Animals appear to be part of a great parable of earth. They belong even more to earth than mankind. They live close to the land with modest nests, dens and adaptations to their environments. They have rather simple diets, often living off the lives of other animals with a natural nutrition they seem to discover. They usually care for their young, appear to make choices in mating for the most developed species of vertebrates, even creating families among some, especially with mothers and offspring relating in the first year or so of a newborn. They manage well in the matter of giving birth and finding ways of survival. Without the care and protection of human beings the animals are in perpetual threat of other animals in the eat-and-be-eaten context that perpetuates their kinds, found in the conditions of weather and habitat that call on vigilance and search which drives them. In the lesson of parable, animals are to us as we are to God. As mankind deals with virtue and evil, depending upon a god followed, so the animals are subjected to good and evil related to that god that preys upon them – as cutting off tusks and leaving animals to perish, or reducing habitat so to destroy species. Others appreciate the rights of animals in nature and seek to protect them from human violence. Mankind too chooses the Elohim (god) to serve, and some of the persons of the human race choose to follow God in Jesus Christ. For the Christian, as Albert Schweitzer argued, there is a reverence for life. So it is that insightful and caring persons attempt to maintain earth’s life species.
As meaningful and perceptive as this is in human understanding it is not to be confused with the special life of the physical animal identified as mankind. In that physical being there is a factor that separates the human being from all animals of earth – the image of God. No earthling knows what that means in its entirety. We know enough to act upon it and to interpret in nature to which that image relates. Scripture notes that the earth/heaven we know will pass away and the only divine residue left will be those in life bearing the image of God. For those acceptable to God there will be one destination, and for those who have not catered to that image there is another. We have no authoritative literature that suggests anything else in nature will be preserved. Death even in the course of present life implies death ultimately to what we know of earth. Ultimately that which supports life will run down, will be damaged, and will fail for the maintenance of life. Both those who believe only in nature and those who believe in God, as defined in Scripture, believe in a final end of nature as we know it. The rescue of mankind through the redemptive process of God through Jesus Christ is the only affirmative residue of earth as we understand the future.
In frank terms of human beings, there is nothing else to turn to but to the literature relating to the future either for rescue or nothingness. In the terms of rescue there is nothing that holds together as fully as the story of Christian redemption with the free offering of rescue, and the freedom of mankind to accept or reject the offer. There is nothing more that is available that is more fittingly related to a logical theology than Christianity. The other promising views are too ephemeral. Christianity seems remote to many persons, but it is closer than any other to what we can interpret through revelation to satisfaction, and the sense of reality we like to follow. The distance between physical and spiritual is wide, but bridgeable if we can believe in the love and mercy of God to provide what we cannot, and for us to provide what the wisdom of faith asks of us in the story of some righteous (truthful) persons. Since the issues of earth were so well recited even before those issues appeared, we may assume that the unseen/unfelt issues of divine context may be accepted and sifted out by a loving and merciful God – who remembers that we are emerged from the miracles of God in the treatment of dust. That treatment required some factor from God that gave it self-conscious life that would when fully developed be greater than the life of angels and akin to the life of God. Our proofs are found in life, even if in its mysteries not explained by a big bang. As this is being written there is a project projecting a trip to Mars with the understanding that the astronaut will die before he or she would be able to return to earth. That suggests we may need a revised meaning of mankind. *Mark W. Lee, Sr. — 2016, 2020