Cherish The Butterflies

Cherish The Butterflies It's sad, but it's true. The earth is dying. It is wearing out. The Bible said it was going to, but until our generation I believe nobody took these passages seriously. But they are there and very plain to see if you have eyes to see. Let me show you. Psalms 102:26 - tells us that the earth will "wear out like a garment."
Revelation 11:18 - warns that the time will come,"....for destroying the destroyers of the earth."

Isaiah the prophet saw what would happen the most clearly, and even knew who would cause it. The scene is earth and the final demise of Satan. There are people standing around the edge of a great pit. They are looking at Satan saying, "Is this the man who made the earth tremble, who shook kingdoms, who made the world like a desert?" Like a desert - barren, lacking fresh water, and devoid of abundant life. Does it seem possible that our world, whose land mass is 75 percent forest, could become a desert? Fifty years ago that scripture would have been offered as a symbolic overstatement. But not anymore. Isaiah further amplifies in 10:19 "The remmant of the trees of his forest will be so few that a child can write them down." What kind of numbers can a child conceive? Ten, maybe twenty. When Satan is cast into the pit the trees have something to say. Isaiah 14:18 "The cypresses rejoice at you, the cedars of Lebanon, saying, "Since you were laid low, no hewer - woodcutter - comes up against us." Let us consider the history of Isreal. G. S. Cansdale, in his wonderful book All The Animals of The Bible Lands, states, "Man has left his mark all over the world, but the lands of the Bible have been occupied and used since the birth of civilozation, so it is not suprising that he has done more damage there than almost anywhere else, leaving great areas of soil impoverished or even eroded down to bare rock. This is reflected in the flora, poor in species and poor on the ground and this in turn in the fauna." When Abraham came to the Promised Land it was a woodland. His only source of fuel was wood, so he and those after him began to cut down the trees and clear the land. Because of wars the land was often salted so that nothing would grow for long periods of time. It began as a land flowing with milk and honey but it became an ecological nightmare. Satan has been busy throughout history at the task of destroying the earth, but it seems to have become a higher priority in our age of technology. All the world is following the pattern of Isreal. In Southern California one of of eight trees is dying because of our air pollution. But we are better off than the eastern United States. The auto and steel industries are belching millions of tons of sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere. Rain clouds pick it up and redistribute it all over the East Coast and Canada. Oak trees are dying by the thousands, and whole forests are being stunted. Fish are becoming unable to reproduce because of metal build-ups caused by the acid rains. Robert H. Boyle writes in his sobering book, Acid Rain, that we are absolutely devastating Canada with our toxic emissions. The effects of acid rain originating in the eastern U.S. to date include killing all the fish in 1,200 lakes; 3,400 are nearly dead; 11,400 are at risk; and in twenty years 48,500 lakes are likely to lose their fish. Germany is even further down the road. One out of three trees in their famous Black Forest is dying because of smog damage. Pollution is not the only problem that the trees are experiencing. Direct cutting in South America is taking one acre of forest every 1.2 seconds - that's 50 acres per minute, or 42,000 square miles a year. These facts were gleaned from Paul and Anne Ehrlich's powerful book, Extinction. Did you know that more than three million acres are paved over every year? Isaiah 5:8 says, "Woe to those who join house to house, who add field to field, until there is no more room." Satan's desert may not be as far into the future as we would like to believe. He is not in "the pit" yet, and he is actively working at the destruction of the earth. What does Satan get out of all this? A chance to kill many people. The trees filter pollution out of the air and they wxchange carbon dioxide for oxygen. They also liberate millions of gallons of water into the atmosphere. The water becomes rain. We need those trees. Satan knows all this, but he is now and has always been a murderer. What an effective way of killing millions. Africa is already experiencing the beginning of the ecological end. Their famines are the result of poor land management and a total disregard for the ecological balance. Isaiah 24:4-6, 19 saw it all. "The earth mourns and withers......The earth lies polluted under it's inhabitants... The earth is utterly broken, the earth is rest assunder, the earth is violently shaken." Isaiah was given a look at what the future of th earth would include. As he wrote, he was accounting for events that would not occur for 2,700 years. He saw our now, and it's happening just as he said it would. He saw the effects, we know the causes. Decimation of species, chemical pollution of habitat, and overuse - these are the weapons we have used to destroy the earth. How do you think God feels about the way we are treating His magnificent creation? Not good. I think Dante said, "Nature is the art of God." We are defacing His art. His art is functional art. It takes care of us. Think about John Drinkwater's poetry: When you defile pleasant streams, And the wild birds' abiding place. You massacre a million dreams, And cast your spittle in God's face. Why is God putting up with our meaningless and furtile defacement of His pricelesswork of art? I believe there is a complete explanation nesstled in the middle of: Romans 8: 19 - 20 For the creation waits with eager longing for the revealing of the sons of God; for the creation was subjected to futility, not of it's own will but by the will of him who subjected it to hope... Let me paraphrase the above verses. I think you will be moved by what God's spirit has revealed through the apostle Paul. All of nature is awaiting with enthusiasm and deep longing for everyone who is going to come to the Lord to do so. God has ordered nature to put up with man's needless abuse. Nature didn't want to, but God ordered nature to take man's abuse to give man more time to come to Him. If you want to get a concrete picture of what this verse is saying, consider this illustration. Michelangelo is in his studio. Around the room are several of his most cherished masterpieces. His love and greatest skills are evident in every stroke of the brush and cut of the chisel. His work praises his genius and expresses his deepest thoughts. Suddenly, a servant boy that he loves dearly throws open the studio door. It is evident that he is severely mentally disturbed. He doesn't comprehend the love of the master artist and is, in fact, needlessly jealous of his abilities and authority. The servant boy rushes forward and slashes many of the paintings, and dashes many of the sculptures to the floor. Much of the art is beyond repair and lost forever. Michelangelo walks to the servant boy and holds him in a long embrace. He then speaks softly, "My boy, you mean more to me than the art. I want you to be my son. We can work this out." Michelangelo shares with the other servants that for now the boy is not to be punished. The boy will be given more time to be willing for adoption. The servants express their anger and shock at what has happened but they promise to stand with the master's choice. Our Father never misses a sparrow's fall. The fact that He has not destroyed us for what we have done to His beautiful creation, is all the assurance we should ever need of His love. May I give you an idea of what it means for the creation to have been subjected to futility? We need only to look to what has happened to our own ecology in the United States to get an idea of the needless pain that nature has suffered on our behalf. The American bison knows of the futility of man. When our forefathers set foot on the continent they found that it was teeming with life. There were turkeys to be shot so that the early colonists could make it through that first severe winter. There were hooved animals on every hillside and in every valley. Fish were teeming in every sparkling stream. One animal dominated the scene and provided meat and hide in generous abundance. That was the Americna bison. When the pilgrims stepped onto Plymouth Rock, it is estimated that North America sustained a population of seventy-five million of the impressive hooved Goliaths. The North American Indians killed only what they needed. And throughout the 1700's there were not enough settlers to pose a threat to the bisons' existence. All this wonderful balance begun to erode by 1810. A European market developed for meat and hides, and buffalo hunting began in eranest. Names like Buffalo Bill Cody, Kit Carson, and Jim Bridger became household names. They were the great white hunters of our continent and their time. By 1832 the last buffalo east of the Mississippi was killed. David A. Dary says all this in his great book - The Buffalo Book: The Saga of an American Symbol. Hunting became a sport and people were encouraged to shoot the buffalo from trains as they journeyed westward. No thought was given to whether they might be wasting valuable resources or whether they just wounded or actually kiled the beasts they shot from moving trains. When the United States government realized how dependent the Indians were on the bison, they encouraged eradication of the species. The Indians could be relegated to reservations more easily if they were starving and cold. By 1895 there were less than 400 buffalo in existence. We killed almost the total population of 75 million in 85 years. There were other casualties of the westward movement. As we settled the West we killed the wolves, both the red and grey. There are about 1,600 left in the wild. There used to be more than a million. The largest bird in North America, the condor, suffered an indirect slaughter. They were carrion eaters, and we had wasted their food supply. God had designed them to eat dead animals, especially dead bison. They were His clean -up crew. But so much of their food had been eradicated that they began to starve to death. When America was first settled, there were close to one and a half million condors. Now there are a mere 26 struggling to hold on to their existence. All of them are in captivity. Their only hope is for an artificisl breeding breakthrough. They have long since passed the point when they could recover on their own. Our American symbol, the bald eagle, has not fared to well, either. We have less than on-tenth of the original population. Insecticides and destruction of habitat took them. Think about the demise of the great whales. Farley Mowat in his moving account, A Whale For The Killing, shows the decline of the whale population between the years of 1930 and 1972. Some species which had been in the hundreds of thousands have dropped 75, 80, even 90 percent. The grey whale is extinct altogether, and the white whale and the blue whale are on the brink of extinction. Whales are fantastic animals. They have I.Q.'s that rival mankind's. They cooperate with each other in hunting, they care for each other when they get sick, and they sing songs that can be heard by other whales more than thirty miles away. They have been quietly tolerant of man's abuse of their species. They have remained subject to the futility of man as God had decreed. And they have suffered. The statistics reveal the decline of the whales, but they do not demonstrate the agony they have endured. The principal method of killing whales has been harpooning. The sensitive animals were repeatedly harpooned and forced to drag boats for miles as they tried to keep up with their family groups. When they became too exhausted to swim any farther, the whalers would spear them over and over until loss of blood slowly but surely claimed their lives. This is a warm-blooded animal that nurses its young and loves its family. One of the most sickening facts to surface in recent years involves our U.S. Navy. Farley Mowat records the incident in A Whale For The Killing. Until after the Second World War there were almost no sightings of great whales off the south coast of Newfoundland. Then, in the late 1940's, U.S. Naval aircraft flying out of the leased base at Argentina in southwest Newfounland began spotting an occassional big whale. News of these sightings came to light in the mid-1950's when it was learned that whales had become a useful addition to the Navy's antisubmarine training. Aircraft crews, engaged in practice patrol work, had been instructed to pretend that any whales they spotted were Russian submarines. The whales became targets for cannon fire, rockets, bombs and depth charges! In 1957 an outcry by Harold Horwood, a crusading columnist on the St. John's Evening Telegram, resulted in a promise from the Argentina officials that whales would no longer be used as tragets. The number either killed, wounded, or attacked over a ten-year period was never released. Presumably, it was classified information. I could go on and on until you were overloaded with facts, statistics and stories of man's inhumanity to the animal kingdom. I could tell you that there are less than two hundred and fifty grizzly bears left in the United States. I could tell you that until they became protected, the mountain lion was hunted almost to extinction. If I were to include worldwide statistics, you would discover that in your life time you may expect to hear about the passing out of existence of the following animals: mountain gorillas, cheetahs, African elephants, rhinos, and thousands of other lesser-known species. At the present rate of extinction, we will be losing one-fifth of the world's species by the end of this century. There are times that I wish the animals would fight back. They could, you know. There are enough bees and bacteria to kill every man, woman, and child on the earth. But they won't, because they have been subjected. There may be no greater example of God's patience with man than His putting up with man's abuse of His great creation. Remember that this is all to give time for people to come to the Lord Jesus Christ. I agree with Andrae Crouch: "I don't know why Jesus loves me but I'm glad, so glad He did." Our proper response to His great love is to share it. We should be bringing people to Jesus. I've tols you the bad news. Now let me tell you the good news. In fact, this earth will pass away, as will the present heaven, but the Lord will make new ones. They will be far better creations and they will be populated with perfect, sinless, and forgiven people. He will set His children on a cloud somewhere in eternity and speak these new creations into existence. You and I may be there to see it. The Scripture says that the new earth will have neither sun nor moon, for it will be illuminated by the glory of the Lord Himself. The seas will be no more, but no one will be disappointed. This just means thst there will be lakefront property for everyone. Lots of eagles, I bet, filling crystal-clear skies. Did I tell you about the animals? They will all be tame. If you want to hug a lion, no problem. If you want to pick up a cobra, go ahead. Consider these verses from the Book of Isaiah: Isaiah 11: 6 - 9 The wolf shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid, and the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them. The cow and the bear shall feed; their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. The suckling child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put his hand on the adder's den. They shall not hurt or destory in all my holy mountain; for the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea. If you think that sounds great, then enjoy what the apostle Paul shares with us in: 1 Corinthians: 2 - 9 .....no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the heart of man conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him. We only see a small band of the colours that exist in the unniverse, just those of the rainbow. They are beautiful, but we haven't seen anything yet. Moths see a whole spectrum of colours we have never seen, but will. We hear in a small band of the sounds that exist. Foxes hear a far wider range than we do. We are thrilled to hear orchestras and choirs play in eight octaves, but just wait for the thrill of hearing angel choirs burst forth in eighty octaves. Our music will have sounded so incomplete. Go ahead. Push the limits of your imagination. Try and picture wonders far beyond any you have ever known. Well, God is planning things immeasurably better than you have just imagined. Don't you love God for that? If you don't, won't you try? You just won't want to miss out on the future that He has planned for those that love Him. Author ~ Gary Richmond

All graphics © 2001 Until Then Graphics All right reserved. All other copyrights belong to their respective holders. This background set made and copyrighted by Until Then Graphics. It was made especially for "View From A Zoo - Daily Reflections", so please do not take any of the graphics or set. Thank you for respecting the copyright laws. Photo courtesy of : Broderbund Butterfly tubes courtesy of: PaintShop Pro Floating script courtesy of: