THE EARTH: OUR ULTIMATE TESTING GROUND
Our entire life is one long test. From birth to death we are being examined. The subject of this life-long probing is precisely where we are: our physical earth.
The experiment started with Adam. I believe that God took Adam and Eve from the then existing population, just as later Abraham was singled out and called to leave his ancestral home to travel in faith to the land his descendants would inherit. David is another example of this. He was chosen to become the ancestor of Jesus.
Back to Adam who failed the test, something we do all the time. It is by grace that we are saved. Perhaps Adam’s former life proved too powerful. In Genesis, the first Bible book, we read that there were other people on the earth for whom Cain expressed fear. There were also those mysterious sons of God (Gen.6:2) who were attracted to the beautiful women on earth. The Bible authors, by the way, have a real appreciation for female beauty. Job 42: 15 tells us of Job’s daughters “Nowhere in the land were there found women as beautiful as Job’s daughters.” Perhaps Adam was also influenced by Eve’s beauty. At any rate if Adam and Eve were selected from the then existing people, God did this because our world had come to a stage where the human beings could damage the state of the earth, so God elected Adam and Eve to prevent that. He infused them with his Spirit to enable them to make a new start for the human race, instructing them how to keep the laws of creation and be a beacon of light to a world on the cusp of being irreparably harmed.
That it all started with a tree is significant. The tree is a symbol of the earth. The tree, in a sense, carries the earth, is the axle on which the universe depends. The cross of Calvary is often equated with the tree. The blood of Christ first penetrated the tree: his flesh was first pounded into its wood. The Tree of the Cross fuses the Alpha and the Omega, unites earth with heaven, the past with the future, the beginning with the end. The cross in the Bible stands between the Tree of Life in Paradise and the Tree of Life in the world to come, as described in Revelation, the last Bible book. We as the human race stand and fall with the trees. Regard them with awe. It could well be that Adam’s sin was to take the fruit without asking the tree’s permission. In Paradise everything was connected to everything else. Trees and animals and humans formed an unbreakable whole. All species were intimately connected and treated each other with reverence and deference. I can well imagine that, when Adam and Eve forgot this and took the fruit without first asking permission from the tree, the holy spell, that special symbiosis in nature was broken. That’s when suddenly insects became a nuisance, animals a danger and humans strangers to each other.
Before Adam and Eve named the species I think God infused them with special capabilities to understand the language of the animals and the plants. That’s how they were able to gauge their nature and see their function in the scheme of totality. I believe they could speak with these creatures and in close cooperation with them determined the name for each individual species. All of them, animals and plants, received instructions how and where to live. Jeremiah 8:7 tells us that “the stork in the sky knows her appointed seasons… but my people do not know the requirements of the Lord.” Just as we have a spirit which ascends to God when we die, animals too have such a mysterious ingredient. Ecclesiastes 3: 21 relates that “the spirit of man rises upward and the spirit of the animal goes down into the earth.” Adam and Eve also knew the special features of all plants: they owed their long and healthy lives to the miraculous ingredients plants had, knowledge they retained when the gates of paradise were shut, still assuring them many centuries of life.
I found a very interesting article in the Lapham Quarterly dealing with animals, their spirit and their minds. Here’s its start:
These are stimulating times for anyone interested in questions of animal consciousness. On what seems like a monthly basis, scientific teams announce the results of new experiments, adding to a preponderance of evidence that we’ve been underestimating animal minds, even those of us who have rated them fairly highly. New animal behaviors and capacities are observed in the wild, often involving tool use—or at least object manipulation—the very kinds of activity that led the distinguished zoologist Donald R. Griffin to found the field of cognitive ethology (animal thinking) in 1978: octopuses piling stones in front of their hideyholes, to name one recent example; or dolphins fitting marine sponges to their beaks in order to dig for food on the seabed; or wasps using small stones to smooth the sand around their egg chambers, concealing them from predators. At the same time neurobiologists have been finding that the physical structures in our own brains most commonly held responsible for consciousness are not as rare in the animal kingdom as had been assumed. Indeed they are common. All of this work and discovery appeared to reach a kind of crescendo last summer, when an international group of prominent neuroscientists meeting at the University of Cambridge issued “The Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness in Non-Human Animals,” a document stating that “humans are not unique in possessing the neurological substrates that generate consciousness.” It goes further to conclude that numerous documented animal behaviors must be considered “consistent with experienced feeling states.”
That same article goes on saying:
“And yet, if you put aside church dogma, and lean in to look at the Bible itself, or at the Christian tradition, the picture is more complicated. In the Book of Isaiah, God says that the day will come when the beasts of the field will “honor” Him (Isaiah 43:20). If there’s a characteristic of personal identity more defining than the capacity to honor, it’s hard to come up with. We remember St. Francis, going aside to preach to the little birds, his “sisters.” Needless to say he represented a radical extreme, conclusions of which regarding the right way of being in the world would not seem reasonable to most of the people who have his statue in their gardens. In one of his salutations, that of virtues, he goes as far as to say that human beings desiring true holiness should make themselves “subject” to the animals, “and not to men alone, but also to all beasts.” If God grants that wild animals eat you, lie down, let them do “whatsoever they will,” it’s what He wanted.
Deeper than that, though, in the New Testament, in the Gospel According to Luke, there’s that exquisite verse, one of the most beautiful in the Bible, the one that says if God cares deeply about sparrows, don’t you think He cares about you? One is so accustomed to dwelling on the second, human, half of the equation, the comforting part, but when you put your hand over that and consider only the first, it’s a little startling: God cares deeply about the sparrows. Not just that, He cares about them individually. “Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies?” Jesus says. “Yet not one of them is forgotten in God’s sight.” (Luke 12:6). Sparrows are an important animal for Jesus. In the so-called Infancy Gospel of Thomas, a boy Jesus, playing in mud by the river, fashions twelve sparrows out of clay—again the number is mentioned—until a fellow Jew, happening to pass, rebukes him for breaking the Sabbath laws (against “smoothing,” perhaps), at which point Jesus claps and says, “Go!”, and the sparrows fly away chirping. They are not, He says, forgotten. So God remembers them, bears them in mind. Stranger still, He cares about their deaths. In the Gospel According to Matthew we’re told, “Not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.” Think about that. If the bird dies on the branch, and the bird has no soul, and is from that moment only inanimate matter, already basically dust, how can it be “with” God as it’s falling?
We must embrace the totality of creation. I believe there’s where our testing comes in. Creation is God’s primary word. John 3:16 is the most underestimated and misinterpreted text in the Bible. If God loves this world so much that he lays down his life to buy it back- the literal meaning of ‘redeem’ – should we not do the same? Animals are much closer to us – witness their DNA – than we like to admit. And what applies to animals is equally true for plants: we have to surround ourselves with them and care for them, because not only are animals special, plants too are much more sensitive than we often realize.
There is a well-known study from the early 1970s where classical music (Debussy), jazz (Louis Armstrong was used, among others), and Indian (Ravi Shankar) were played. The plants grew large and healthy, with the plants actually growing towards the radio for each of these three forms of music, just like they bend towards sunlight. In a book I have, Secrets from the lives of Trees, I read that “At a recent symposium in Montpellier, France, entitled the International Colloquium on the Tree, a South African zoologist spoke of his research with an acacia tree. When munched on by insects, it issued a warning to other trees of the attack. The scientist, Wouter van Hoven, noted that trees within fifty yards responded to the message. In less than fifteen minutes neighboring trees increased the level of tannin in their leaves, making them poisonous to the insect predators.” The current issue of the National Geographic reports that, “When drought hits, trees can suffer—a process that makes sounds. Now, scientists may have found the key to understanding these cries for help.”
I believe that the church is far too narrow in its approach to life. Basically its entire message still has that ‘heaven’ orientation, as it concentrates on God’s Secondary Word, the Scriptures, which actually are a lamp for our feet while we study God’s Primary Word. Our test does not concern Scriptures alone: our test primarily deals with our treatment of the cosmos.
I love the Scriptures and such gems as Colossians 1:15-20. Look it up. Memorize it. “For God was pleased to have all his fullness dwell in Christ, and through him reconcile to himself all things (Ta Panta).” Sphere sovereignty has its place, but not in the preaching of the good news. To confine the preaching to the Bible is separating nature from grace, fostering a dualism that is foreign to the Bible. Seminaries should educate students for all of life: the good news is that everything will be made new: seminarians need to learn both ecology and theology.
Johan Herman Bavinck has something to say about this. In Chapter Four of his The Kingdom: Speed Its Coming, (soon to be published by Eerdmans) with the telling title: Christ, the Central Focus of the Scriptures, he laments that:
It is extremely unfortunate that the concept of the Kingdom of heaven or the Kingdom of God has escaped our dogmatic reflection and is paid scant attention in our Christian life. That is the reason why we find it very difficult to read the Good News with that wonderful suspense that comes from seeing it against the backdrop of the overwhelming reality of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God has come “near” in Christ; the great Day of the Lord is about to come. The Kingdom claims the entire cosmos in all its manifestations. Wherever Jesus comes the demons flee, the fever subsides, the sea becomes calm, the storm obeys. The Kingdom of God has come near. Leprosy retreats, the blind open their eyes in utter amazement, the lame start to leap in spontaneous enthusiasm, the dead rise from their graves. Indeed, the Kingdom of God is near. All those shattering, destructive, depressing and disruptive forces now dominating the universe flee away in despair and anguish as soon as the King appears. All those miracle stories recorded in the Gospels, which we in our thoughts and our daily lives find difficult to explain and which we can only deal with if we somehow spiritualize them, are clearly meant in the Gospels to manifest the awesome powers of the Messiah in his kingdom. As such they serve as proof that God will not surrender this terrible world to the powers of decay at work in it, but that the Great Day has started in which he himself will gather up his world into a harmonious symphony of adoration. Christ’s miracles gather the Kingdom under a cosmic umbrella: the Kingdom is the restoration of the Urzeit; it is the introduction of the eventual “renewal” (Matt. 19:28).
I believe Dr. Bavinck is correct. The church must have a much more integrated approach to ‘life’, because the way we go about our daily affairs is a dry-run, is the ‘testing ground for eternity’ and determines whether we will be part of the glorious kingdom to come, a kingdom where also all animals and all plants find their perfect place.
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Next week an examination of the present economic situation.