You crown the year with your goodness, and your paths drip with abundance. Psalm 65:11

Extravagant fruitfulness. It is hard to find a more exuberant expression of praise for God’s abundance than the one penned by the Hebrew psalmist David:

You visit the earth and water it, you greatly enrich it; the river of God is full of water; you provide their grain, for so you have prepared it. You water its ridges abundantly, you settle its furrows; you make it soft with showers, you bless its growth. You crown the year with your goodness, and your paths drip with abundance. They drop on the pastures of the wilderness, and the little hills rejoice on every side. The pastures are clothed with flocks; the valleys also are covered with grain; they shout for joy, they also sing (Ps 65:9-13 NKJV).

The fruitfulness of the earth and all its creatures is a major theme both of the biblical creation story and the re-population of the earth after the Flood. In both instances the Creator’s mandate is that the non-human creatures should “be fruitful and multiply,” and then that people should “be fruitful and multiply.” We all have the capacity to multiply because the earth produces enough food for us all to live and thrive.

But there’s a major difference between these two major forms of “living creatures”: people have dominion over the animals. This means that animals are ultimately at our mercy. Yet if we had to feed the animals, that would be our full-time job! For this reason, of course, we are blessed in that the animals are taken care of by God. The Psalms in particular speak of the wilderness as God’s great larder where “the young lions roar after their prey, and seek their food from God” and where God gives the great sea creatures “their food in due season” (Psa. 104). Psalm 145 affirms the same: “The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food at the proper time. You open your hand and satisfy the desires of every living thing.” And God does that because He “is gracious and full of compassion,” and His “tender mercies are over all His works” (vv 8-16 NIV).

The amazing fruitfulness of the earth that provides both for us and for the creatures of the wilderness is a gift from a righteous, gracious, merciful, and loving Creator. As its stewards then, mankind has a divine mandate to preserve its capacity to be fruitful.

Sacrificial nurture. When I was about ten I came across a baby killdeer, and my instinct was to “save it” by capturing it. Being naturally endowed with long legs, the little bird made a successful run for shelter. As I was trying to lay my hands on it, my eye was distracted by another bird—a larger one flapping helplessly on the ground only a few feet away. What luck, I thought; and I quickly went off in pursuit of this new prey. After about a fifty-yard scamper, however, I called off the chase—because the “injured” bird suddenly took flight. I watched it fly without handicap over to the spot where I first saw the baby bird, which was now far from my reach. I’d been fooled by the mother killdeer, which had merely feigned injury to draw me away from her fledgling. She had risked capture and death to save her young, just as other birds commonly do—and countless other creatures. Many other examples of this sort of natural devotion continue to be a humbling inspiration to human parents and other caregivers who are often put to shame by animal devotion and self-sacrifice—such as mother birds caught in prairie fires who cover their chicks with their wings, dying so the new generation will live.

Human pre-eminence. One biblical truth that is clear throughout the Scriptures is that people are more valuable than animals to God (Matt. 10:29-31).  And we have the pre-eminent position among living creatures on earth.  This is clear from the dominion mandate in Genesis 1:26-29, the stewardship mandate in Genesis 2:15, and the David’s pronouncement about mankind’s superior position in Psalm 8

When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have set in place, what is man that you are mindful of him, the son of man that you care for him? You made him a little lower than the heavenly beings [God]and crowned him with glory and honor. You made him ruler over the works of your hands; you put everything under his feet: all flocks and herds, and the beasts of the field, the birds of the air, and the fish of the sea, all that swim the paths of the seas. O LORD, our Lord, how majestic is your name in all the earth! (vss. 3-9)

Over the past twenty years secular scientists who do not themselves acknowledge the existence of God have nonetheless confessed that unless people of faith in a Creator who does have the qualities identified by Paul in Romans 1:20 (“eternal power” and “divine nature”), their desperate calls for better care of the earth will likely fail.  A notable gathering of evangelicals and scientists occurred in January 2007: An Urgent Call to Action: Scientists and Evangelicals Unite to Protect Creation.  At this gathering there was a unified acknowledgment that mankind has the power both to protect or imperil God’s creation.  Certainly those of us who claim to worship the Creator must spend less time asserting the human rights of this God-granted position and begin tending better to its responsibilities.  A good place to begin is to acknowledge the amazing joint affirmation reached by this historic gathering:

"Angelus" by Millet

We believe that the protection of life on Earth is a profound moral imperative. It addresses without discrimination the interests of all humanity as well as the value of the non-human world. It requires a new moral awakening to a compelling demand, clearly articulated in Scripture and supported by science, that we must steward the natural world in order to preserve for ourselves and future generations a beautiful, rich, and healthful environment. For many of us, this is a religious obligation, rooted in our sense of gratitude for Creation and reverence for its Creator.

[Check out the "Creation Care For Pastors" site where this statement and other valuable resources can be found.]