A Lesson On Anthropology
Tuesday (October 7)
A Lesson On Anthropology
Psalm 8:3-4
When I look at 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, and the son of man that you care for him?
A tragic and all-too-common conception today is that man is in the way of nature. Supposed experts lecture us constantly on our polluting effects, don’t they? In fact, legislators have even passed laws forbidding us from collecting so much as an eagle feather if we find it in our back yard while mowing the lawn. If my son and I want to put our goggles on and swim around in the Watauga River near Valle Crucis, NC, looking for crayfish, signs will warn us in ALL CAPS not to move any rocks so that we don’t disturb the sacred hellbender salamanders who evidently need peace and quiet. Once, when I veered off a forest trail at Yates Mill Pond nature preserve, just to get a little closer to the overgrown bank where a family of beavers were swimming, a park ranger stopped me and shouted, “Excuse me, sir! Get back on the trail—Your feet will crush the grasses!” Oh, what a world. Even in a nature preserve funded by me, the taxpayer, deer and beavers and coyotes can waltz around wherever they please, but my footsteps are somehow intrusive.
Well, to be fair, humans have messed things up—badly—and it was our original sin that catapulted earth into the spiral downward. And, yes, we often pollute and distort and destroy beautiful environments that we should be preserving and enjoying. However, we are not an unfortunate accident or a blight on the soil or peripheral to nature. In fact, we, as tiny as we are, as powerless as we seem, as brief as our lives appear to be, represent the climax of God’s creation! We alone—not the eagles or the beavers or the pond grasses—bear the image of invisible God on this little spinning orb called earth.
So go outside today and look up at the heavens, friend. Really look. Marvel at the thought that Almighty God doesn’t see you as an imposition or a defection or a waste of space, but He looks at you as His precious, valued, one-of-a-kind child.