Psalm 37 – A Study on Wisdom, P3: Dwell in the Land

[walaa farouk]

Psalm 37 – A Study on Wisdom, P3: Dwell in the Land

H.H. Pope Tawadros II

Wednesday September 15, 2021

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. One God. Amen. May His grace and mercy rest upon us, from now and forevermore. Amen.

Sermon Highlights:

“The land”: Why is it so important?

1-God and “the land”

2-Satan and “the land”

3-Humans and “the land”

Dwell in the land, but …

1-Maintain a sense of being a stranger

2-Be a peacemaker

3-Inhabit the land (populate it and build it up)

4-Protect/Preserve the land

Introduction

This is our third in a series of wisdom lessons from Psalm 37.

1-The first wisdom we learned was from verses 1 and 2: Do not fret nor be envious of evildoers because success that comes from wrongdoing is temporary, is quickly cut down like the grass, and is of no heavenly/eternal value.

2-The second wisdom we learned was from the first part of verse 3: Trust tin the Lord, and do good – that we are to trust in the Lord, not in ourselves, not in others, and not on wealth or money. In addition, we are to also do good – to take advantage of every opportunity to do something good. This is wisdom. Make it your intention and only responsibility in this life, to put your trust in the Lord and to do what is good.

3-Today we will learn the third wisdom lesson and it comes from the second part of verse 3: to “dwell in the land.”

If we put these lessons into practice in our lives, we will be living by wisdom. And now, as usual, let us begin with a reading of Scripture, from Psalm 37. I will read the first 11 verses.

Psalm 37

1 Do not fret because of evildoers, nor be envious of the workers of iniquity.
2 For they shall soon be cut down like the grass, and wither as the green herb.

3 Trust in the Lord, and do good; dwell in the land, and feed on His faithfulness.
4 Delight yourself also in the Lord, and He shall give you the desires of your heart.

5 Commit your way to the Lord, trust also in Him, and He shall bring it to pass.
6 He shall bring forth your righteousness as the light, and your justice as the noonday.

7 Rest in the Lord, and wait patiently for Him; do not fret because of him who prospers in his way, because of the man who brings wicked schemes to pass.
8 Cease from anger, and forsake wrath; do not fret—it only causes harm.

9 For evildoers shall be cut off; but those who wait on the Lord, they shall inherit the earth.
10 For yet a little while and the wicked shall be no more; indeed, you will look carefully for his place, but it shall be no more.
11 But the meek shall inherit the earth, and shall delight themselves in the abundance of peace.

The grace of God the Father be with us all. Amen.

I want us to contemplate this third wisdom lesson together: to dwell in the land. But before we do, I want you to notice that the first lesson’s wisdom – the words “do not fret” - is repeated three times in this Psalm. And this is a very important point or lesson, why? Because not fretting (becoming bothered or worried) is the first point of entry into wisdom.

Be careful that you never envy the wicked or their plots or any of their successes, no matter how good they may appear to be, because as the Book says here, “they shall soon be cut down like the grass;” in other words, their ultimate destiny will be to perish. So keep this is mind, that “not fretting” is the foundational wisdom upon which we will build every other wisdom, and that evildoers are like the grass of the field, we step on it. But as for those who walk in the way of the Lord, Scripture says, “The righteous shall flourish like a palm tree, He shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon” (Ps 92:12) – they stand tall and are full of leaves; the righteous are productive, beautiful.

And so always keep this in mind: that the grass we step on symbolizes the evildoers, and the tall trees symbolize the lives of the righteous. And one of the lessons we learn from the lives of righteous people is that they “dwell in the land,” and here, “to dwell” means to live in, to inhabit, to build up.

But before we talk about how we are to “dwell in the land,” I want to talk to you first about what “the land” is and what is meant by “the land”? - especially because this subject of “the land” is a very significant one throughout the Holy Bible. We will consider three points: God and the land, Satan and the land, and humans and the land.

“The land”: Why is it so important?

1-God and “the land”

We are the inhabitants or dwellers of planet Earth, “the land,” which consists of mountains and seas and nations of people and generations and so on, and we refer to all this as “the world” or “the land”, but it is in fact a planet, a moving planet. It is both moving along a circuit and revolving on its own axis, and it has a small moon revolving around it and it itself revolves around the sun, as part of a group we call “the solar system.”

As students, we study the planets and the solar system and so on, and [as a people] we have been able to reach the moon and are still trying to reach the other planets, and although the closer a planet is to the sun the hotter its temperatures are and its unsuitability for human life, yet the world continues to try and make progress in this area.

The land. As we all know, after God created the light, He separated the land from the waters and the light from the darkness, and the earth began to take its physical or geographical shape. And although God would say “it is good” (Gen 1:9,18,etc) at the end of the other days of His creating, on the day God created the human (the sixth day), it says, "Then God saw everything that He had made, and indeed it was very good” (Gen 1:31). The very pinnacle of all of God’s creation was the human, Adam, then Eve.

And so it was that the human was the thinking creature that God commanded to cultivate the land and to dwell in it. The Church fathers have a very beautiful saying about this, they say that after God, the Creator, created this great kingdom of creation, He then created the king, which is the human, and said to him, “Come and dwell upon this land.” And when we say “human” or “humanity,” what is meant is both Adam and Eve, the man and the woman. And so humanity began to dwell in, cultivate, and populate the land.

And we all know the rest of the story but unfortunately, then follows the story of the fall of humanity and their falling into sin, and to summarize it very quickly, the story of the fall represents me preferring my own will to God’s will, and my trying to find a reason for my life other than God, and making the reason for my life to be food/eating.

And this is the philosophy or the reason behind why we have fasting periods, is that we are trying to once again return to the paradisiacal image. In Paradise they ate plant foods, which is why plant food is the basic staple in our fasts, at the same time, when I fast I am saying to the Lord, “Lord, my life is not from food alone, I am not alive because of food nor because of this fruit that looks and tastes good, but my life comes from You, Lord,” and this is why [in addition to only eating plant foods during our fasts] we also have periods of complete abstinence from food, and then when we do eat, we only eat plant foods.

When Adam and Eve fell into the sin of breaking the Commandment and broke God’s heart, the result was that the land was cursed. The Bible tells us, “Then to Adam He said, ‘Because you have heeded the voice of your wife, and have eaten from the tree of which I commanded you, saying, “You shall not eat of it”: ‘Cursed is the ground for your sake.’” (Gen 3:17). And when the earth became cursed, this was when corruption and plagues and so on began to come upon the earth; up until that point, all the animals and creatures had lived together in harmony and there was no cannibalism nor diseases and so on, but with sin and the land that had now been cursed, all these conditions began to appear: diseases, plagues, floods, earthquakes, wars, and all the conditions that are now experienced on earth.

Also, Adam had to now work hard and put forth effort in order to eat. He had to put the plow to the ground and work with his hands in order to make the land produce food for him, so that he and his children could live - “In toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life” (Gen 3:17).

And the land (the earth) remained this way until we get to the story of the calling of our father Abraham. The Lord told Abram, “Get out of your country, from your family and from your father’s house, to a land that I will show you” (Gen 12:1). Abram was from the land of Ur of the Chaldeans, a city in the area of current day Iraq. God called him to leave this land despite that it was actually a good and productive land, but God called Abram to leave it and journey through a vast expanse of desert, until he would reach the land God was leading him to.

And the Lord said to Abram, “I will make you a great nation; I will bless you and make your name great; and you shall be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and I will curse him who curses you; and in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed” (Gen 12:2-3). And from this point onwards we see the subject of “the land” begin to unfold, and if you were to follow the story of the children of Israel throughout the entire Old Testament, you would notice that the entire narrative revolves around the land. The land is the topmost subject in the life of the children of Israel, and we continue to hear about “the land” in the Book of Joshua, and so this subject of “the land and God” is from the very beginning of creation and throughout all the Books of the Old Testament.

And so we have Moses followed by Joshua, who divides the land among the 12 tribes, and we find many other short stories alluding to the importance of the land. I will tell you one of those stories that we all learned in Sunday School when we were little children, the story of Naboth the Jezreelite (1 Kg 21).

It says, “And it came to pass after these things that Naboth the Jezreelite had a vineyard which was in Jezreel, next to the palace of Ahab king of Samaria. So Ahab spoke to Naboth, saying, ‘Give me your vineyard, that I may have it for a vegetable garden, because it is near, next to my house; and for it I will give you a vineyard better than it. Or, if it seems good to you, I will give you its worth in money.’ 3 But Naboth said to Ahab, ‘The Lord forbid that I should give the inheritance of my fathers to you!’” (1 Kg 21:1-3).

Naboth was a poor farmer with a small piece of land, but when King Ahab wanted this land, the evil Queen Jezebel took it from Naboth by force; she forcefully took was not rightfully hers.

And so we see that throughout the Old Testament “the land” [and land] is the centermost subject; the subject of every conflict and clash in the history of the children of Israel, and not just conflicts among nations but also conflicts among individuals also. Over the land, greed, taking advantage of others, and divisions among the people begin to appear, and this continues all the way until we reach the time of Christ, when the Temple was destroyed. The temple (Solomon’s Temple) represented the most important geographical point on the land [or on earth], but both the temple and the city of Jerusalem were destroyed in 70 A.D.

And when the children of Israel began falling into many sins, the Bible called them “a stiff-necked people” (Exo 32:9) and the Lord’s punishment for them was to exile them from the land, to remove them from it. And here is where the exiles began, whereby a foreign nation would come in, take over the land, and carry away the people or rule over them, such as we read about with the Babylonian and Assyrian exiles, and so on.

But I want you to know that with Christianity, the concept of geography was done away with. What does this mean? Okay, for example, in the New Testament we say, “For God so loved the world” (Jn 3:16) - the world, meaning that there is no longer any particular or special geographical location or piece of land having more value or holiness than another; God loved the whole world. And this is why it is said that “Christianity does not know geography;” the place where you stand to pray, wherever it may be, becomes holy.

We saw this when the Corona epidemic began and the churches were closed. People had to stay at home and so each home was transformed into a church, and when two come together in marriage we say that they have “formed a new church in which Christ dwells.” And so the concept of a single geographical location being more holy than any other, no longer exists – not in Christianity – as it did in the Old Testament. And so, know that this is what is meant when we say “For God so loved the [whole] world” – no place is different or better than any another; Christ sanctifies and makes holy any place where He is present.

And we have Christian churches all over the world until the great Day of Judgement or the Second coming of the Lord Christ Jesus, because as it says, “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night, in which the heavens will pass away with a great noise, and the elements will melt with fervent heat; both the earth and the works that are in it will be burned up” (2 Pet 3:10).

And so this is the relationship between God and the land (the earth, the world), now let us look at the relationship between Satan and the world.

2-Satan and “the land”

Satan has turned the world (planet earth) into his arena, an arena of conflict, and transformed it into a place for wars and famines, greed and holocausts and envy. And so the land (the earth) has become covered with blood and polluted with injustice, and the earth that had been originally given by God to humans as a blessing, has now been given to the evil one, as it is written, “The whole world lies under the sway of the wicked one” (1 Jn 5:19, also John 12:31, John 17:15).

And now the enemy of Good roams around among humans seeking to make them fall, in any and every form and fashion, and we see this in the temptations of the Lord Christ in the wilderness and also in the Book of Job, which as we read, was a very big test from Satan: “And the LORD said to Satan, ‘From where do you come?’ So Satan answered the LORD and said, ‘From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking back and forth on it’” (Job 1:7). So the role of the enemy of Good is to roam around on the earth seeking to cause people to fall, through the thoughts, deeds, speech, behaviors, and sins which he pours into them, and when a person gives in to this, he or she become a tool in the hands of Satan.

Notice what we say in the Prayer of Thanksgiving: “All envy, all temptation, all the work of Satan, the counsel of wicked men, and the rising up of enemies, hidden and manifest, take them away from us, and from all Your people.” The “wicked men” are those who permitted Satan and his thoughts to occupy their minds, and then we make the sign of the cross.

And here we are, today we hear that there are more than 88 conflicts around the world – whether large or small, between nations or between tribes, or the war we saw between America and Afghanistan which lasted for 20 years and nothing was accomplished. Just conflicts! How many lost their lives, and how much was spent, and how much was destroyed? Conflict, conflict, and people forget the purpose of their lives and the life of virtue for which they were created, moreover, they forget their own humanity, and this is what the enemy of Good does to people.

And sometimes a person feels like they own or possess things, when in reality and ultimately, he will be buried in a 1-by-2 meter space; his life will come to an end and he will become part of the dust of the ground (the land). Notice that when we walk along the road and see dust or dirt, where did it come from? This dirt was at one time living human beings, this dirt was people, people who had voices and conflicts, people who went to court and either had conflicts with other people or who were peacemakers, either way, life ends and they became dirt.

In the Book of Ezekiel it says, “‘Thus says the Lord GOD: “Behold, I am against you, O Pharaoh king of Egypt, O great monster who lies in the midst of his rivers, who has said, ‘My River is my own; I have made it for myself’”’” (Ezek 29:3). The level of arrogance reaches a point where one would claim to own a river! And who could ever claim to own a river? Nature is the work of [and belongs to] God.

The conclusion is that the enemy of Good has succeeded at transforming the world into a place of conflict. Weapons are being piled up by many nations; many people, in the millions, across many nations, are under the tyranny of poverty, despite the fact that the Lord’s abundance is sufficient to cover all of humanity’s needs; and life on earth has become that the rich become richer and the poor become more poor.

And yes, we do hear of the great efforts of many nations to encourage continued growth and the United Nations’ efforts and so on, but the enemy of Good continues to wage war against people through greed and through many thoughts; through the desire to possess or control grandeur and earthly possessions; and through conflicts and wars, whether between individuals or between nations, and these lasting for a very long time. This is the relationship between the land and Satan.

3-Humans and “the land”

When God made humans it says, “Then the LORD God formed man from the dust of the ground and breathed the breath of life into his nostrils, and Adam became a living being” (Gen 2:7). To make Adam, or the human, God took from the dust of the ground, and so in the creation of humans we see that they are both body and spirit (dust and breath of God). And by breathing His own breath into them, God enabled humans to be intelligent and mature beings, and that is why people can create civilizations upon the earth - do not forget that the Commandment is to “dwell in the land.”

And to “dwell in the land” in this context means that you are positive in relation to or toward the land. And so God created the human out of dust, placed them here on earth and gave them various components of soul, mind, and so on, and yet at the same time, these humans are connected to God through the breath of life that God breathed into them, which is why we call the human “a heavenly creature.” With his body he walks on the earth, but through his thinking he can leap towards heaven, and this is where the idea of the life of virtue comes in; that through a life of virtue, a person can live and become identified with God, his Creator.

[But because of this “dual nature”], a person also began to live in inner conflict: will he think of heavenly and higher things, or will he think of earthly and materialistic things? And we call a person who lives with his mind on earthly things “an earthly person” – he is very much connected to material and earthly things. Animals cannot think on heavenly or higher things, they were not given the breath of God, but you, O human, when God created you, He put His Spirit in you, the breath of life.

And so I plead with you, do not be a person who is only concerned with this world. There are people who only care about this life and all they think about is eating and drinking, or as the Greek philosophy says, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die.” Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die, but about such people St. Paul tells us, “Their destiny is destruction, their god is their belly, and their glory is in their shame. Their mind is set on earthly things” (Phil 3:19). Such a person’s god is their belly; they worship their belly - eating and drinking - which is and represents the daily activities of human life.

There are also people who take pride in owning things; they like to have possessions and estates and to own things here and there and everywhere, even though they do not need all these things, but there is a person who is moderate and wise. I want to tell you that in your dealing with earthly things, you need to be moderate and wise.

And so as you “dwell in the land” or live on earth, yes, it is a very nice thing to live in a beautiful house - and we even see this in Egypt today with the massive development projects like Project “Good Life,” whereby the nation is trying with all its effort and all its resources to raise the standard of living in many of Egypt’s areas of city-outskirts and villages - and so this effort and calling it “the Good life” is a very nice thing, but let us not only keep our minds on earthly things but on things above.

O human, it is not wise for you to think only about earthly things, but your thoughts must also be on heaven because you are composed of both, flesh and spirit. One of the fathers said, “It is a very sad matter, deserving of weeping, that a person daily feeds his body and yet leaves his soul, for weeks, to go about hungry. He dresses his body with clothes and yet leaves his soul naked (not dressed with virtues). He cleans his body and even his clothing from dirt, while his soul is filled with the dirt of divisions and wickedness, as if it were the soul of an enemy or as if he were without a soul. He prepares a beautifully decorated home for his body, while the house of his soul is in hell.”

And so what is wisdom here? Wisdom is always found in balance. Be balanced. “Dwell in the land”: have a positive attitude towards life on earth but [be careful to not become] filled with all the cares of the world and of life. And in case it is still not clear to you how to maintain this balance, I will explain it to you from a Biblical and spiritual perspective so that you may understand the meaning of this Commandment, this Scripture, and this wisdom lesson.

Dwell in the land, but …

1-Maintain a sense of being a stranger

The first lesson is that as you dwell here, on the land, on earth, you must always have a sense of being a stranger here, and these are not my words, they are the prophet David’s words. He said, “I am a stranger in the earth; do not hide Your commandments from me” (Ps 119:19). No matter how many years or how long my life may be, I am coming to earth for a period of time, but Lord, do not let Your Commandments be far from me.

And this is what we see in the fathers of the Old Testament, they dwelt in tents because tents are temporary structures and living in tents, one can and does travel from one place to another. It also says, “Our earthly dwelling” – which is the body, because the body is likened to a tent – “For we know that if our earthly house, this tent, is destroyed, we have a building from God, a house not made with hands, eternal in the heavens” (2 Cor 5:1). This is a very beautiful expression, that even the body we wear is like a tent; we live in it for some time and then it comes to an end.

And in 1 Peter 2, the apostle Peter makes a very nice statement, he says, “I urge you as foreigners and strangers to abstain from fleshly lusts, which wage war against the soul” (1 Pet 2:11 NASB). These are Commandments, my brethren, Commandments that we are to place before ourselves. To be a stranger is like being a guest in a hotel; you stay there for 2 or 3 days and then you leave.

There is a beautiful Russian monastic, spiritual book called The Way of a Pilgrim, and he was a pilgrim because he did not have a permanent home but moved about from place to place [in the forests]. And so the book is about his pilgrimage as he journeyed in the way of the Lord both physically and spiritually - practicing spiritual disciplines, learning spiritual lessons, meeting monastic fathers - and this book records the scenes he encounters along the way. And so the feeling of being a stranger in this world is a very important feeling for one to have, and if you truly [cultivate] this feeling of being a stranger here, you will attain the sense that so many things [here] are/have become insignificant, worthless.

2-Be a peacemaker

Another aspect of “dwelling in the land” is that while you are here on your earthly journey, be a peacemaker, and I like it so much when He says in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God” (Mt 5:9) – meaning that these will be the ones who have a portion in heaven.

Make peace on earth and be a peacemaker, whether on a small scale and on a large scale, but become one who, like a dove, is a continuous messenger of peace. And to “live in peace” is a Biblical Commandment, as it says in the Book of Proverbs, “Better is a dry morsel with quietness, than a house full of feasting with strife” (Prov 17:1), because a house that is full of conflict does not meet the standard of “dwelling the land.”

When the servants of Abraham and his nephew, Lot, began to strive with one another over the land, it says, “Now the land was not able to support them, that they might dwell together, for their possessions were so great that they could not dwell together. And there was strife (dispute) between the herdsmen of Abram’s livestock and the herdsmen of Lot’s livestock” (Gen 13:6-7), [and so we see that even] since the days of Abraham and Lot, there was fighting over the land.

And if you were to just contemplate the statement: “the land was not able to support them,” one wonders… this land belongs to neither of you and one day you will both leave it, so then why quarrel and strive? And why waste your life and the lives of others in disputing? Where is the logic? Where is the wisdom?

And at this point we see our father Abraham acting in wisdom and putting the lesson of “having a right attitude about the land” into practice. He called Lot to him and said, “Why should we fight and argue? Please let there be no strife between you and me, and between my herdsmen and your herdsmen; for we are brethren. Is not the whole land before you? Please separate from me. If you take the left, then I will go to the right; or, if you go to the right, then I will go to the left” (Gen 13:8-9). And that was the end of that and they lived the rest of their lives in peace towards one another, and this is wisdom, the wisdom that many lack.

In Jeremiah 29:7 it says, “Seek the peace of the city where I have caused you to be carried away captive, and pray to the LORD for it; for in its peace you will have peace.”

3-Inhabit the land (populate it and build it up)

The third aspect of “dwell in the land” is that you move forward and inhabit the land; build it up, populate it. God abhors emptiness, and so we are to inhabit the land, but in a good way. For example, when we hear of projects to develop desert areas [and other uninhabited/uninhabitable areas], these projects bring joy to God’s heart. The establishing of new cities, the rehabilitation of land for the purpose of agriculture, these are all things that are in accord with the Divine Commandment to “dwell in the land.”

We also see this in the history of Christianity and monasticism in Egypt, whereby when monasteries began to flourish in the deserts, each monastery began to be responsible for and cultivate plots of land, producing food that both contributes to the national GDP of Egypt as well as meets the needs of people, and so this type of work also fulfills the Divine and Biblical Commandments to “dwell in the land” by inhabiting [and cultivating] it.

The Commandment is also fulfilled when we construct beautiful buildings and spaces for people to live in. Inhabit the land; dwell in it and fill it with life! Do not let the land be desolate, lifeless. I really like it when previously desolate areas or places that were for trash collection are turned into public gardens. What a beautiful thing, and giving people much benefit.

Another benefit of “dwelling the land” by inhabiting it is that it creates work opportunities for people: people needed to build, people needed to maintain, people needed to organize, and so on. Any society is composed of many members and every member has a job, and as an individual human, I need all the services offered by others. There is not one of us that can say, “I do not need others”; no, I need both the simplest of services as well as the most sophisticated of services, both.

Another denotation of inhabiting the land is to make the land like Paradise; make it like Paradise with the people dwelling in it, by the activities being conducted upon it, with the projects going on within it, by the trees being planted in it, and so on.

“Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor” (Eccl 2:24), meaning that there is nothing better or more for a person to do than to eat and drink and rejoice in his labor, but that is not wisdom; wisdom is that a person inhabit and develop every place he or she lives in.

You are responsible to make the place where you dwell, in general, beautiful, for example, sometimes people will move their trash from inside their house to outside their house, and while yes, you have cleared it out of your house, but it is now going to offend or harm others.

One of the very nice things we see in other cultures is how they encourage people to make their balconies beautiful by filling them with beautiful planted flowers, and you may ask, “What for? If the flowers are on the balcony, I will not get to see and enjoy their beautiful sight.” True, you won’t, but it’s not for you; it is for those living across from you to enjoy. Likewise, your neighbor will do the same thing and you will get to enjoy his flowers, and so on.

4-Protect/Preserve the land

So, as we “dwell in the land” (as we live here on earth) we are to maintain a sense of being a stranger (a guest/visitor), we are to be a peacemaker (living in peace), we are to inhabit the land (by cultivating and beautifying it), and finally, we are to protect it, which is what is referred to today as “environmentalism,” and there are many studies and branches of science that are today dedicated to the study of this question of, “How do we protect or preserve our environment?”

When God created Adam and placed him in the Garden of Eden it says, “Then the LORD God took the man and put him in the Garden of Eden to tend (to work) and keep (guard/protect) it” (Gen 2:15) – to work it and to guard/protect it.

And of course people ultimately harm themselves [when they harm the environment], for example, high temperatures have caused the ice caps in the north and south poles of planet earth to begin to melt and turn into water, this water then runs down the mountains and enters into the rivers, the rivers then overflow and flood, and the floods flood countries, and this is all a result of what humanity has done.

I remember one time seeing a place that used to have vast areas of greenery and wonderful agricultural acreages, but there they came and built a tire factory. This of course emitted carbon, smoke, and pollutants into the air, which in turn affected the trees that had previously been doing so well, and they began to dry out and lose their leaves. I think that if the trees could talk they would have asked for help, “Rescue us.”

Protecting the environment is the responsibility of each and every one of us. That you protect and not waste a single drop of water is a responsibility you have, that you protect the air from becoming polluted is also your responsibility, that you protect the waters from becoming contaminated or polluted because today, for example, many sea creatures are dying in the seas and oceans just because of plastic bags thrown in the water! These are just a few examples of how protecting the environment is a personal, a collective, and a national responsibility.

Another thing is that the pollutants from petroleum cause incredible air pollution, this pollution is then breathed in by humans and it affects their health, even more so children’s health, and it is even causing the appearances of new diseases. So then what are we to do? Well, they are now searching for what is called “cleaner energy” sources, whether it be energy we can get from the wind, or from the sun, or from electricity – clean energy. And so, since the environment and well-being of the planet and the land are so closely connected to our own health and well-beings, we can consider that the issue of the planet’s health and environment is an issue of our own [human] health.

Conclusion & Blessing

The conclusion my brethren is that to “dwell in the land” is one of the lessons in wisdom, and that you are to be a moderate and wise person in your dealings with the land, and that you make sure that the land whereupon you dwell is a calm, beautiful, and restful place for you, and that you are to be a person who works to cultivate the land and one who has a positive attitude in all that you do, remembering that to “dwell in the land” is one of the Commandments the Holy Bible teaches us.

Today’s wisdom lesson is to “dwell in the land,” to deal with the land in a positive way, every day, and know that the planet is a great blessing and it is our job to protect it, all of it.

To our God be all the glory and honor, from now and forevermore. Amen.