Luke 12:6-7 Are not five sparrows sold for two pennies? Yet not one of them is forgotten by God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Don’t be afraid; you are worth more than many sparrows.

One of the devil’s biggest lies is about the value of life. On the one hand he has convinced some people that animal life is as valuable as human life. The extreme example of that is the Jain religion in India, where people wear masks, not for health reasons but to avoid breathing in insects and killing them. Here, Jesus directly refutes that, saying that human life is worth more than that of many animals. I do understand attachment to pets, and have wept at the death of several that have been part of my life, but placing animals on the same plane as humans is a terrible deception. The other side of this deception is saying that human life has no value. The devil loves that one! Stalin famously said, “Five deaths is a tragedy. Five million deaths is a statistic.” France recently took someone to court for saying that abortion was death, when they very accurately wrote that abortion was the leading cause of death in the world. The number is several times greater than that for cancer or heart disease, but the government position is that until a child is born they are less than human. It isn’t an insect growing in the womb! The point is, none of these things are escaping God’s notice. Another lie closely related to this is when people believe that they themselves are worthless. This lie is generally pounded home by various forms of abuse, but social media is currently a favorite tool of the devil. Young people, children, are convinced that their value depends on the number of “likes” they get, and an epidemic of suicides is the result. And I won’t even go into the whole scene of drug and alcohol dependency. Those who know God, who know their own value because they are created and loved by God, need to be tireless in sharing that awareness with others to liberate them from the destructive lies of the devil.

I have always had a high view of my own value (!) but haven’t always valued others properly. I am very much against cruelty to animals, but I am certainly not a vegetarian. I have had a wide variety of pets, with dogs in the greatest number, and I have mourned each one when they died, but I don’t think I have placed them on the level of human beings. That said, the death of pets when I was a child helped me understand that death is a part of life, and I think I respond much more calmly to human death than most people. That’s not to say I take it lightly! A famous, and I think, misunderstood, verse is found in Psalms: “Precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants.” (Psalm 116:15) I think “precious” there should be taken as, “of great significance.” Death isn’t to be taken lightly, but it is still a part of physical life. I am to be dedicated to bringing as many people as possible to the faith that gives them eternal life, so that physical death is no more than a bump in the road.

Father, this is a huge subject, one of the biggest. Help me keep growing in my own grasp of it, and help me draw others into Your life by repentance and faith, for their salvation and Your glory. Thank You. Hallelujah!