I agree we are to love the Lord God with all of our soul and put Him first. There are people though who have put their spouses, children and pets as #1 and made them their idol and that is wrong. As a pet owner, I have prayed and asked for a dog to take care of in these last days and the Lord provided me with the perfect gift to love and to be a steward over and I am grateful for this precious gift. I like both Toy Fox Terriers and Dalmatians and this little guy the Lord wants me to take care is a Toy Fox Terrier but is rocking some serious freckles of a Dalmatian. The way I look at it ... paradise with all the fruit trees, flowering bushes, plants, rivers, ocean etc. would be lacking if animals and birds weren’t a part of it. I firmly believe the earthly Garden of Eden is a scaled down version of the glorious heavenly paradise that is waiting for us. I Cor 2:9 “But as it is written, Eye hath not seen, nor ear heard, neither have entered into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that love him.” Psalm 50:10-11 “For every beast of the forest is mine, the cattle on a thousand hills. I know all the birds of the hills, and all that moves in the field is mine." Proverbs 12:10 “Whoever is righteous has regard for the life of his beast ...” ———————————— -Fair Use- In love, we can “agree to disagree and to wait and see” :whistle: Amen to that. Again I'm not here to minimize or judge the relationships we have with pets, it's not in my pay grade! TR
From All-Creatures.org
Animals are included in God's Covenant with Noah in Genesis 9:5-17. It is prophesied in Hosea 2:18 that God will affirm His New Covenant with animals. “And in that day will I make a covenant for them with the beasts of the field and with the fowls of heaven, and with the creeping things of the ground: and I will break the bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, and will make them to lie down safely.” Ecclesiastes chapter 3:19-20 says that animals are equal with humans. “For that which befalleth the sons of men befalleth beasts; even one thing befalleth them: as the one dieth, so dieth the other; yea, they have all one breath; so that a man hath no preeminence above a beast: for all is vanity. All go unto one place; all are of the dust, and all turn to dust again.” Otherwise, how could they have atoned for man, for a season (until Jesus came, who's blood is superior in totally redeeming animal and man) in the Old Testament blood sacrifices. The fact that Hosea 2:18 says that God will include animals in His New Covenant and Romans 8 says that they are sub-heirs of the grace of life too, and we see a picture of their peaceful lives in the prophesies of Isaiah concerning the Messianic kingdom in Isaiah chapter 11, ought to prove that they have a right to a peaceful life here without fear of harm from mankind.
