God’s Laws and Policies in a Fallen World – God and Animal Life

Peter Barnes | Gen.9:3-6; Prov.12:10; Isa.11:6-9

SERMON  NOTES
GOD AND ANIMAL LIFE
Gen.9:3-6; Prov.12:10; Isa.11:6-9

– there is a repeated claim today that human beings and animals are of equal worth.

1. We are created in God’s image; animals are not.

– Gen.1:27-28. Even after the Fall, that is true – Gen.9:1-6. If you treat animals like humans, you will treat humans like animals. Hence we have the views of Peter Singer

– Luke 12:6-7, 24.

2. We are to be kind to animals.

– Prov.12:10. Francis Schaeffer: ‘If I love the Lover, I love what the Lover has made.’

– hence Ex.20:8-11; Deut.22:1-4, 6-7; 25:4; Ps.104:14; Luke 12:6-7, 24; Jonah 4:11.

3. There will be animals in the new heaven and new earth.

– Isaiah 11:6-9. Some say this is the millennium, but it is surely the new heaven and the new earth.

– John Wesley probably overdoes this in sermon 60:

The whole brute creation will then, undoubtedly, be restored, not only to the vigour, strength, and swiftness, which they had at their creation, but to a far higher degree of each than they ever enjoyed. This will be restored, not only to that measure of understanding which they had in paradise, but to a degree of it as much higher than that, as the understanding of an elephant is beyond that of a worm.

– there is a creation-wide hope in the work of Christ – Rom.8:19-23.