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Advent HOPE Sabbath School

Matthew Priebe

Spotlights on Creation - Part 3

When we look at the world in which we live, what do we see?

The animals, the plants, the people, the land, the sea, the sky.

If not, then how do they relate to each other?

Ecology is the science dealing with the interactions of living organisms and the natural processes of the planet.

This science is huge and infinitely complex and has real, practical importance to our daily lives.

What can ecology teach us about God and the creation we live in?

No death, disease, danger, or competition existed.

When sin began, almost every aspect of life had to change.

Most ecology we see today is God's backup plan.

Without drastic intervention, life on earth would likely have ceased to exist.

So we should remember that the ecology we study today is not God's original plan, but rather his temporary way of dealing with the curse of sin.

Why do animals and plants live where they do?

Individual species live in very different conditions.

Finding out the reasons why tells us a lot about the way life works.

Why are natural habitats the way they are?

Why do deserts have cactus while prairies have grass?

Why do warm, sandy coastlines have palms and mangroves, while cold, rocky coastlines are dominated by seaweeds.

For example, wolves reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park have changed the entire ecosystem for the better.

Surprisingly, wolves have benefited species such as the quaking aspen, golden-eyed ducks, and grizzly bears.

Plant communities never stay totally unchanged.

New communities are constantly replacing the current species.

Some ecosystems need to be frequently burned to be healthy.

Animals and plants interact in amazingly complex ways.

Many cooperate with totally different forms of life.

We now know that 80% of plant species have symbiotic relationships with fungi.

Without the fungi, plants struggle to absorb nutrients from the soil that only fungi can digest.

This is why many crops fail and forests recover poorly from clear-cutting, since the crucial fungi are not taken into account by the farmers and the lumbermen.

So these basic examples show us what ecology is all about.

But how does this matter to us, and what does ecology show us about creation?

When we study ecology, we find that human survival depends upon many other species.

God has made plants and animals to serve special roles in his creation.

Plants provide us with both food and oxygen.

God has made insects to pollinate plants as they gather nectar from flowers.

Pollination is 1 of the most important processes in nature.

Without pollinators, we would have virtually no food, as most plants require this interactive process.

Forests are some of the richest habitats on earth, providing us with food, medicine, clothing, and shelter.

Forests host some of the greatest diversities of life.

God created a wide variety of plants for us to eat.

How we grow our crops has a huge impact on our health and daily lives.

The perfect system of Eden is long gone, but God replaced it with a workable system of checks and balances to maintain life even in a sinful world.

But even a casual examination of our world today finds a system breaking down.

Nothing seems to be working well anymore as we reach the end of time.

For we know that the whole creation groaneth and travaileth in pain together until now.

Part of this is Satan's constant efforts to weaken and destroy the works of God.

But much of the problem is our own disregard of God's principles of ecology.

Pesticides have destroyed entire species of native pollinators, and even honeybee colonies are collapsing.

Areas in China that have lost insect pollinators now require humans to hand pollinate each individual flower.

Do we really want to take on the arduous job of hand pollinating our food?

Insects pollinate plants for free and are happy to do it.

As humans use more and more water, the trees needing more water die, replaced by plants suited to drier conditions.

When grazing animals are allowed to graze at will, they tend to change the local plant life.

This combination has resulted in many forested areas first changing to grasslands and eventually becoming arid deserts.

Humans either must move away to try to survive in much more hostile conditions.

The rich warehouses of life in the forests are gone, and human life changes from prosperity to survival.

For restoring the ecosystem to the original conditions is usually difficult or impossible.

So When we look at the world we live in, we find that we need to be mindful of God's creation.

God gave us dominion over the plants and animals, and He expects us to fulfill our responsibilities.

When we do, God blesses us and keeps the system running well.

Ecology gives us a glimpse of God's design in all its many forms.

Let's look now at how ecology magnifies the greatness of God and the hopelessness of evolution.

When we look at a single cell, we find it stunningly complex.

Take away any part of it, and the rest will cease to function.

When we look at the complexity of a single species, we find it to be too complex and well-designed to be the result of random chance.

When we look at the infinitely more complex interrelations of all life, we find the impossibilities infinitely multiplied.

So when we examine life at any level of detail, it turns out to be irreducibly complex.

How can evolution account for the web of interactions that had to develop to make life possible?

Which part of the web of life came first?

Most life cannot survive without the support structure of the rest of nature.

But if originally there was virtually no life on Earth, how could anything have survived long enough to develop into the rich tapestry that we see now?

Only if nature is set in place at the very beginning, with all the parts fully interlinked, can life continue to thrive and prosper.

The study of ecology is the study of God's incredible planning and power.

Unless we understand the patterns that God has organized, we will forever be damaging what we don't understand, and we will all suffer.

The unmatched miracles of creation are a never-ending source of wonder and beauty that testify to the Creator who has given us this world to live in until He returns again." And now we're going to go back to the animals to shine a few more spotlights on the natural world.

Now we already did the fish, so what are we talking about now?

If we ever needed complete proof that animals were not placed on Earth for humans to exploit and enslave, We need look no farther than the teeming throngs of life found in the ocean.

These include fish and mammals, birds and reptiles, all designed for life in salt water.

But these are by far the minority of the underwater creation.

In fact, the more we study sea life, the more we find that we have barely scratched the surface of what God has placed in his world.

We are constantly discovering new forms of sea life.

Many animals in the ocean have never been used by humans for anything, as we didn't even know that they existed.

There is no way to cover all the marine invertebrates out there, so we will just focus on a few of the major groups to showcase the diversity of life God decided to craft.

The mollusks are 1 of the major groups, with many different variations.

Many have a single spiral shell with some of the most exquisite designs found in nature, as seen on many sandy beaches when old shells wash ashore.

All have the basic snail design, a single large foot for crawling locomotion that can be retracted into their own personal motorhome.

Other mollusks have 2 shells held together by a strong hinge, such as the clams and the mussels.

These are filter feeders that decontaminate large volumes of seawater as they filter out both food and pollutants.

Most of these are sedentary, anchored tightly to rocks or buried in the mud.

But scallops are able to clap their way through the water to escape predators.

Some reefs are studded with giant clams in electric colors and intricate patterns, sometimes reaching 6 feet across.

Spotlights on Creation - Part 3

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