Featured as a back-of-page article in the CSABC Quarterly Letter of December 2020
by David Kadylak
Today there are many animals preying on and gushing blood from their prey, as they eat meat to survive. This doesn’t sound like it is in accord with a good and caring God who said His creation was very good upon completion. In addition, many a skeptic will seek justification for their denial of a global flood and Noah’s ark by claiming the carnivores coming off the ark would have eaten all the remaining prey, so that there should not be any of them left today. Yet we can also see vestiges of the very good creation among the animal world even nowadays, giving us a glimpse into what the once-perfect world may have been like. Or the fact that carnivores may have survived without making all their prey go extinct if they already started reproducing on the ark. Carnivores like lions would likely have eaten easy prey in exhumed carrion after the destructive Flood.
If animals were once all herbivores, may we expect to find some carnivores today that exhibit tendencies to not eat meat? Indeed there are! Consider the cat, Dante, which refused to eat meat in Great Britain. There are even cases of a lioness adopting a baby of its prey, an African antelope-type in the wild, twice. There’s a zoo in Thailand that raises its tigers by having the cubs nurse from pigs, and thereby growing at a faster rate and are raised to become much tamer; and piglets taking a nap on the back of a mother tiger. Or how about Little Tyke, the fully vegetarian lioness who would even turn her head from meat and wince?
The way this lioness lived with lambs, dogs, cats, chickens and deer, all in harmony points us to the expectation of when Christ will restore all things to the paradise it once was and even better. If long ages and evolution are true, should we then expect God to keep predation a reality in the New Heaven and New Earth? There will be a time where those who rest in Christ’s work for them will not be able to sin, nor to cause the effects of the curse to come back. Consider the prophecy in Isaiah 11:6-9:
6And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
7Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
8The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
9They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD
As the waters cover the sea.
The lion who lay down with the lamb
References:
Little Tyke: True Story of a Gentle Vegetarian Lioness
The Cat Who Refuses to Eat Meat