The Highest Form of Life
Aren’t we clever!
The inventiveness of mankind seems to grow by the day. We can fly with the birds in our aeroplanes, swim with the fish in our submarines, and outpace the fastest animal on earth using one of our high powered cars. We can communicate with each other from one side of the world to the other in fractions of a second, both by sound and vision. What living creature has intelligence to compete with that of human beings?
All this is fine and expected, as God commissioned mankind, through Adam, to populate the earth and exercise control over all living creatures. Does it follow, then, that mankind, with such superior intelligence, is the highest form of life on this planet?
Well, no! It doesn’t necessarily follow. This site assumes that God is our creator and that He has revealed Himself to us through the Bible, in which the patriarch, Abraham, is described as the friend of God. I have heard it said that a man’s best friend is his dog, and I would suggest that this gives rise to a helpful analogy. Like most analogies, we must be careful not to push it too far.
Let us consider the relationship between a man and his dog, acknowledging that ‘man’ in this context comprehends both male and female. As far as both dog and master are concerned there is a real relationship. The dog shows loyalty and affection, shares fun and exercise, and is even sensitive to subtle mood changes in its owner. The man for his part provides food, shelter, affection and, most importantly, enjoys the dog’s devotion and company. Does this make man and his dog equals?
Can a dog read this website as you are doing? Can it manufacture and use a mobile phone? Can it build a spacecraft and travel to the Moon? Is it capable of the abstract thought that underlies maths, physics, chemistry and the like. The answer is clearly a negative, but does this make the animal unhappy? I would think not, for given the limitations of a dog, most things in its world are fine. The point I wish to emphasise especially, though, is that the dog is not capable of fully understanding its master and everything in its master’s world, but this doesn’t diminish the reality of the relationship between them.
Let us look now at the relationship between man and God as it is explained to us in God’s revelation to mankind, the Bible.
Man’s claims upon his dog as owner are strong, but God’s claims upon man are stronger still. God is more than our owner – He is our creator. He made us in order to have a relationship with us, and His claims upon us are paramount. Just as a dog does not fully understand his master and his master’s world, so we are incapable of fully understanding God and His ‘world’. The dog has its limitations, and we have ours. These will be discussed elsewhere on this site. In the meantime, I would suggest to you that . . .
If you are trying to fully understand God and the spiritual world before you are willing to believe, you are barking up the wrong tree!
Having said that, it must be emphasised that this does not affect the reality of the relationship between man and God. We need to bear in mind that God is the creator of everything from the universe to the subatomic. We weren’t there when He did it, and it is no surprise that we cannot fully comprehend our God’s creation, nor can we expect to fully understand God Himself.
If we kid ourselves that man is the highest form of life, I’m afraid this is not going to make it true. There is a higher form of life, and it would be most foolish for us to ignore the fact. We, too, like Abraham, need to be a friend of God.