Save the City, (Part Three) . . . God cares about Animals.
Jonah 4:11 (NIV) “. . . Nineveh has more than a hundred and twenty thousand people who cannot tell their right hand from their left, and many cattle as well. Should I not be concerned about that great city?”
Did you ever notice the mention of cattle in the verse above?
What’s up with that?
As a confirmed Evangelical I can easily understand God’s concern for the 120,000 unredeemed people in the city of Nineveh, but why mention the animals?
And then, from out of the mists of a distant youth, I faintly recalled hearing the elders speak of the Rev. Mr. Wesley’s and Mr. Adam Clarke’s thoughts upon the subject of God’s concern for the lower animals. How they took note of, and commented upon, the many places in holy writ where His focus falls upon the most humble of creatures. . . such as you and I take little notice of. There the sparrow finds mention, from Old Testament to New, as falling within the scope of the care and concern of the Almighty.
And who, after reading Acts 3:21, can resist at least some small question as to what the total renewal of “all things” will entail? And shall not these innocent beasts, who never willingly broke their Creator’s will nor spurned His righteous Word, inherit some measure of blessing in that re(new)ed world?
Paul seems to suggest this in his letter to the Romans (8:19-22) where he says:
19 The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed. 20 For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope 21 that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. 22 We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.
All creation is caught in the wreckage brought about by human rebellion in the Fall. Will not all Creation, then, share in the blessings of the future renewal? There are others who think so, too.
John Wesley was among them. I leave, as a good place to begin to develop a theology of ethics toward lower animals, his ‘Sermon 60’.
Read it and think.
You may never look at a sparrow (or the family pet) in the same way, again.
