four most important biblical passages for a Christian enviromentalism, The

While God may not be chuckling gleefully as he provides this description, it is evident that he is taking great delight in a prize creation and is happy to point out "how utterly and awesomely useless (to us) are some of the creatures he has made."15 After extending his point by means of a similar description of "leviathan" (41:1-10), God emphatically declares, "Who has a claim against me that I must pay? Everything under heaven belongs to me" (41:11; emphasis added). Against Job's presumption God is graciously offering the reminder that he does not owe man anything.

While somewhat less dramatically, our psalm makes a similar point.

Here we are shown that it is not just man's needs, certainly not his physical ones, that explain God's manifold creation.16 Apparently God has a vital interest in scurrying pikas, nesting storks, tiny marine creatures, and the prowling nocturnal animals of the deep forest and jungle. He has given them each appropriate shelter and he satisfies their bellies with "good things" (v. 28). And all this interest is for the creatures' own sakes without reference to man's physical sustenance.17 In fact, the psalmist makes a point of drawing a sharp line between the economy of these beasts and the economy of man. "The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God The sun rises, and they steal away: they return and lie down in their dens. Then man goes out to his work, to his labor until evening" (vv. 21-23; emphasis added). A life unrelated to the needs of man is forever going on. Therefore, any ardent anthropocentrism must be radically, perhaps categorically, qualified. Though man is undeniably the focus of God's creative and redemptive work there is an almost overwhelming fecundity to life that simply cannot be explained by reference to human nourishment and comfort. Again, only God can supply an adequate frame of reference. It is precisely this theocentrism that will rescue us from the greed or indifference that so easily invade an anthropocentric view. Keeping God at the center of the universe will help us to behave.

The third major contribution of Psalm 104 has to do with the perfection of God's creation. It is in v. 24 that this emerges most powerfully. "How many are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you made them all" (emphasis added). This reference to divine wisdom operating in the making of "all" of God's creatures speaks of the perfection inherent in each different species. Every animal and plant species that exists owns perfection as a result of the exercise of God's wisdom in creation. John Calvin wrote,

God has been pleased to manifest his perfections in the whole structure of the universe.... On each of his works his glory is engraven in characters so bright, so distinct, and so illustrious, that none, however dull and illiterate, can plead ignorance as their excuse.18

But the conceptual pressure from the larger message of the psalm tells us that not only was each individual species made perfectly but that God's wisdom is seen in the perfection of the way individual species relate to each other to form biotic communities occupying well-defined life zones.