I don’t even like cats! And yet there I was balling as my wife was holding our dead cat in the backseat on the way to the vet’s this morning. He had escaped this mortal coil on our living room floor, so thankfully we didn’t have to give the vet the order to “put him down.” God mercifully did that. We thought we’d lost him two months previously, but he recovered, and it seemed fully. In the last few days, though, we noticed the familiar listlessness, but didn’t think it would happen so quickly. It did. Anyone who thinks or claims that death is “natural” is in denial. They can say or think that, but they know in their bones it isn’t true. Death is wrong! Death shouldn’t be! We hate death! I’ll get to why in a moment, as I have here many times, but first . . . animals. Or more accurately pets. I’m not a big animal person in the first place, but I marvel at God’s handiwork in creating so many varieties of them. That is yet another apologetic for the reality of our Creator God; chance doesn’t do that.
I am also sure that animals have souls because they have life, soulish life. They don’t have life like a tree has life because, as we all know, they have “personalities,” so to speak. When you look in their eyes there is something there, a being with a self-conscious existence, although they don’t think in any way like we do. God has given them instinct, not thought, for their survival. My family had begged me for a pet for many years, and I stoutly resisted. Over time, though, they broke me down with, “Please, dad?” like the sound of a slow faucet drip that eventually drives you crazy! So around Christmas of 2012, old softy let them bring home brother and sister kittens, Hunter and Bella. I had no idea one could get so emotionally attached to animals one doesn’t the least bit care for. Sure, they were terribly cute, in that don’t bother me cat kind of way, but they’re cats! I guess I was more attached than I thought I could be.
When Hunter was gone, his soul, the life went out of his eyes. They remained open, but you could tell Hunter was gone. Somehow our souls are attached to our bodies, inextricably linked, but they are not our bodies. We are more than our material existence, and maybe that means animals are too. When this material body that the Apostle Paul tells us is rotting dies, we will eventually be clothed with an eternal body:
42 So will it be with the resurrection of the dead. The body that is sown is perishable, it is raised imperishable; 43 it is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory; it is sown in weakness, it is raised in power; 44 it is sown a natural body, it is raised a spiritual body.
Our resurrected spiritual bodies, somehow the same bodies we have now, but radically different, will inhabit a new heaven and a new earth. You have to think, what would earth, even a new earth, be like without animals. It would be kind of odd given animals on this earth are ubiquitous, and they play a significant role in redemptive history. Who knows, but maybe this isn’t the end for Hunter after all.
Briefly, I mentioned the wrongness of death above. No worldview, no religion, no philosophy, can explain death, and the wrongness we feel about it, except Christianity. We know this: It should not be! But it is! What explains it? Does it have to be explained? Can it just be? No! We seek explanations for everything in life, including some stupid virus that has driven the world insane. Are we just supposed to give death a pass? We will, if we want to ignore its spiritual implications. The first few chapters of Genesis offer us the only plausible explanation for death, and why we feel about it the way we do. Jesus felt it too at the tomb of his friend Lazarus, whom we would bring back to life a few minutes later. Thankfully, Jesus, the resurrection and the life, has conquered death for us, and given us hope the ugliness will not ultimately prevail.
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