Carnivores and the New Jerusalem

[Imaginosis]

According to Isaiah chaptes 11 and 65, there won't be carnivores in the new Earth and Heaven. I wonder, thought, how much is figurative language and what's to come?

What will carnivorouss whales eat? Is planckton meat or a plant?

 

[Willtor]

Plankton is a crustacean. It's neither meat nor plant, in Biblical taxonomy. But I tend to take all discussions of the life hereafter as figurative. If they can meaningfully be taken literally I have no problem with people who do so. However, I think the important part - the reason they are included by the authors - is that they are pictures of hopeful things. When people are oppressed there are images of justice and condemnation of the oppressors. When people are hopeless or weak, there are profound images of comfort. When people endure longsuffering, there are pictures of joy and no more tears.

Whether the roads are actually paved with gold (this seems like it would be an undesirable surface on which to walk) is one question. But certainly the image indicates abundance. Certainly, if the roads can be paved with gold, nobody is in want of food or shelter.

Where the lion lies down with the lamb there is security for someone who feels all too often like the lamb. Will we all be vegetarians? Will this question even make sense in that context? I don't know. Maybe. At any rate, I think there is a message for us, where we are; and if the various authors are communicating fact, that fact is of strictly secondary importance.

 

[shernren]

In Genesis 1 nothing is mentioned of God creating anything too small for the human eye to see. In Genesis 2 Adam named all the animals God created, but for Adam to have named something he must have been able to see it.

Therefore plankton, if it exists, could not have been created by God or named by Adam. However, everything which exists must have been created by God. Therefore plankton does not exist.

Plankton is an atheist myth designed to conceal the fact that there is no natural explanation for the sustenance of whales. Whales live directly on God's miraculous power, as shown by the fact that the whale did not starve even though Jonah was in his stomach, and yet Jonah was not digested by the whale so that Jonah could not have been the source of its sustenance.

However, atheists cannot believe that God sustains whales, so they dreamt up plankton to push God out of the picture. Remember, you have never seen plankton with your naked eye before, and you can't actually touch what you see under the microscope so you don't know that it's an illusion. Therefore there is no evidence that plankton exist, and this shows that plankton-o-belief is a religious belief among atheists, not a scientific belief.

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Parodies aside, I have actually seen quite a few commentators on my E-Sword notes explain the lion and lamb as figurative. According to them, this reflects how the grace of God operating in the Messianic Kingdom will so subdue those with the temperaments of lions, that those who would ordinarily be victimized by them as lambs will miraculously feel safe enough to even lie down with them. In modern terms, the tax collector will stop overcharging, the landlady will actually leave you alone for a few days before asking (politely) for the rent, and lawyers will start telling the truth, and those who were formerly victims will now be friends in the brotherhood of humanity.

 

[jereth]

It's figurative language. What we read in Isaiah (and elsewhere) about the new creation is an expression of the human longing for a new and perfect world. The language springs from the prophet's vivid imagination of what paradise will be like. It isn't God dictating to the prophet: "Tell them, this is how the new creation will be..."

The main point of lions eating grass etc. is that the new world will be one where we no longer feel threatened by the sting of death. It is not some kind of biological scientific statement.

Fact is, the Bible does not tell us in precise terms what the pre-fall world was like, and what the new creation will be like. These realities are beyond our current grasp and comprehension. So what we have in Genesis 1-2 about the beginning, and in the prophets and Revelation about the end, is merely figurative descriptions of paradise using pictures and ideas derived from our own current fallen, limited existence. We cannot infer too much from these passages.

An analogy would be trying to describe "colour" to someone who is blind from birth.

 

[billwald]

Veggieburgers will grow on bushes.