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

It’s been an awesome spring in West Michigan so far.  Unusually warm.  Flowers are up and fruit trees are beginning to blossom—about three weeks earlier than usual.  And that makes fruit farmers in particular nervous because we normally have several hard frosts in April. Frost can kill the blossoms, and if it turns cold just as the blossoms are ready for the pollinators, the insects will be finding shelter instead of doing the work the Creator gave them to do.

The crops look brilliantly verdant as do the fields and woodlands.  And the wild animals appear to be multiplying as per their Creator’s mandate.  It’s a sad fact that proves the point: roadkill is abundant.  Skunks, raccoons, squirrels, and woodchucks mostly.  It’s still early for the fawns; and since they can’t jump the highway fences yet, they usually don’t get out on the main roads until late summer. (What a strange twist of the created order that mankind should become the chief predator of animals we don’t even eat.)

This time of the year I’m reminded of the psalms that speak of nature’s bounty.  And it’s 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 (Psalm 65:9-13 NKJV). [Photo: Jordan River at its source, Israel 2005]

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 land 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.” They and us 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—in spite of the fact that for the most part, their Creator takes care of all their needs. Which is good: if we had to feed the animals, for instance, that would be our full-time job!  So 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” (Psalm. 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—which involves our being able to determine when human activity begins to go beyond our taking of the fruit of the land and we start destroying its fruitfulness.  A part of that work is making certain that we preserve abundant habitat where wild animals can thrive in order that they may do the work their Creator has called them to, just as we do ours.