Today I want us to think about our relationship to animals. We are going to explore what the Bible has to say about that. It is important because we were given dominion over them and, as we are going to see, there is a responsibility that we have as children of God toward animal life on this creation. We are going to look at a couple of verses in Genesis, because this seems to be the beginning of just about everything in the Bible.
I think that part of the purpose of showing the creation in the way that God did is to show that there is something that we and the animals have in common. We could have gone on and read further, but all of us have come out of the earth. Man was created out of the earth. It very distinctly said that about the animals, Let the earth bring forth . . . its kind.
We share with them a mortality. We are earthy in that respect. They too, are earthy. However, the way that this is worded also shows that there is a difference between us and the other living creatures, and that difference was made very clear in that man was created after the God-kind. We are created in the image of God. And, in addition to that, there is no sexual orientation made in respect to animals. We, of course, know that there is a sexual orientation, but God made sure that was emphasized, male and female created He them. This will have a more importance later.
So we see three things that God establishes as being different between us and the animals: mankind is in His image, mankind is in male and female, and mankind has dominion.
But animals do have rights. We are going to look at one of them later. And though we are not going to go into it deeply, it is very clear that they have a right from God, right now (we are seeing it already established), to share this creation with us; but we have dominion over them.
This man's explanation, as I said, has much in it that is right, but it is also lacking in that he fails to show that mankind has a responsibility toward animals. That is what the dominion was given for: to carry out the responsibility. You might look upon dominion as being authority. Man was given authority over the animals, but whenever God gives authority to do something, it also carries with it a responsibility to act towards that over which he has been given authority, in the way that God Himself would act.
Within God's creation that means to act out of love, or, we might say, to act out of concern; not to use and abuse, but to act for the well-being of the governed. In this case we are talking about animals.
Please turn to Genesis 1, verse 11. If you have worked with animals, you have some understanding of the realm of midbrain responses. Within the midbrain, there is a powerful God-given resistance to killing your own kind. It comes inherently to humans as the spirit in man.
Every species, with a few exceptions, has a hardwired resistance to killing its own kind. In territorial and mating battles, when animals with antlers and horns fight one another, they head butt in a harmless fashion. I am sure it hurts but it is not lethal. But when they fight with other species, they go to the side to gut and gore. Piranhas will turn their fangs on anything but they fight one another with flicks of a tail. Rattlesnakes will bite anything but they wrestle with one another.
Almost every species has this hardwired resistance to killing its own kind. And when we humans are overwhelmed with anger and fear, we slam head-on into that midbrain resistance that generally prevents us from killing. Only sociopaths, who do not have that resistance, lack this innate violence immune system.
