Animal Rights

The readings we had earlier were from the book of Job, but let's go back there to the twelfth chapter and to the seventh verse. The twelfth chapter of Job and to the seventh verse, and then we'll proceed to the New Testament, to the book of Romans and the eighth chapter. Sometimes, in handling a subject that speaks not just directly of our spiritual salvation but of our consequent responsibility as citizens in this world, one feels a resistance because this is a further facet of the teachings of Scripture, perhaps not always fully comprehended.

Maybe sometimes, as a result, we are disobedient towards the way in which God intends us to live in our world. So it's to try to bring something of a corrective and to stimulate your thinking as well as to recognize that every good and perfect gift, as we've already been acknowledging as we sang the doxology, comes from the Lord. And part of those good gifts is the grace of living and the grace of just enjoying the world in which God has placed us.

So here the inspired writer says in the twelfth chapter of Job and the seventh verse, But ask the animals, and they will teach you. Or the birds of the air, and they will tell you. Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you.

Or let the fish of the sea inform you, which of all these does not know that the hand of the Lord has done this. In his hand is the life of every creature, and the breath of all mankind. Now we go to Romans, and the passage where the Apostle Paul is speaking of the future glory for God is not through with this world, neither at the end of time will He chuck this world away into an abyss like a child might throw away its rattle when it's through.

Rather, the Bible declares that God has some ultimate purpose for this world, for this universe, and indeed for the countless universes which He has created, of which we know so very little. Verse eighteen, I consider that our present sufferings are not worth comparing with the glory that will be revealed in us, the creation. He's not here talking about men and women.

He's talking about the world, the inanimate world. He's talking about the world of beasts, the world of vegetation. The creation waits in eager expectation for the sons of God to be revealed, for the creation was subject to frustration.

That refers to the fall of man. Not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it in hope, and this is mind-blowing, that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God. We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time.

It was a little while ago on a BBC phone-in program that I got asked the question, does the Bible have anything to say about animals? And the response that I gave seemed to promote even further curiosity on the part of the producer who was putting the questions. I went on to say that there are something like three thousand verses in the Bible that refer to animals. And if you were to put those alongside the rest of the biblical contents, then obviously they occupy a fairly generous slice of this holy book.

Now evangelicals, which is a term embracing the majority of us here, believe the Bible to be the Word of God. That means to say, therefore, that anything that it teaches has importance, on anything that it touches has interest. And in these days, when quite a lot is being said about so-called animal rights, and there is a large and vocal lobby that are making the plight, as they see them, of animals known, it is right for Christian people not necessarily to go along with the lobby, but at least to ask what does the Bible teach, and to what degree are we twentieth-century Christian people living by its precepts? The so-called animal rights movement got airborne in the 1980s, or that is the claim.

Everything else allegedly had been liberated. Ladies have the vote. But the hastily drawn conclusion is put that there is no longer any slavery in our world.

Apartheid has crumbled, at least in southern Africa. Let's then go and liberate the animals. The fact, historically, is that interest, or more recent interest in animals, dates back not to the 1980s, but to the 1820s, when one saw the formation of the then-called Society of Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, which was brought about under the inspiration of a man called Arthur Broome, an Anglican clergyman, who had been very much influenced by the writings of Dr. Humphrey Primat, who was a preacher in the previous century, that is in the 18th century, and wrote an outstanding book, which in my view has never been surpassed, entitled in the lengthy way that books were titled in those days, The Duty of Mercy and the Sin of Cruelty to Brute Animals.

Primat was almost laughed out of court, but there were some sensitive people who went along with what he was saying, because he was appealing to the Old Testament and to the New Testament to sustain the principle that human beings like ourselves have responsibilities to, duties to, the creatures with whom we share this world. Now going back to the BBC and their question, it stimulated me to do some more reading, of course within Scripture itself, but not only so, to see just what the church has been saying on this issue, and to try to work out its gospel implications. For as I understand it, when a man or a woman is saved, they are bound not only for eternity, but they are equipped to be better citizens, sensitive people, salt-savoring civilization, light-bringing illumination.

And I discovered that there were men who lived in the 18th and 19th century, besides those who I have quoted, and some of the great Puritan preachers, who also touched on this subject, and some spoke on it with great feeling. Let's go back to last century and to my favorite preacher, Charles Haddon Spurgeon. On one occasion, he preached an address in that remarkable building constructed to house the thousands of people who came to hear him, on the subject of the little dogs, as he called it, and spoke of man's responsibility under God to the treatment of animals.

And then he followed that up with another sermon, which he called In the Hayfield, and it was an exposition of Psalm 104 and verse 14, which we have just read, at least we did at the beginning of the service, some verses from it. And he went on to say this, as he had come on his carriage, his horse-drawn carriage, into the center of London and seen sights which had distressed him. How often the cattle are oppressed by man.

I am sure it is painful to see them driven through these streets, bruised and faint, with their poor tongues hanging out of their thirsty mouths. I wish the authorities would provide suitable drinking troughs for them, for at present their sufferings are a disgrace to our city. It is frequently so sickening a sight to see these poor, tortured cattle in our thoroughfares, that it makes one long to fly from, and here he quotes the poet, brutality, where sights of cruel men and maddened beasts might never reach us more.

And yet he goes on, and Spurgeon was not a sentimentalist to say, nonetheless, God looks down upon these cattle. He is not uninvolved with their pain, with their suffering. When you move into the first part of the Bible, obviously you come across the story of creation.

And if it is a choice between believing that the world came about as an evolutionary fluke, as the result of some big bang, light years ago, and a process of evolution that took millennia to be realized, then give me Genesis at any time. The Bible speaks of God creating man. The Bible speaks of God creating animals.

The first chapter of the Bible, six times the words are invoked, and God saw that it was good. On the fifth day, he made the beasts. On the sixth day, he made man.

And after both creative phenomena have been realized, he says he is pleased with the result. Now, it's interesting, isn't it, that when you read in Genesis about the creation of animals, you discover that there is a close correspondence between the act of their coming into being and yours and mine. God speaks to the earth, and from the earth the animals are formed.

And then in a somewhat distinctive and important way, he says, now let us, for there is plurality within God, let us make man in our own image. And when you go to the second chapter of the book of Genesis, you discover that God takes from the ground some soil, possibly red soil. For the Hebrew word for red, at least if you trace the word back historically, is something like adam.

And out of the soil he brings a ruddy-faced man, Adam. So closely corresponding with the beasts, made from the earth, breathed into Adam is the spirit of life, as was also breathed into the animals. There is no easy distinction between animals and humans in terms of referring to one as having souls and the other as not having souls.

The Bible speaks about spirit in both cases. There is such a close affinity in the biblical description of the creation of man and the creation of animals that James Houston, the principal of Regents College in Canada, who is an evangelical theologian of great standing, dares to suggest that there is a way in which the Bible out-Darwins Darwin. It shows that there is a closeness.

And you see that, of course, you see it in terms of physiology. Otherwise, why would doctors experiment on animals or whatever you may think about animal experimentation? The reason is there is a close correspondence. Blood, nerve, tissue.

And unless you're so dumb of mind you can't read what the animals are saying, there is also the capacity, the propensity for pain on the part of both the animal kingdom as well as the human. There is a continuity. There is a similarity.

But, and this is where I run headlong into difficulty with animal rights philosophers, and the reason why I'm preaching this sermon incidentally is because the evangelical church is increasingly criticized and biblical theology is increasingly criticized by this ever-growing influential lobby that somehow or other the church, somehow or other the Bible is against animals. And the reason why there is such animal suffering in our world, according to some secularist philosophers, is because of the cavalier way in which the Bible touches on the subject of animals. But I want to argue that those secularists could not be more wrong.

There is a biblical basis that is far stronger than any philosophical presupposition on which our treatment of one another and our treatment of the animal kingdom should pivot. There are these great similarities between a man and between a beast. A man was given charge by God over the animals, the charge of dominion.

But it is a charge of stewardship. But I go too quickly. And not only is there a similarity that is defined in the Bible between the animal and man, there is also a wide dissimilarity.

And it is found not so much in the concept of God breathing the breath of life into man, for He did that with the animals. But when God said, let us make man, He said we will make him in our image, in the imago dei, we will grant to him a reasoning faculty. We will grant to him an ability to cogitate and to formulate and in a limited fashion also to create, so he will be able to produce his symphonies.

He will be able to harness the beauty of a landscape and place it on a piece of canvas. All these things man, and I use the word generically incorporating obviously therefore women, can do. Man is made in the image of God.

And as a result, he does not have the right to look upon the animals as, for example, the slave masters in Egypt looked upon those poor Hebrews who were under bondage. That is not the paradigm. That is not the permission that is granted.

You see something of the example of what man should be. You see it in its excellence when our Lord Jesus Christ came on us. He is the Lord.

He is the Master. But when he's dealing with the world into which God sends him, he does so on the basis of servanthood and stewardship. He washes the feet of his disciples.

He is the one who has all rights and probably arguably the only person who ever came into the world who could say he had rights. And yet in the interest of others, he waived his rights. The Lord of creation.

For that is who Jesus is. Not so-called Jesus in the Old Testament, but nonetheless he is present. God Father, God Son, God the Holy Spirit, the second person of the Trinity, the creative agency who brings about this world in its pristine glory and beauty and says it is good.

Have you ever noticed my friends, those of you who are familiar with the New Testament, that when the blessed Christ commenced his earthly ministry, his public ministry, he spent 40 days in the wilderness. Not so. He'd been baptized by John.

John didn't want to baptize him, but nonetheless he submitted to the superior authority of Jesus. And Jesus goes off into the wilderness. And if you read Mark's Gospel carefully, you'll find directly after the baptismal account, it says that he was with the wild animals for 40 days.

You would not want to be in the company of wild animals for four minutes, let alone 40 days. Why not? Because since the beginning of creation and the advent of our Lord into this world, something terrible happened. The original harmony was disturbed and there is discord.

And nature, as the poet tells us, is red in tooth and claw. Man feasts on animals and animals upon animals. But it was not like that in the beginning.

Genesis makes it very clear that when God created the animals, he gave them the plants to eat. They were not carnivorous. When God created man, it was exactly the same mandate that was given him.

As far as his menu is concerned. But don't you see, when Jesus comes to this world, he comes if you like, and not just if you like. The Bible tells you this in Corinthians.

He comes as a second Adam, or if you prefer more accurately, the last Adam. He's not contaminated by sin. There is nothing about him that is to be feared as far as the animals are concerned and vice versa.

They have no, he has no need to fear them. You see, what you get at the beginning of Mark's gospel is, if you like, the return to what things were in relationships between the animals and Adam right at the very beginning. Isn't it interesting that in Luke's gospel, when our beloved Lord is preparing for the final entry into Jerusalem, he sends his disciples ahead.

They are to book a room. The room is going to be for the Passover. And he wants to indicate how they are to know what room to book.

And he says, you'll go down a certain road and there will be two animals. A man will come to you and book the room through the man and bring the animals. And if the man says to me, what are you doing with those animals? You tell him, the Lord has need of him.

And we're told of those animals that they had never been broken in. Yet Jesus will ride on one of those animals as he enters into Jerusalem. I've only once, and I'm not going through the illustration again, in the last few years ridden an animal.

It was broken in, but it still declared hostility towards me. But our Lord Jesus is at home, the Lord of creation. And as you move back into the book of Genesis, you find that man sins against God.

And as a result of that sin, the world which has been formed loses something of its beauty and its symmetry. Adam, you'll go to the soil and you'll work at it. And by the sweat of your brow, you'll make your living.

And it becomes fairly obvious as you read on into Genesis, that affected by the fall, as I've already highlighted, is the relationship between the animals and man. But man is still given. For the Bible tells us this, not just in Genesis 2, but also in Genesis 8 and 9, when Noah, you remember, comes out from the ark, the ark having housed animals as well as that family after the deluge.

Man still has a right, a dominion, a stewardship, given to him by God over the world, over the animal world, which God brought into being. And it's interesting, not so in the first verse of the eighth chapter of Genesis, you read that God remembered Noah and all the wild animals and the livestock that were with him in the ark. And he sent a wind over the earth and so on and so forth.

And when you read about the rainbow and the promise of God, not once again would he flood the earth. You find that the animals are included in that particular benefit. Verse 8, chapter 9, I now establish my covenant with you and with your descendants after you and with every living creature that was with you, the birds, the livestock, and all the wild animals that came out of the ark.

Now, when you continue to read on in Genesis, you find that this indication of God's interest in the animal world will peak from time to time. It will occur in the most remarkable settings. If the promise that God gave to Noah you understand in terms of a covenant, then here is another covenant.

But it's no longer Noah, it's Moses that features. At least, Moses is the one who will take the principles of the covenant and share them with the Hebrews. I'm referring to the giving of the Ten Commandments.

In the fifth chapter of Deuteronomy and in the twelfth verse, reference is made to the Sabbath day. Why is the Sabbath so precious? Well, if you've done six days' work, you deserve one off, but not just you. Verse 13, six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath to you.

On it you will not work nor your family, nor your ox, your donkey, or any of your animals, nor the alien within your gates, so that your manservant and your maidservant may rest as you do. Not just a throwaway line. There aren't actually throwaway lines in Scripture.

But this cannot be the case because on so many an occasion, you will find in the first five books of the Bible, reference made to God's concern for the well-being of animals. Not in the sense that they are equal with man, for as I have indicated, God has made man in his image. But time and time again, God will say to man, because of who you are, this is how you are to behave.

So, when you move further on in the book of Deuteronomy, and you come to the 22nd chapter and the 25th chapter, I think it is, then once more you will get little lines of instruction given to man in terms of how to tend for his animals. The fourth verse of the 25th chapter, do not muzzle an ox, while it is treading out the grain. The implication there being that if the ox is used for you and for your benefit, then as he labours, he has a right to the fruit of your labour.

Which gives you some very sharp understandings as to why it is right for Christians to protest. When an animal is thoughtlessly and with no sense of responsibility to man's stewardship obligations, exploited. Did you ever pinch eggs when you were a boy or a tomgirl? You did? Well, the Bible has got a thing to say to you about that.

You're not going to feel too uncomfortable. Let's go to the 22nd chapter of the book of Deuteronomy. And within this chapter, there are a number of references to how we are or how the ancient Hebrews were to treat their animals.

But we'll take this one because, well, time is not on my side and you can do the research yourself. Verse six, if you come across a bird's nest beside the road, either in a tree or on the ground, and the mother is sitting on the young or on the eggs, do not take the mother with the young. You may take the young, but be sure to let the mother go.

It's a tragedy enough at one level for the nest to have collapsed and fallen onto the ground, for that seems to have been the circumstance. Tragic enough for the loss of the young, but not a double, not a triple tragedy. No, you see, the important thing, however, my friend there is not just to show you, to demonstrate that there is an ethic in terms of the way we are to approach our treatment of animals.

But look at the rider. Look at what is placed alongside that instruction in terms of the man, the woman who lives by it. Now, we're only dealing with an incident, aren't we? I mean, this isn't a big issue or wouldn't seem to be a thing.

So this is just an ordinary common garden bird. You've got tens of thousands of them in Palestine, equivalent to the hundreds of thousands of sparrows that you've got here in the United Kingdom. If you obey this small instruction, it will go well with you and you may have a long life.

Do you remember the promise, or rather the commandment in Deuteronomy 5 that has to deal with honoring your parents? Why do you honor your father and your mother? Well, because God says so. But also, there's a rider attached. If you honor your father, if you honor your mother, it will go well with you, says the Bible.

All the days of your life, it is the one commandment with promise. And exactly the same promise as is twin to that commandment is actually put in by Moses when he is making reference to the treatment of such an insignificant thing as a bird. And now, what you make of this is entirely up to you.

What my objective is this evening is just to show you, and I really am honestly just taking a few samples. I couldn't take all the 3,000, obviously, to stir you up into coming to grips with what the Bible, perchance, is teaching you. Maybe a corrective in your own understanding of this subject.

You see, there is in the Old Testament what I would say, and certainly in the teaching of Moses in the first five chapters, and in the first five books, a presumed behavior ethic. Now, you get this with Jesus. You see, some of the animal rights philosophers, they will say of Jesus Christ that he had no concerns whatsoever for animals.

They take this particular miracle that he did, the exorcism of the demoniac of Gadara, and the way that the demons affected the pigs and the swine rushed over the precipice and they were drowned. And I think that that admittedly very difficult action in some things, that in some ways, if you take it out of its context, and that that almost is the bottom line for Jesus. And it's not.

They completely misunderstand that, and they don't read. Time and time and time again in the ministry of Jesus Christ, he makes reference to animals. Forty times to sheep, several times to donkeys, on a number of occasion to oxen.

He said, look, when he's setting up the parable of the lost sheep, which of you, which of you who has 100 sheep and one goes astray, which of you will not go after that sheep? He assumes, you see, the reaction. Of course we would go after sheep. On another occasion, he's more daring.

Here's a donkey. It falls into a ditch. It's in great difficulty.

I mean, it's the same illustration as Moses gives in the first five books of the Bible. Now here is this donkey. He's in a ditch.

And what's more, says Jesus, thickening the plot. It's the Sabbath. What do you do? Well, you don't check the legislation about working on the Sabbath.

You know that behind the legislation, there is the spirit of the creator. If the animal is in difficulty, you break the Sabbath and you release the animal. Now, this is the teaching of Jesus.

It's a consistent teaching. It's a consistent ethic throughout the whole of the Old Testament and the New Testament. All right, you see.

But you're skating over the positives. There are some negatives. Yes, indeed, there are.

I said, I think right at the very beginning, I don't understand all this. I don't understand what God is finally going to do with this world. But reason tells me my knowledge of God, of his creative activity, of the way that he brings salvation into being through Jesus Christ, tells me he's a God of order.

There are strands in the Bible that are loose that I cannot tie up. I wish I could. I would be dishonoring you as a congregation, trusting me as a preacher, if I were to tell you I got answers when I have no answers.

There are areas where there is animal cruelty, shocking cruelty. Samson ties the tails of foxes, lights them, and sends them into the fields of the Philistines. I can think of nothing more bestial.

Yet the Bible did not approve, incidentally, of the action. There are times when David allowed his horses to be hamstrung. And yet it seems to me that Jacob, of all men, gives the sort of bottom line, the corrective.

Because when he has his sons before him, and Jacob is on his deathbed, two of his sons come in front of him. And to one, he says, I would not want to be in your company for eternity, because of your cruelty to men and to animals. Solomon will tell you that the righteous man is a man who is kind to his animals.

All right. Let's try to sharpen this all up and bring it to some form of conclusion. And once again, I indicate I have so much material, that there is no way that I can trim it into some sort of clear-cut pattern this evening.

If what you say is right, then does it mean that we cannot use animals? And the answer to that question is that you can use animals within the parameters that God allows you from His Word. You cannot allow animals to be abused. You cannot allow, as a Christian without protesting, a situation where the natural habits, the natural tendencies of animals are prevented through cruelty and simply on the grounds of profit.

When Jesus was looking over Jerusalem, He uses the imagery of a hen. He said, Oh, Jerusalem, Jerusalem, how oft would I have gathered you under my wings as a hen gathers her chicks. He could hardly have said that if he'd gone to a farm.

Where they have battery hens. You know, when you get something as hard-nosed as the Economist magazine bringing out an address in its editorial that makes mine tame into almost a neutral offering by way of comparison. Then it makes you stop and think.

Are there areas in our farming where we have gone beyond what Christian people should tolerate? This is why I protest. When animals are plucked from our hills at the back of Worthing and instead of being humanely slaughtered, are packed into lorries and then into ships or boats, taken across the continent, to the continent where all legislation, obviously in the United Kingdom, has no effect whatsoever. Then I think it is mealy-mouthed of our government officials to do a Pontius Pilate and wash their hands of responsibility.

There is no way from the Old or the New Testament that you can bring in a demonstration that Christian people, though on other grounds they may reach this conclusion, should be vegetarian. The Old Testament, they ate the animals and you have the picture of our Lord in the New Testament multiplying fish and presumably eating the fish. That's what you've got on the seashore of Galilee when our Lord has been resurrected and has a further appointment with his disciples.

So what should be the controlling maxim? Let me suggest this to you. Do you ever ask any questions about how the meat that you bought came to be in the butchers, the sort of life that that animal had? Do you ask that? And if you knew that this was as a result of tremendous cruelty, would you stop eating or ensure that your source of supply had reasonable guarantees that the product was without cruelty? Or another one. You ladies or men for that matter, who use perfume or aftershave, is it really legitimate that that should have been tested on the eye of a rabbit and the rabbit's eye dissolves sometimes in the intensity of the solution? Can you say that that is stewardship responsibility? Of course you can't.

And there are other options. All that I'm asking for is for Christian people to think, to ask, to ask the questions and to react and to be corrected within the light of the general compass of the teaching of the Word of God. Because we have a responsibility.

Animals are not in the image of God. We are in the image of God. Therefore, our basis in terms of our behavior towards one another and towards animals has an even firmer foundation than that of the secularist animal philosophers, animal rights philosophers.

I have not had the opportunity to touch on the subject of animal pain. It is one of the greatest philosophical problems that I've ever tried to confront and again, I have no answer. Apart from this.

The Bible teaches us that pain is either redemptive or punitive. Redemptive pain illustrated by our beloved Lord on the cross of Calvary when he died for your sins and for mine. The only guarantee of salvation that you have and this is the most important question for you to resolve is, have you benefited by his death? But there is punitive pain as a result of people praying fast and loose with the laws of God.

And sometimes as for no apparent reason. When it happens with no apparent reason and the person is a believer, then you don't have a long-term difficulty because you know that there is immortality. One day you will be raised in the power of a life that is like that of our Lord Jesus and that the pain and the suffering this side of eternity will be counterbalanced.

But what about animals? Can you argue from scripture animal immortality? No. But then you cannot disprove it from scripture. The whole of creation groaning as a result of its pain.

John Wesley came to the conclusion in that respect that the Bible is more positive than negative in this area. It's an open question. But what is not an open question is that in the eternal age there will be animals.

The lion and the lamb will lie down together. Isaiah 8 and 11 makes it very plain. So does the symbolic language of the book of Revelation.

John Calvin, Martin Luther, Martin Lloyd-Jones, Spurgeon, Top Lady. Do you want me to continue? All these men who acknowledge this fact. You see what I'm bringing to you this evening, though it may be fresh in your thinking, in your reasoning, it is not new in terms of what the Christian church at its best has been teaching.

So I bring to you again the challenge. Are you living this side of eternity at the level of citizen responsibility that God gave Adam in the first instance when he said that he was steward of creation? How are you doing with your stewardship? And even more importantly, do you recognize the lordship of Christ of your life? Because the one should lead to the other. Let's pray.

Father, we come before your throne. Perhaps our minds stimulated in some degree, some questions still needing answers, but we thank you for your intimate dealings with our world. We praise you that you are a God who sees and who responds to pain, human pain or animal pain.

Whatever you have allowed, whatever you've decreed, we believe that the final chapter of the book is still to be written. And when you write it, the problems that exist now will be fully resolved. So help us to walk as those who confess Jesus as Lord and to live as those who are men and women of compassion, bearing in mind that you said, blessed are the merciful for they shall receive.

Mercy. Amen. Good night.

God bless. Thank you for your patience. Can we get next week?