ANIMAL
REDEMPTION
By
D. M. PANTON,
M. A.
A
rare and startling truth out of Scripture can rise
great difficulties in our minds, but it always solves far greater
difficulties
than it creates. Such
is the problem of
the animal world with its Scripture solution. John
Stewart Mill,
painfully forecasting the Gnosticism that will come at the end, said; "The facts of the universe suggest,
not so much the idea of a beneficent and all-wise Creator as that of a
demiurge
dealing with an intractable material, over which he has not acquired
complete
mastery." This is a blasphemous
solution to a very real
problem that imperatively needs solving - namely, the undeserved,
unavoidable,
unrequited sufferings, often agonies, of the animal creation; a problem
which
has as its solution - whatever difficulties may attach to that solution
- one
of the most golden utterances in the whole Book of God. "The CREATION itself
also SHALL BE DELIVERED from the bondage of corruption INTO THE
THE
CREATURE
It
is first of all of critical importance to observe that Paul carefully
distinguishes throughout this passage between the 'creation'
or 'creature'
*
and the redeemed of humanity:
"the earnest expectation of the creation
waiteth for
the revealing of the sons of God"
(Romans 8: 19):
that is, all the world that
is not man - the animal and vegetable creation - waits
for the
Advent, when the sons of God will appear with Christ.
Paul, in an
earlier chapter, describes the animals as the 'creation',
or creature.
Men, he says, after making
images of corruptible man, and of "birds, and fourfooted
beasts,
and creeping things, worshipped THE
CREATURE rather than the
Creator" (Romans
1: 23).
In the words of Dean Alford: "The 'creation' is all this world
except man; all animate and inanimate nature as distinguished from
mankind."
[* 'Creation'
rather than 'creature',
because it includes the vegetable world.]
THE CURSE
Now
arises the great
fundamental moral fact on which the
action of God is based. "For"
- this is the reason why God acts as He does - "the
creation was subjected to vanity" - to distress, disease,
death,
when the Curse fell upon it - "NOT
OF ITS OWN WILL"
- not consciously, nor wilfully, like Adam and Eve: the snake, and all
other
animals in it, were involved in the Fall, but without guilt - "but through him who subjected it in hope" - for in the very
breath with which He cursed
the Serpent the Most High revealed the Woman's Seed. Solomon
vividly associates man and beast in the fall. "For that which befalleth the sons of man
befalleth the
beasts: as the one dieth,
so dieth
the other: for all is vanity [to which the
creation was subjected]:
all turn to dust again"
(Ecclesiastes 3: 19).
And exactly as
the mouth of a morally unconscious snake was used by Satan, so the
animal
creation, at least in sections, innocently fell under Hell's
grip. "I have given
you authority to tread on serpents and scorpions,
and over all THE POWER OF THE ENEMY" (Luke 10: 19).
SIN
Now
the coming removal of the Curse involves, backward, a very startling
revelation. The difficulty is expressed by the poet William
Blake:-
Tiger,
tiger, burning bright
In
the forests of the night,
Did
He who made the lamb make thee?
A
priceless photograph of the future answers. In the Lord's [Millennial]
Reign
on [this
cursed]
earth the animals are thus pictured: "The
wolf
shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid;
and the
calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child
shall lead
them" (Isaiah
11: 6).* The
conclusion is overwhelming. The ferocity of savage
animals - such
as the acme of horror in the tearing of Christians to pieces by lions
in the
Colosseum - since it is totally removed with the lifted Curse IN
THE
MILLENNIUM, must have been inflicted by the Fall
which produced the
Curse. This is what we should have supposed. The
Curse fell, first on
the animals, then on the soil: if therefore "Christ
redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us"
(Galations 3: 13), the Curse must
be entirely revoked
wherever it fell, even on the vegetable world. Our
Lord, crowned with thorns, was crowned with the Curse; and
therefore He destroyed the thorns when He expiated the Curse.
And
this is exactly what we find; for "instead
of
the thorn shall
come up the fir tree, and instead
of the brier shall come up the myrtle tree; and it shall be
to the Lord for
an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off" (Isaiah 55: 13) - that
is, no curse will ever fall
again, either on the old earth or on the new.
[* Not all
snakes are poisonous. In the
DELIVERANCE
So
therefore we confront the deliverance of the whole creation.
As Professor
J. R. Thomson well puts it: "If
Nature has,
without consent on her part, been made the painful illustration of
moral and
spiritual truth; then we may expect a
just Governor like God to give Nature
compensation, and allow her to share the glorious liberty of His
children."
So Paul says:
"The creation was subjected to
vanity" - it fell:
it incurred both spiritual and physical bondage - "not willingly" - the
serpent did not wilfully harbour Satan,
nor did the ground vex men with thorns and thistles of its own accord:
but God
laid on them the burden "in hope"
- a
hope, with God, is a certainty - "that the
creation itself also"
- and not only men - "shall be delivered
from the bondage of
corruption into the liberty of the glory of the children of God."
That is, the unconsciousness which made the animal creation share in
the Curse
is the very unconsciousness (as with infants) which makes them share in
the redemption
of
RESURRECTION
Now
we behold the radical nature of the redemption. "The creation itself also shall be
delivered from THE
BONDAGE OF CORRUPTION". If 'the
bondage of corruption' were merely the liability
to corrupt, and
so only the animals on whom that Day dawns are made deathless, the
moral
problem would remain unsolved, and the animal generations that suffered
all the
worst pangs suffered them for naught; on the contrary, as the phrase
means, it
is the bondage of the grave; the 'bondage'
is the corpse, the 'liberty'
is the immortal
body out of the tomb. So therefore the redemption
of
THE
It
is amazing that this golden truth has not been more widely grasped in
view of
the fact that it was embedded in a type simply gigantic. "The ark, wherein few, that is, eight
souls, were saved through
water; which is also AFTER A TRUE LIKENESS"
- that is, an
exact and designed type - "doth
now save you, even
baptism" (1Peter
3: 20).
That is, the
[*No sooner have Noah's six centuries
lapsed - symbolizing our six millenniums culmination in the 'flood' of wrath (Daniel 9:
26) - than all wrath-flood has died off the earth on the
seventh or sabbatic
millennium (Hebrews 4:
9): "in the six
hundred and first year, in
the first month, the first day of the month" (Genesis 8: 13).
So it is the day if the
Resurrection - the 17th of Nisan - when the Ark touches Ararat.]
PRESENT
TRAVAIL
So therefore
all that we are experiencing and are watching is the
travail before the birth of the new world. "For we
know that the whole creation groaneth
and travaileth in pain
together until now."
It is a picture extraordinarily illuminating. The earth,
containing the
dead [their
bodies in the grave; their souls
in Hades],
labours in travail, even as the Lord Himself was "the
first born of the dead"
(Revelation
1: 5): so the travail sharpens
as
the birth draws nearer, and of the Great
Tribulation our Lord says, "These
are the beginnings
of birth-pangs"
(Matthew
24: 8). Joel
has depicted the
deepening crisis culminating in the Tribulation. "The day of the Lord is at hand, and as
destruction from the
Almighty shall it come. How do the beasts groan! the
herds of cattle are perplexed, because they have no pasture; yea, the
flocks of
sheep are made desolate. O Lord, to thee do I cry: for the
fire hath
devoured the pastures of the wilderness, and the flame hath
burned all the trees of the field. Yea, the beasts of the
field pant unto
thee; for the water brooks are dried up, and the fire hath devoured the
pastures of the wilderness" (Joel 1: 15).
So in a moment a new world is born. As Isaiah
says ; "Like as a woman with child, so have we
been before thee, O
Lord. Awake
and sing, ye that dwell in the dust, for the earth
shall cast forth the
dead" (Isaiah
26: 17).
The birth is accomplished.
THE NEW [restored]* WORLD
[* It is not ‘a new heaven and new earth’
(Rev. 21: 1),
but this cursed world restored
after the ‘Great White Throne’
judgment, when the
Sea, Death, and Hades give up all
of the remaining dead. Rev. 21: 13.]
The
final vision is a final confirmation. God has always had
before Him the creation He intends to redeem,
in
the person of four Living Beings - living creatures,
therefore not
symbols - for ever before the Throne. "The
first creature was like a lion,
and the second creature
like a calf, and the third creature had
a face as of a man
and the fourth creature was like a flying eagle"
(Revelation 4: 7).
It is the animal creation,
including man, kept forever before the face of God.
Surely this
is conclusive. And so all
closes with the Hallelujah
Chorus of Creation. "And
every created thing which is in the heaven,
and on the earth, and under the earth, and on the sea, and all things
that are
in them, heard I saying, Unto
him that sitteth on
the throne, and unto the Lamb, be the blessing, and the honour and the
glory,
and the dominion, for ever and ever. And the four living creatures
said, Amen"
(Revelation 6: 13).
-------
BISHOP
ELLICOTT ON THE DESTINY
OF THE CREATURE
Irenaeus and the
Greek Fathers were right in giving the term 'creation' (Rom. 8: 21)
its widest application, and in referring it to all creation, animate
and
inanimate, which stands in any degree of relation to man. *
[* “So Tholuck,
Reiche, Rückert, Olhsausen,
Fritzche, De Wette,
In
the consolatory words the point of real and startling importance is the
close
bond that connects man with the material world, especially in relation
to time.
With man's sin came at once the curse that fell upon the earth; thorn
and
thistle began to germinate the very day that Adam sinned; confusion and
discord
began at once to work amid the tendencies of created things. So
the
earnest expectation of the creature waits for no doubtful or chimerical
[unreal] future, for
no ill-defined or uncertain hour of emancipation; it waits, as the [Holy] Spirit of God here
infallibly declares, for no less a sure and certain epoch than that of
the
manifestation of the sons of God.
I
can understand the ruin of my own soul, I am forced to acknowledge its
corrupting lusts, I can feel its rending passions, I can trace out the
slow
corrosion of evil habits, the convulsive movements of sudden sins - I
can mark
all this in myself and others; but the
guiltless creatures of God's hand, what have they
done? These animals that minister to my wants, and
die unrecked of and
unheeded, whence came their strange
accumulations of sufferings? This
wide-spread plant-world, that contributes
to my food, or bears balm to my wounds, - whence
comes its often thwarted development and stinted growth, its palpable
subjection to something more than perishableness, the bondage to
something
worse than decay?
In
the very first day of his creation, man is indissolubly associated with
Nature. Not only is he to have dominion over all that liveth,
but he is
to subdue and make his own the earth he treads on. When he
falls, the
earth becomes cursed; when the deluge sweeps off his race, the
guiltless
animals perish with him; when the covenant is made with the solitary
surviving
family, the surviving creatures are especially included in its
provisions; the
foul and the cattle - every living creature of all flesh - share the
blessings
of the divine clemency. Even so it is impossible to
doubt that when
the restitution of man takes place, the restitution of the earth and
its
occupants will speedily and immediately follow. The
day of the
perdition of the wicked, as one Apostle tells us (2
Pet. 3: 7), will let loose the last lustral fires, even as
another
Apostle here represents all creation here waiting for its final
redemption and
glorification of the elect of God.
Therefore
all the animals suffer at the hands of man - all
that they suffer from
one another, all their exhibitions of wanton cruelty, their deep-seated
aversions and connatural hostilities; - all, again, that nature
suffers
from the hand of man, the poisoned vegetation round peopled cities, the
blazing
prairie, the desolated forest, - all that it suffers from the wildness
or
churlishness of the elements, - all tend to swell that mighty
cry of
suffering and travail that is now ever sounding in the ears of God
- all
serve to call forth the deep longing of the hour when the apocalyptic
vision of
the Apostle shall be a mighty and living reality. Let
us not fear
to say that the efficacy of the blood of our Lord and Master is
limitless in
its applications, that it knows no bounds in space, as it knows no
bounds in
time; and that the issues of His atonement for us, in different
measures and
degrees, extend unto all things, - that the odour of that
sweet-smelling savour
fills every court and every chamber of the universal temple of God.
-------