Old Testament
Job 12:7-10
7 “But ask the animals now, and they will teach you; the birds of the sky, and they will tell you.
8 Or speak to the earth, and it will teach you. The fish of the sea will declare to you.
9 Who doesn’t know that in all these, the LORD’s hand has done this,
10 in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind?
New Testament
Matthew 6:25-26
25 Therefore I tell you, don’t be anxious for your life: what you will eat, or what you will drink; nor yet for your body, what you will wear. Isn’t life more than food, and the body more than clothing?
26 See the birds of the sky, that they don’t sow, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns. Your heavenly Father feeds them. Aren’t you of much more value than they?
Job tells his friends to go and learn from creation: ask the beasts, the birds, the earth, the fish. Wisdom is not only in books and arguments. It is also in the lived, breathing world that the Lord has made and continues to hold in his hand.
Jesus, in Matthew 6, teaches the same humility of attention. Look at the birds. Consider the lilies. He is not romanticising nature as though it were painless; he is training anxious hearts to trust the Father. The point is not to stop working, but to stop worshipping worry.
Biodiversity is a kind of testimony. Variety in creatures, habitats, seasons, and interdependence is not an accident to be tolerated; it is a gift to be cherished. When that gift is thinned and broken, the poor often feel it first: through soil, water, heat, disease, and scarcity.
Lord, teach us to look and to listen. Give us the patience to learn from what you have made, and the courage to protect what is threatened. Keep us from anxious doom-scrolling and from lazy denial. And make us, as your people, gentler in our habits: brethren at one table, learning gratitude, restraint, and care in Christ.