Natural selection hammers the planet with physical challenge after physical challenge trying to weed out the evolutionary pretenders. Like a cruel school master, it schedules a never-ending series of tests to determine who will matriculate and who will be expelled. The students in this school of life are required to take earthquake, drought, and flood 101, as well as upper level courses in global warming and the ice age. Surprisingly, its prize pupil turns out to be a rebel who wants to rewrite the academic catalogue by scrubbing the survival of the fittest major and replacing it with a masters in mercy. A rebel who no longer wants to play by the rules of natural selection but rather by the commands of compassion. A rebel who wants to start a new program that ironically preserves evolutionary underachievers, enables the physically vulnerable, and comforts the emotionally fragile. A rebel who is somehow able to step outside the circle of life and question its cruelty. A rebel that recognizes that there is a spiritual reality beyond ones neurotransmitters.
What if this rebel wasn’t actually a graduate from an earthly school of hard knocks but rather the recipient of an honorary degree in heavenly image-bearing? What if he wasn’t a collection of chemicals undergoing cellular respiration but rather a body that breathed a different kind of spiritual air? A being whose way of thinking wasn’t shaped by survival but sympathy.
G.K Chesterton recognized this problem and made some very astute observations.
“The more we really look at man as an animal, the less he looks like one.”
“Man is not merely an evolution but rather a revolution”
“Man had pre-eminence’ over all the brutes; man was only sad because he was not a beast, but a broken God.”
“There may be a broken trail of stones and bones faintly suggesting the development of the human body. There is nothing even faintly suggesting such a development of the human mind.” (GK Chesterton)
We need to continue the rebellion by resisting the narrative that we are monkey’s uncles and reclaim our identity as image-bearers to the King. Maybe then we can bring a little bit of heaven to earth.
Photo by Robert Anasch on Unsplash
