The angel of the LORD moved on ahead and stood in a narrow place where there was no room to turn, either to the right or to the left. When the donkey saw the angel of the LORD, she lay down under Balaam, and he was angry and beat her with his staff.  Then the LORD opened the donkey’s mouth, and she said to Balaam, “What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?”  Balaam answered the donkey, “You have made a fool of me! If I had a sword in my hand, I would kill you right now. “The donkey said to Balaam, “Am I not your own donkey, which you have always ridden, to this day? Have I been in the habit of doing this to you?”  ”No,” he said.  Then the LORD opened Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of the LORD standing in the road with his sword drawn. So he bowed low and fell facedown. (Numbers 22:26-31)

It seems to me that when we consider the proper treatment of animals we should speak of man’s responsibilities as steward rather than to speak of the rights of animals.  It’s far easier for me to ignore the rights of others than it is to ignore my personal conviction that I have God-given responsibilities toward others. Since the Bible does not really mention rights in regard to animals, I feel it’s much more important for us to consider what the Bible means when it says we are to tend the Garden.  The animals, like the remainder of the Creation, belong to God; and it is a major responsibility for me to do with them what is right in God’s eyes.

a PETA logo

Many non-Christian animal-rights activists react strongly against the biblical idea that man has a superior position in respect to the animals—thinking that such a belief leads to human arrogance and to our frequent ill treatment of the other creatures who share this earth with us. (See the Wikipedia article on PETA) But like so many other truths, it is not the belief that’s the problem; it’s what we do with that belief.    While Christianity does not con­done groundless sentimentality and the granting of personhood to animals, it does speak consistently of man’s responsibilities regarding them.  Animals are creatures of God under the care of God’s stewards—mankind .  For us to treat them as nothing or to treat them cruelly is clearly wrong.

In reality, humanity’s position of superiority should humble us; because for all our superiority, we are the ones who have sinned and continue to sin—not the animals.  It is human sin that has created the havoc in the world that the animals must occupy (Romans 8:18-21).  Thus superiority has, in sin, shown its potential to be a curse.  Only in humble confession and submission before a holy God can we truly carry out the task of stewardship—the primary responsibility that goes hand-in-hand with our endowment of authority in the created order.  As in all other relationships, prideful superiority has no place in man’s relationship to the world of animals.

I like what Francis Schaeffer said about this matter in his book Pollution and the Death of Man: The Christian View of Ecology:

We should treat each thing with integrity because this is the way God made it. . . .  The value of the things is not in themselves autonomously, but that God made them, and thus they deserve to be treated with high respect. . . .  God treats His creation with integrity: each thing in its own order, each thing the way He made it.  If God treats His creation in that way, should we not treat our fellow-creature with similar integrity?  If God treats a tree like a tree, a machine like a machine, the man like a man, shouldn’t I, as a fellow-creature do the same—treating each thing in integrity in its own order?  And for the highest reason: because I love God.  I love the One who has made it!  Loving the Lover who has made it, I have respect for the thing He has made. (pp. 54-57)

Think about Balaam in the Bible (Numbers 22).  That rebel prophet was considering disobeying God in order to obtain wealth, and on his way to hear the lucrative offer, the donkey he was riding saw an angel standing in the way with a sword in hand.  The prophet, who was thinking so much about financial profit, failed to see the messenger of God.  His mount refused to move, and when Balaam beat it, the beast spoke up and complained about its treatment (“What have I done to you to make you beat me these three times?” vs. 28).  The comical part of this story is that instead of falling off the donkey in surprise at the miracle of an animal that speaks, Balaam started to carry on a conversation with it!  This amazing circumstance finally shocked the prophet into hearing God and seeing the angel.  Then the angel spoke: “I have come here to oppose you because your path is a reckless one before me.”

Considering how so many of God’s non-human creatures often fare at the hands of people bent primarily on monetary gain, I feel that if animals could speak today, they would ask the same thing Balaam’s donkey asked, “What have I done to you [that you should treat us like this]?”  Perhaps we need some similar shock for us to see that much of our reckless treatment of animals may eventually lead to God’s opposition to us—which, as Balaam discovered,  is not an enviable position.

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them will fall to the ground apart from the will of your Father. And even the very hairs of your head are all numbered. So don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows (Matthew 10:29-31).

I love just about anything scientific: ornithology, zoology, botany, meteorology, astronomy. When I go outside, I hardly know what to look at: the birds, the clouds, the animals, the trees, or the night sky! Many Christians, however, have a bad attitude about science. They think that because so many outspoken scientists are atheists, science must somehow lead to disbelief in God. Not so. In fact, the Apostle Paul points out that the natural world is itself evidence for the existence of God (Rom 1:21).

My Three R’s

I’ve found that three R’s help me keep my biblical focus about the natural world: regard, respect, relationship.

Regard: The Bible tells us that God attends the death of a sparrow. Think of that! If the great Originator of the sparrow also attends its death, how can we care less? Most of the species extinctions mankind has witnessed are the result of our failure to give attention to what God gives His attention to. Learning to love what the Creator loves can only increase the intensity of our spiritual experiences. Think of all the biblical stories where people met God in the wilderness. Could it be that we often miss the voice of God because we are regarding only human entertainments and artifacts?

Respect: George MacDonald, 19th century Christian author whose writing inspired C. S. Lewis, had a reverent respect for the natural world. He wrote, “The flowers are joyous, inarticulate children, come with vague messages from the Father of all. If I confess that what they say to me sometimes makes me weep, how can I call my feeling for them anything but love?” The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made (Psalm 145:9).

Relationship: Evangelical theologian John Stott is an avid birder who motivated the founder of A Rocha, a Christian nature conservancy. He writes, “Christian people should surely have been in the vanguard of the movement for environmental responsibility, because of our doctrines of creation and stewardship. Did God make the world? Does He sustain it? Has He committed its resources to our care? His personal concern for His own creation should be sufficient to inspire us to be equally concerned.”

Our relationship to the natural world is that of steward—the one who is responsible to care for what God has made. Homo sapiens is the only responsible species. How responsible have we been?

To Adam [the Creator] said, “Because you listened to your wife and ate from the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You must not eat of it,’ “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life.  It will produce thorns and thistles for you, and you will eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:17-19).

I have a theory.  Think it through with me as I try to squeeze a lot of theology, philosophy, and sociology into a short space.  One of the most significant aspects of man’s fall into sin was our Creator’s curse.  Because we know that God works out all things for the good of those who love Him and are called according to His purpose, and because we know He loves the creature made in His image, we can believe this curse was for a beneficial purpose and was ultimately an act of love.

It is pretty obvious that the while the curse made a great impact on the natural order, nature itself did not sin.  Man is fallen, not nature.  Nature is cursed, but it is cursed to discipline sinful man—sending him out of the Garden where the living was easy and life perpetual into the wider world which would now resist his efforts to wrest it to his own glory, selfishly hoard it, and destroy its fruitfulness.  Sinful, self-centered man having perpetual life and easy access to all the fruit of the earth was a disaster in the making; so God did two other things to protect His creation from the evil of sinful man: He closed the Garden and prevented re-entry with His armed angelic host, and He took away our access to the tree of life: daily sustenance that would give mankind unending life (and which, praise God, we will once again have access to according to the last chapter of the Bible) .

Here’s my theory: God said we will make our living by hard labor being reminded of our sin by facing a natural world that would in many ways be hostile to us; and we said “No way.”  So immediately we put our creative powers to work to make “labor-saving” and “time saving” devices.  The rest is history, as they say.

We have saved so much labor by our cleverness that we’re now destroying the earth with it:  Creating chemicals that are a lethal influence in our environment.  Burning fossil fuels to run our powerful engines each doing the work of hundreds or thousands of people and fouling our air, fishing out our oceans, and wiping out our forests.  Creating huge machines that do the “gardening” for us and turning them over to irresponsible corporations motivated only by monetary profit, while we cocoon ourselves in our cities with purblind eyes that do not bother to see what is happening to our soil.  Making appliances that keep families out of the kitchen and keep us from working side by side with those we love to make our meals and wash our dishes.  And we leave all that and take our children to restaurant chains the purpose of which is to make money for stock holders and which waste millions of pounds of food and paper every day.

And what have we done with the labor and time saved?  Where to find clues: Facebook, sports, entertainment, TV, video gaming, perpetual travel, shopping temples, and . . . .

I’m going to leave that there for now—just to keep your mental gears in motion.  I’d love to have many readers of WOC take up this idea and start a good discussion on this post in the comments box.  Do you think that we have become a fat and loveless culture in part because we have spurned the love of our Creator, who was wise enough to know that our avaricious nature needed the discipline of the curse that we have worked so hard to overturn?  Dig into your Bibles for this one.

To be continued (with apologies to Shakespeare for snitching his title).

The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the firstfruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. For in this hope we were saved. But hope that is seen is no hope at all. Who hopes for what he already has? But if we hope for what we do not yet have, we wait for it patiently” (Rom. 8:19-25, NIV).

Having grown up in a Christian home, having gone to a Christian university, having taught in Christian colleges, and being familiar with the Bible from toddlerhood, I have no idea how I missed understanding for so long the truth found in this passage from Paul’s letter to the church in Rome: the creation itself, in its own non-human nature, looks forward to the coming of Christ just like we do.  In his paraphrase of this passage, J. B. Phillips elaborates on just how much creation looks forward to the Consummation: “The whole creation is on tiptoe to see the wonderful sight of the sons of God coming into their own.” 

But reflective of Adam’s task to understand, care for, and name the animals, note that the creation is looking expectantly for something from us: it is eager to so see us “coming into [our] own.”  Nature has been suffering under God’s righteous, man-disciplining curse (Genesis 3:13-19) and under the abuse of sinful mankind and it is looking forward to our being sinless, Eden-like stewards once again.  Simply said, we are not what we should be, and nature knows it.  Every time animals flee from me or try to attack me out of perceived self-defense when I mean them no harm, I hurt.  Don’t you?  And when wild animals do take the risk to venture close, I thrill at being trusted. 

Eden resides down deep in us—and in the animals.  O how I long for that day when things will be even better than Eden and trust returns between us and the creatures.   Margaret Clarkson’s poem “Expectation” from her poetry collection All Nature Sings, expresses this longing in a way that has long touched my soul:

Expectation

This glowing dawn,
all nature stands on tiptoe
waiting
drenched in wonder.

Grasses nod
soft air breathes
leaves sigh
petals stir
waters ripple
mists rise.

Birds loose shining shafts of song.

High in the blue
bright wings drift
hover and dart.

By fragrant brier
furred bodies freeze
nostrils twitch
whiskers quiver and stiffen
sharp eyes glance
sure paws flash.

Shimmering insects flit and fall.

On dewy thorn
the patient spider weaves
her jeweled web.

In weedy depths
of still green waters
shadowy forms gleam
silently gliding.

Breezes freshen
the morning quickens.

Washed in new gold
all nature waits on tiptoe
watching
wordlessly questing:

“Is this the day?
will it be soon,
the hour of earth’s redemption,
Life’s return?”

In the first year of Cyrus king of Persia, in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah, the LORD moved the heart of Cyrus king of Persia to make a proclamation throughout his realm and to put it in writing:

“This is what Cyrus king of Persia says:

” ‘The LORD, the God of heaven, has given me all the kingdoms of the earth and he has appointed me to build a temple for him at Jerusalem in Judah. Anyone of his people among you—may his God be with him, and let him go up to Jerusalem in Judah and build the temple of the LORD, the God of Israel, the God who is in Jerusalem. And the people of any place where survivors may now be living are to provide him with silver and gold, with goods and livestock, and with freewill offerings for the temple of God in Jerusalem.’ “ (Ezra 1:1-4)     [Photo source]

In this fascinating historical account from the Hebrew Scriptures, Cyrus, a pagan king, heard the command of God and obeyed by releasing the captive Judeans to return, according to the prophecy of Jeremiah, and rebuild the temple and eventually resettle their homeland.  Dr. Richard Wright, emeritus professor of biology from Gordon College, coined the term “the Cyrus Principle” to indicate the process by which God often uses unbelievers to accomplish His purposes.  In his book Biology Through the Eyes of Faith, he speaks of this principle in reference to the many non-Christians who have worked diligently to preserve the wonder and integrity of God’s creation and have in essence done what God’s children could have and should have at least been actively involved in.

A prime example of this is the church’s almost universal hostile reaction to the protestation of “hippiedom” during the late sixties directed toward construction, mining, industrial, and agricultural operations that were polluting our waterways—such pollution eventually becoming so great that flammables on the surface of Ohio’s Cuyahoga River actually caught fire in 1969.  The very next year Tyndale House Publishers released the book written by the influential Christian pastor/theologian and pop philosopher Francis Schaeffer, aptly titled Pollution and the Death of Man in which he sided with the hippies and pointed out that the church was both complicit in its lack of care for God’s good creation and negligent in its teaching on the theology of nature.

These protests along with mounting evidence that we were killing the life of our rivers and lakes resulted in our Federal clean water acts of 1972, 1977, and 1987.  A visible and financially beneficial result of such protection for many major cities is that many of our urban rivers now provide great sport fishing and safe water recreation.  I recall as a kid in the fifties that our local Grand River was not grand: it was mostly an industrial, agricultural, and sewage drain that sent huge plumes of crud out into Lake Michigan immediately adjacent to a major swimming beach.  Today anglers fish below the high-rise buildings downtown and land large salmon and steelhead.

[Photo source]

I love seeing that and knowing how much cleaner the river is; but I have to confess that for the first three decades of my adult life (sixties through the eighties) I was, as a political and social conservative, opposed to nearly all environmental regulation and scoffed at the claims of environmental scientists.  And though I was greatly influenced by Schaeffer’s earlier works, I refused to read his book on the Christian view of ecology.  That changed in 1989—a story I will tell later this week.

Now I am ashamed of both my attitude and my behavior and am glad God moved many “Cyrus’s” to do the work that I could have and should have been actively involved in.  I wonder how different things would be today with the Body of Christ if we had given heed to Francis Schaeffer:

On the basis of the fact that there is going to be total redemption in the future, not only of man but of all creation, the Christian who believes the Bible should be the man who—with God’s help and in the power of the Holy Spirit—is treating nature now in the direction of the way nature will be then.  It will not now be perfect, but it must be substantial, or we have missed our calling.  God’s calling to the Christian now, and to the Christian community, in the area of nature—just as it is in the area of personal Christian living in true spirituality—is that we should exhibit a substantial healing here and now between man and nature and nature and itself, as far as Christians can bring it to pass.

[Photo source]