This is her picture from last spring; we have walked this wood together many times. She was never my personal pet, but she most definitely counted as a friend of the family. I was always happy to fill in and feed her when her regular caretaker was away. I used caretaker because Molly was not owned by anyone. She was her own dog.It has been said that the Bible never mentions pets, and that is what I was taught as a child. In one sense, that is accurate—most of the time. When you type "pet" into a King James Version Bible search tool, you will get: No Results Found.
In some of the more relaxed paraphrases, however, you might get a match. Here is one from the New Living Bible:
Can you make it a pet like a bird,
or give it to your little girls to play with?
Job 41:5
In this instance, it is pretty easy to forgive my childhood teachers for not recognizing a pet in this verse. In the King James version that they were using, the verse read like this:
"Wilt thou play with him as with a bird? or wilt thou bind him for thy maidens?"
The whole "binding" thing in 400 year-old English can easily throw a person off. Think of it in terms of a tether or leash.
In context, the 41st chapter of Job begins with a challenge, "Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?" The personal pronoun him in verse 5, KJV above, refers to Leviathan, meaning: Will you play with Leviathan as with a bird? The first seven verses of Job 41, including this one about the pet bird, are a series of rhetorical questions designed to show that Leviathan is fierce, the exact opposite of a pet bird that would be safe to have around small girls.
Although this passage from Job has little to do with pets in heaven, we can extract a bit of deductive knowledge: Ancient people played with pets. This fact is also backed up with archeological evidence. During the era in which Job lived, the Mesopotamians tamed falcons to help them hunt gazelle, while in Egypt at that time, people were domesticating dogs, antelopes, and monkeys.
For us, in our quest to answer the question of pets being in heaven, this supports the idea that men have always enjoyed animals; it is not a recent trend or fad. The fact that men have connected with pets across time, geography, and culture indicates that God designed it to be this way.
A Parable about a Pet
Although the word pet is not found in most standard translations of the Bible, I think you will agree that the narrative perfectly describes a pet.
There were two men in the same city—one rich, the other poor. The rich man had huge flocks of sheep, herds of cattle. The poor man had nothing but one little female lamb, which he had bought and raised. It grew up with him and his children as a member of the family. It ate off his plate and drank from his cup and slept in his bosom. It was like a daughter to him.This Old Testament parable was told by the Prophet Nathan in 2 Samuel 12 when he confronted King David about having sent Uriah the Hittite to his death on the front line of the battle. The story gets even messier after that, but we don't want to focus on the bad behavior. Today we want to see that Nathan definitely describes a beloved family pet. It is such a delightful picture that I could aspire to be that man's pet: eating and drinking as well as he does, and then being held in his arms, next to his heart for a perfectly safe rest. This little lamb was cherished.
One day a traveler dropped in on the rich man. He was too stingy to take an animal from his own herds or flocks to make a meal for his visitor, so he took the poor man’s lamb and prepared a meal to set before his guest.
Again, on the surface, this parable does not seem to have much to do with pets in heaven. The ewe lamb was slaughtered and the last we heard of it, it was on its way to the stomach of a dinner guest. That is not the common notion of utopia. But if we look a little more deeply, we will discover a couple things about the nature of God.
First, we see that God recognized the unique relationship this lamb held for its family. The love bond made this lamb special above all the nondescript sheep in the rich man's flocks. The poor man had invested time, money, and heart in raising this lamb, and God counted it with a separate standard than the standard used for the other sheep that were turned out to pasture. Because in this parable God differentiates between the value of this particular lamb and the value of the other sheep at large, I am encouraged that this supports the possibility that the same could be true for animals in heaven as well. So while a parabolic story like this one does not "prove" that some animals in heaven might have a love relationship that counts as "more special" than another random generic animal, it does add credence to that possibility.
Secondly, we see God's character of Restorer. Right before this parable of the lamb, in 2 Samuel 11, is the long sorry story of how "the thing that David had done was evil in the sight of the LORD," verse 27. But chapter 12 opens with this phrase, "And the LORD sent Nathan to David." It is remarkable and revealing of God's character to realize that after David made the greatest screw-up of his life, God initiated the restoration by assigning one of His prophets a mission: the LORD sent Nathan to David.
Each individual life is unique, and it is my opinion that when God's time schedule can accommodate it, He will often wait for a person to repent on his or her own because self-initiated repentance brings God greater glory. In this case, however, God had the nation of Israel that He needed to be getting on with, so He facilitated the speed of its wayward king's repentance by sending Nathan. David writes about this time in Psalm 51:1, "For the choir director. A Psalm of David, when Nathan the prophet came to him, after he had gone in to Bathsheba. Be gracious to me, O God, according to Your lovingkindness; According to the greatness of Your compassion blot out my transgressions."
The rest of Psalm 51 is stuffed full of wonderful insights on the character of the Lord, and it would be worth your time to read it in full. However, for the purpose of this blog we will limit that discussion to two points:
Verse 12, Restore to me the joy of Your salvation...
Verse 17, The sacrifice pleasing to God is a broken spirit. God, You will not despise a broken and humbled heart.
Again, we have come to a place where you may be asking, "How do those two points relate to pets in heaven? They are quite a bit further down the trail than the parable that turned David in this direction." Here is what I discovered about that:
The joy of Your salvation
Notice that the Y in Your was capitalized in this literal translation. David is speaking of the joy in the Lord's salvation, not his own joy in personal salvation. God gets joy in saving! The Lord got joy in restoring David!
Most parents experience an emotion like this at some point—they will give a gift to their child, and although the child is delighted with the gift, the parents' joy in seeing that delight is even greater than what the child experiences.
The story is told of a little girl who asked Billy Graham if her recently deceased pet would be in heaven. His reply was that if that is what it takes to make you happy, then yes, your pet is in heaven. At the time I first heard that anecdote, my science-brain kicked in and said to myself, "That is a sweet story, but where's the proof?" My revelation of God's love at that time in my life was so lacking (it is still small, but then it was minuscule) that I could not imagine how Dr. Graham's words could be anything more than a feel-good answer. But, no! Luke 12:32 says, "Do not fear, little flock, for your Father took delight to give you the kingdom." Or as the King James phrases it, "your Father's good pleasure," which is a really good segue into the the second point that I am highlighting from Psalm 51— the sacrifice pleasing to God.
The sacrifice pleasing to God
King David came to understand that God places a high value on a humbled heart. Many translations use the term "a contrite heart" in verse 17, but contrite is not a word commonly used today. The original Hebrew is transliterated as dakah, meaning crushed or broken down.
This speaks to a major attitude adjustment that many (most?) of us need to make about pets being restored to us in heaven. Our earthly inclination is our self-perspective: Yea! I get my pet restored to me! The Kingdom of Heaven perspective, however, runs closer to: Wow! I am so humbled that God has such regard and love toward this animal that He would restore it. He saw my broken heart and moved. I want to praise Him
♦ ♦ ♦
This post dispelled the myth that the Bible is silent on the topic of pets; it is not. As we move through the posts ahead, this will pop up again—that myths we have been led to believe, opinions that we have accepted, and flat-out wrong teaching we have been exposed to have occluded our view of the heart of God.
The overt references to pets may be thin, but when we consider the purpose for the Bible, the reasons we are here on Earth, and the ways of God, eventually we begin to recognize that our bootcamp time on the planet involves a lot of process. Growing. Learning. Considering. Working toward. Jesus could have stood on the Mount of Olives and simplified the answer by injecting into the middle of his sermon, "Oh, by the way, pets of believers go to heaven." Well, no, actually Jesus could not have done that because he did not see his Father doing it. cf John 5:19 and 8:28. The Father could have shown him that, but had chosen not to. My point being that the Father has chosen discovery to be part of our human experience.
We can embrace this as we pursue the answer to "Will my pet be in heaven?" He has not forbidden us to seek that answer the way He has forbidden trying to speak with the dead. The answer is knowable, but we need to know the ways of the Father better first.
The plan for my next post is to look at the creation of animals and God's purpose for them. He used the dust of the Earth, so were they meant for this world only? Believers get new bodies, but what about animals? I have a lot of notes on this and they scatter in different directions, so it will be fun for me to see how the Holy Spirit works that out on the page.
Until then, keep your heart filled with praise.
No comments:
Post a Comment