14/09/2026
SCRIPTURE ON THE CARE OF ANIMALS
Our plea to the church who is protecting the identity of the man who perpetrated unthinkable cruelty on animals in Livingstone.
***Creation, cruelty and the stewardship of living things — texts and a note for preaching. All quotations King James Version.***
Why the protection of animals is a Christian obligation
The care of animals is not a sentimental addition to Christian faith.
It follows directly from what the Church already confesses about God.
Scripture teaches that God made the animals, pronounced them good before any human being existed to find them useful, and holds the life of every creature in his hand (Genesis 1:21, 25; Job 12:10).
He feeds them, he covenants with them, and he does not forget the fall of a single sparrow (Psalm 147:9; Genesis 9:9–10; Luke 12:6). The dominion granted in Genesis 1:26 is defined one chapter later as tending and keeping a garden: the office of a steward who must give account for what was entrusted to him, not the licence of an owner who may do as he pleases.
The Law then makes the duty concrete — rest for the working ox, food for the animal that treads the grain, help for the fallen beast even when it belongs to an enemy, the mother bird left unharmed. And Proverbs states the principle without qualification: “A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.”
That verse does not place the treatment of animals at the edge of the moral life. It places it at the centre, and makes it a measure of the person. Deliberate cruelty to a creature is therefore not a minor fault or a private eccentricity: it is the abandonment of the stewardship God assigned, contempt for something he made and called good, and — as Proverbs 11:17 warns — an injury the cruel man finally does to himself.
Where a congregation says nothing about such an act, it teaches by its silence that some of God’s creatures fall outside his mercy.
Scripture says that NONE OF THEM DO.
