Whenever this blog mentions "God," it is speaking of the Creator. There is so much disinformation about evolution floating around— it is ubiquitous. The highest levels of our most prestigious universities have opted to go with evolution and treat the Bible as historical mythology. As a consequence, the evolutionary paradigm has filtered into our thought processes to the point that it is so common that we do not even recognize its reach.
The greatest problem with evolution is not the gaps in the geologic column, the greatest problem is that it makes many people comfortable in denying the supernatural in general, and specifically in denying a Creator. Many who do believe "in" God, still reject the Bible as the inspired supernatural revelation of His Word to mankind. Therefore, I must lay some foundational groundwork:
To an observer on Earth, Earth was created in six literal days as described in scripture, and on the seventh day, God rested. The "apparent" billions of years are not explained by evolution, but by the math and physics of Time. The Eternity of the supernatural exists outside of Time. Deal with it.If "deal with it" sounds harsh, then I will quote what Paul wrote to Timothy in my footnotes and you can walk away. I have been there & done that on the endless debates and have no desire to pursue them further. Genesis 1 is an accurate accounting of how creation would have looked to an observer on Earth.
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Okay, with that stated, let's get on with God creating animals...
One of the clearest concepts presented in the first chapter of Genesis is that God created in categories.
In 1735, Carl Linnæus published Systema Naturæ. It provided a system for classifying nature that—now greatly modified and expanded, of course—is still in use today. In the preface to Systema Naturæ he wrote: “Finis creationis telluris est gloria Dei ex opere Naturæ per Hominem solum.”¹ A somewhat loose paraphrase is that 'the purpose of the creation of this planet is that from the works of nature, God is glorified by man.'
It is worth taking the time to go a bit deeper into his biography because Linnæus viewed creation quite differently than the Darwinists who would use his system of classification in the next century. Linnæus believed that God put him on earth to classify nature. He was certainly born into the right family to devlop those skills as a child. His father was both an avid gardener and a Latin geek who loved to share his interests with his son. By four years of age, Carl knew the Latin names of many plants around his native Sweden. Had Carl been born in this century, he'd likely have been diagnosed with an attention deficit disorder because he would sometimes skip classes to go hunt wildflowers. Later, at Uppsala University, and by divine providence, he found a mentor when he met a professor of theology who was also a botanist. This gave him access to special sections of the university library, opportunities to lecture, and enabled him to go on botanical plant-collecting excursions across Europe.
Indeed, from this side of history looking back, one can see the hand of God directing his life toward the publication of Systema Naturæ. This book first separated nature into three broad categories—Plants, Animals, and Stones/Minerals, which were then broken down into sub categories and phyla. Specifically, for our purpose of investigating the question of pets in heaven, he classified animals by class, order, genus, and species. Linnæus, who frequently sprinkled his writings with references to the Creator, had developed a binomial (two-name) system of classification that was completely consistent with the Bible.
Because the work was so ingenuous, it was adopted by the scientific academies. A little over a century later, Charles Darwin used the Linnaean taxonomy for his work as well.² But in marked contrast to the natural selection³ of evolution, the Genesis account entails forethought, purpose, direction, and evaluation; this is often called "intelligent design." Animals are created in batches of "kinds." Animals of one kind cannot interbreed with animals of another. The animals created on Day Five were aquatic creatures and fowl (birds that fly above the land in the open vault of heaven). On Day Six, God created cattle and livestock, reptiles, and what the King James translates as "beasts of the earth" and other translations interpret as "wild animals." The original Hebrew word there is חַי . The transliteration is chay, with the ch being close to a k and the ay being being close to a long i.
Quite frankly, to an ear that was raised in American English, it sounds a lot like the speaker is trying to suppress hacking up while saying "khy." The reason that I am making a point of this is because there is no English word that makes a perfect-fit translation for this 'kind' of animals, and yet it is this group that most of our pet animals belong to. I will put two links in the footnotes that go into this more deeply. The short definition of חַי (chay) is alive, living thing, creature, life, living souls. Chay has both an adjective and a noun form, and it is used to describe a variety of life and living things in scripture, for example:
Genesis 2:7, God breathed into Adam's nostrils the breath of חַי, and man became a חַי soul;
Genesis 2:9, the tree of חַי in the mist of the garden (of Eden);
Genesis 7:15, They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of חַי;
Deuteronomy 5:26, the חַי-God speaks out of the midst of fire;
Psalm 16:11, You will show me the path of חַי;
Psalm 133:3, the Lord commanded the blessing, חַי forevermore.
The reason that I have spent this much time going into background information is because Heaven is a spiritual realm, not an earthly one. If our pets are going to exist with their own personality in heaven, then they need to have a spiritual element to their makeup. Otherwise, we are back to what my old Sunday school teacher believed—that you may be able to have a pet in heaven, but it will not be the exact same animal that you knew here.
The good news is tucked up there where I quoted Genesis 7:15 earlier, "They went into the ark with Noah, two and two of all flesh in which there was the breath of חַי." If your pet could have qualified to make it onto the ark, then there is a chance that it could make it to heaven too. Sorry fish lovers, if you had to flush Goldie down the toilet... I don't know; that may have been the last you will ever see of her, or maybe not. There is still hope, as you will see a couple of paragraphs from now, but it is not as strong as the case for the breath of חַי .
One thing that probably needs to be clarified is that most of the evidence for pets being in heaven is in the form of "positive support," not hard proof. The Genesis account of the ark falls into this positive support category, and I will spend a future post looking into that. Today, however, I want to do one more word study that relates to animal "kinds." That word is nephesh.
And here is where the hope for the fishes comes from: The first use of nephesh in the Bible is in reference to fish!
vayyô’mer ’elôhîym yish'retsû hammayîm sherets nephesh chayyâhSo maybe you have figured out that nephesh is the Hebrew for "soul" ... except that it is a little more complicated than that, as if "soul" isn't already complicated enough!
"and-said God let-swarm the-waters swarmers soul life/living"
i.e.: "let the waters teem with living soul-creatures"
— studylight.org
Nephesh occurs 755 times in the Old Testament, and the King James Version used over 40 different words to translate it. (Not at the same time, of course!) It is variously translated as soul, person, being, self, mind, heart, body, appetite, desire, and more depending upon what the king's translation team thought was the proper context. (For comparison, the Greek Septuagint was more consistent, translating nephesh as psychē 600 of those times.)
The 'best fit' translation of nephesh into English is usually "soul" but even then "soul" has two distinct meanings. (a) Soul can refer to the essence of life itself. (b) Soul can be the part of us that is comprised of will, intellect, and emotions. And just to mix it up a bit more, that first meaning of soul (a) overlaps with the definition of spirit; the spirit and soul are so closely linked that much of the time they can be used interchangeably. In fact, the only known thing that can divide them is the active Word of God, cf Hebrews 4:12. And lastly, nephesh is associated with (c) breath.
Created for Earth
Undoubtedly, God created animals to populate Earth. And they were put here for mankind's benefit.
To borrow a line from the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
But we also know at our most organic level that there is "something more" than just this present earth life. My whole concept behind this "Bootcamp Planet" is that we are in preparation for "something more."
Let us look at this information in the light of Ecclesiastes 3:11. Here it is in a blend of the New English Translation and the New International Version:
God has made everything fit beautifully in its appropriate time. He has also set eternity in the human heart; yet no one can fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
God has made our pets fit beautifully into this lifetime. He has also given our spirits a sense of eternity. We cannot see fully how our pets fit into the overall plan outside of this earth-time, but these two Hebrew words from the scriptures of creation, chay and nephesh, show us that animals were created in "kinds" to have a special value in the the heart of God. The better that we get to know God, the more clearly we will see the answer to our question. Already we have seen that God chose to place a degree of His own life-qualities into the nephesh animals.
In my next post, I will explore some things that the Bible teaches about animals that will give us a fuller picture of God's purpose for animals. Specifically, we will be looking for clues that their purpose might extend beyond this present life, because if our pets have an eternal purpose, they will need to be around for eternity.
Footnotes
As I urged you on my departure to Macedonia, you should stay on at Ephesus to instruct certain men not to teach false doctrines or devote themselves to myths and endless genealogies, which promote speculation rather than the stewardship of God’s work, which is by faith. The goal of our instruction is the love that comes from a pure heart, a clear conscience, and a sincere faith. 1 Timothy 1:3-5
¹ Finis creationis telluris est gloria Dei ex opere Naturae per Hominem solum.
A more literal translation is: The end of the creation of the planet is the glory of God from the work of Nature by Man only. "The end" meaning the goal.
² Because the Linnæan system is not based on evolution, modern biology has begun making changes in classification to accommodate the evolutionary belief that birds and reptiles had a common ancestor. Going forward, I would expect to see an attempt to edit Linnæus's role out of the textbooks and dump him in the "silly things people used to believe" history.
³ natural selection should not be confused with random selection, although they are somewhat related. There is random mutation of genetic material, but the mutations are "naturally selected" because the useful mutations survive to be reproduced.
chay - חַי click link to language studies ••• chay - click for study listing 501 occurrences of chay
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