God’s creatures on four legs are some of the greatest storytellers of the Scriptures.
Just about every morning, our family cat, Tillamook, greets me as I walk into the living room. He stretches his hind legs and lets out a little yawn, then meows and rubs his fur on my ankle before beginning his storytelling. And he will repeatedly tell me the same story if I haven’t gotten the hint by the time I reach the kitchen to pour myself a glass of water. With a persistent purring and a little more meowing, Tillamook is telling me the sad story of his empty food dish. Sometimes, it’s not hard to tell what animals are communicating to us.
And yet, if you’re like me, at some point, you’ve probably wondered what it would be like if our favorite animals or beloved family pets could actually talk with us. What would they say? How would they greet us when we come home or when we fill their food dish with their favorite flaked salmon? If animals could talk, what stories would they tell?
Maybe this is one of the reasons I’ve always loved books like Wind in the Willows or C.S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia, where that magical, imaginative world is full of talking animals. In our favorite stories, often animals are more than background decorations or an afterthought; they’re the main characters who help drive the story.
In The Magician’s Nephew, C.S. Lewis takes his characters and readers back to the very foundation of Narnia. Aslan walks about the empty void of the land, singing creation into existence. It’s lyrical life. Aslan sang it, and it happened. Narnia blossoms, sprouts, and shines into existence by this majestic music pouring out of the Lion’s mouth. Eventually, Aslan gathered several animals around him and gave them a particularly unique and sacred gift in Narnia: the gift of speech. And with this gift, Aslan gave a benediction: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.”
Places like Narnia and Hogwarts aren’t the only places where you can find fantastic beasts. In the story of Scripture, from Genesis to Revelation, there are animals around every corner.
Scripture’s story of salvation is also a wildlife safari through God’s creation. There’s a whole biblical bestiary to be found within the story of the Scriptures. The animals of the Bible may not always speak with human words, as Balaam’s famous donkey did in Numbers 22. And yet, more often than not, the animals of the Bible have a story to tell. If these animals could talk, what would they say? What stories would they tell us? If the heavens above declare the handiwork of God, what do all the creeping things and beasts of the earth have to declare about our Lord the Creator and Redeemer? Let’s do a little theology by zoology and find out.
No surprise, our biblical animal adventure begins in Genesis. After the Lord God had formed every beast of the field and bird of the air, they are brought before Adam and named. And at least for a while, everything was good. More than good; God declared it all very good. God the Creator lives in harmony and peace with his creatures. Man and woman live in harmony with creation and God’s creatures because he placed them under their stewardship. But we know that the Edenic paradise of Genesis 1 and 2 quickly and tragically moves on to Genesis 3, where Satan takes the form of a serpent. Soon, temptation gives way to desire. Desire gives way to pride. Pride gives way to sin. And sin gives way to death. And yet, amid the fallout and curse of Genesis 3, there is good news. There is an animal that has a better word than the deceitful half-truths uttered by that forked tongue liar.
We’re not told what kind of animal this was. But we do know this animal gave its life and shed its blood to cover the guilt, shame, and nakedness of Adam and Eve. “And the Lord God made for Adam and for his wife garments of skins and clothed them” (Gen. 3:21). Whatever animal God used to clothe Adam and Eve, this creature foretells the story of the time when the Creator himself would take on human flesh to cover us by his innocent death and blood, and once again God clothes the guilty in the innocence of another. The first sacrifice in creation points to the sacrifice of salvation, where you are clothed in Christ.
The next animals in our safari of salvation are found in Genesis 8. Noah and his floating zoo came to rest on the mountains after forty days and forty nights of rain and the raging deluge, and then another 150 days waiting in the arc for the waters to subside. After this, Noah sent out a raven who went to and fro about the earth until the waters dried up on the earth. Then, Noah sent out a dove, but the dove returned. Noah waited another seven days and sent out the dove again. And this time, she returned with a freshly plucked olive leaf in her beak. What a story she could have told Noah. And yet the leaf in her beak spoke for her louder than words ever could. The flood waters had receded. The raging torrent had subsided. A new creation awaited. The olive leaf in her beak spoke both a word of peace to Noah and his family as well as a sign of a promise. A downpayment of a new creation that was yet to come, not in Noah, but ultimately in Jesus, the true man of rest who would come one day and finish the job of saving creation once and for all.
The fish hears and heeds God’s word better than his own prophet does.
No trek through the animal tales of the Bible would be complete without taking in the sights at the Seaworld of the Scriptures. Here, the reluctant prophet, Jonah, found himself not just inside the largest fishbowl of the sea but inside the belly of a great fish itself. In Jonah chapter two, after running from God’s call to go to Nineveh by boarding a ship in the opposite direction, God sends a storm and tosses Jonah overboard and into the belly of a great fish. There, he laments, confesses, and prays. Finally, the same fish that God sent to swallow up the prophet spits him back out again on the beach three days later. Ironically, the fish hears and heeds God’s word better than his own prophet does. What a story that fish would tell its school as it swam back into the deep. “You guys are never going to believe what happened!” And unlike our grandpa’s fish stories, this one is true. If the great fish could talk, his gills and mouth would bubble forth the good news that although this story is amazing, there is someone greater than Jonah. Jonah’s God. The God who sent the fish to swallow up Jonah came to swallow up death forever.
He cast himself onto the nets of the cross. He threw himself overboard into the abyss of the grave. He spent three days and three nights in the belly of the earth. But just like the fish couldn’t stomach Jonah for more than three days, so too, death and the grave couldn’t hold the Lord of Life in any longer. The tomb spat him out in a glorious resurrection
As our nature walk through the fauna of Scripture continues, the Psalms remind us that God created the birds of the air for their nests, the high mountains for the wild goats, the rocks of refuge for the badgers, the lion who hunts by night and sleeps by day, and the leviathan who plays in the depths of the sea (Psalm 104). These all look to their Creator to give them their food in due season. And if they could all speak, they’d tell you the same story–the story our ears are so often deaf to hear. God creates, cares, provides, and he does so without fail.
These all look to you,
to give them their food in due season
When you give it to them, they gather it up;
when you open your hand, they are filled with good things (Ps.104:27-28).
God’s creatures - great and small - tell us the same story when we come to the New Testament as well.
Therefore I tell you, do not be anxious about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, nor about your body, what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they? (Matt. 6:25-26)
If we could translate the song of the sparrows, the melodies of the meadowlarks, and the chirping of the chickadees, they would not only sing the praises of him who feeds the ravens when they call but their morning and evening psalms echoing through the trees fill our ears with another chorus of good news. As beautiful, artistic, and carefully crafted as the birds are, you are of more value than the birds. What story would the songbirds sing into our ears? Perhaps something like this. How loved are you by our Creator? So much so that he did not take on the speckled feathers and colorful plumage of peacocks, cardinals, or the eagle, but he became man for you. How much does your Creator care for you? Let him count the ways, not on his pinions and tailfeathers, but on his fingers and toes, which were stretched out on the cross for you. They chirp and chime a song of salvation: our Creator is also your Redeemer.
And when our Redeemer, the one who upholds all creation with his word, entered into Jerusalem, what was it that bore the King as he marched his way to the throne of the cross? Not a chariot. Not a princely litter. Not a mighty machine of war. Who else could possibly carry the King, the Creator, and the soon-to-be crucified one but one of his own beloved creatures, a donkey?
Say to the daughter of Zion,
"Behold, your king is coming to you,
humble, and mounted on a donkey,
on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden."
If that donkey could speak, like its long-lost relative in Numbers 22, what would this donkey have said? “I heard the Hosannas. I saw the palm branches. I bore the King. The Creator. The Redeemer. The Savior. If I am a beast of burden, how much more is he who bore the burdens of all creation and all humanity upon his weary shoulders? I carried the Son of David, the Son of God, on his journey to make all things new.”
God’s creatures on four legs are some of the greatest storytellers of the Scriptures. They tell us repeatedly that the God who made all things in his work of creation also makes all things new by his work of redemption. That the Creator who declared creation into existence with a word also declares us righteous, holy, and forgiven with that same life-giving, creative, living, and active word. At the center of the new Jerusalem is the same Lord who’s at the center of all the stories of Scripture: the Lord who is the Lion and the Lamb who takes away the sin of the world. “And he who was seated on the throne said, “Behold, I am making all things new” (Rev. 21:5)
