filled with pain and disappointment or beset by delinquency and crime, war and famine, pestilence and death. Its days are not few, but are endless. Its days are not filled with trouble, but with unspeakable joy. It is the life for man that Jehovah God originally purposed.
And what is that? Bliss in heaven sprawled out on a billowy cloud, twanging a harp as you float along in space and eternity? No! It is not that vain and useless existence that idle dreamers have conjured up as heavenly life. To see clearly what this life is that you may now choose, let us go to God’s Word to find out his purpose in creating man and woman.
That first pair were given a mandate, not concerning heaven, but concerning the earth. God told them: “Be fruitful and become many and fill the earth and subdue it, and have in subjection the fish of the sea and the flying creatures of the heavens and every living creature that is moving upon the earth.” To subdue the earth means to take care of it, not ruin it. This is evident from man’s assignment in Eden: “Jehovah God proceeded to take the man and settle him in the garden of Eden to cultivate it and to take care of it.”—Gen. 1:28; 2:15.
As the human family increased and Eden became too small, it was God’s purpose for the growing population to spread beyond the garden’s bounds, taking with them the seeds or cuttings of the perfect plants in Eden, planting them in new territories and tilling these new areas just as did the original family in Eden. Thus as humanity overspread the earth they would subdue it by transforming it into a paradise, until Eden’s condition had spread and the garden of God became global.
In that global paradise man’s dominion over the animals was to be exercised with loving care and mutual trust, not by the jabbing chair and cracking whip of the animal trainer, nor by the barred confines of the zoo’s cages, nor by the deadly guns of modern nimrods. This loving dominion over the animals by obedient mankind was to last forever.
But such dominion did not last. Sin came to mar the tranquillity of the garden of Eden. Jehovah’s edict to man was: “From every tree of the garden you may eat to satisfaction. But 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.” (Gen. 2:16, 17) The first pair disobeyed, did eat, and brought death upon themselves and their offspring. Jehovah ousted them from the garden, saying to the man:
“Cursed is the ground on your account. In pain you will eat its produce all the days of your life. And thorns and thistles it will grow for you, and you must eat the vegetation of the field. In the sweat of your face you will eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken. For dust you are and to dust you will return.”—Gen. 3:17-19.
Jehovah God gave mankind a perfect start. Through no fault of His, humankind has gone from bad to worse. “The Rock [Jehovah], perfect is his activity, for all his ways are justice. A God of faithfulness, with whom there is no injustice; righteous and upright is he. They have acted ruinously on their own part; they are not his children, the defect is their own. A generation crooked and twisted!” (Deut. 32:4, 5) A similar declaration is made at Ecclesiastes 7:29: “God made mankind upright, but they themselves have sought out many plans.” Or, as the Bible translator James Moffatt renders the latter part of this verse, “many a cunning wile have they contrived.”
Today man continues to act ruinously, more disastrously than ever before. Now his calloused exploiting of earth’s plants and animals and his abuse of resources and environment are ruining the earth as a habitable planet. It is Jehovah who will halt this, declaring that he will “bring to ruin those ruining the earth.”—Rev. 11:18.
JEHOVAH’S PURPOSE WILL PREVAIL
It is Jehovah’s purpose for the earth to remain forever: “It will not be made to totter to time indefinite, or forever.” It will be inhabited forever: “For this is what Jehovah has said, the Creator of the heavens, He the true God, the Former of the earth and the Maker of it, He the One who firmly established it, who did not create it simply for nothing, who formed it even to be inhabited: ‘I am Jehovah, and there is no one else.’”—Ps. 104:5; Isa. 45:18.
It was Jehovah’s original purpose for earth to become a paradise, filled with persons devoted to him and who would care for it and its plants and animals and who would maintain a healthy environment. This is still his purpose, and Jehovah assures us that it will be accomplished: “So my word that goes forth from my mouth will prove to be. It will not return to me without results, but it will certainly do that in which I have delighted, and it will have certain success in that for which I have sent it.”—Isa. 55:11.
The next two pages reveal the joys of the life in a paradise earth that you can now choose.