Survival and Sacrifice

I hesitated about posting these photos because many of you may find them repulsive (I'm not saying they don't disgust me too), but I think it's important to understand the concepts of survival and sacrifice. Now, I'm not sure what happened here, whether the camel cricket just died and had been providing food for various creatures, or whether it was killed by another creature that didn't finish it and this baby cricket came along for a snack, but this is what I came upon one night:

In the animal world, food is food, and it doesn't matter that the carcass of a member of your species provides that nourishment. Crickets, like other animals, eat what they can get. But if you think about it this way, it doesn't seem so appalling: the adult cricket lived and died by some means, and now this baby cricket will help sustain itself from what would otherwise just decay and feed the earth. Later that night, I found that the cricket's body was gone. As I'm fairly certain that that little cricket couldn't eat the whole carcass, another animal must have dragged it off for its own meal. So, whether the body decays or is eaten, it feeds something. Nothing is wasted in nature. Only humans waste things, though they only do that when they live comfortably without any threat to their survival and see no need to save every scrap. A starving man would be just as resourceful as an animal is in the wild.

I believe that sin's entrance into the world is linked to the subsequent emergence of killing among animals and humans alike, but I also believe that as a result God has provided each creature, whether human or animal, with a drive for survival, a thirst for life and a tenacity to protect it. This may have been latent in creatures before the Fall; I don't know, but it has been manifesting itself ever since, and it's an inexorable force. Sometimes it reveals itself as pure self-preservation, which I'm sure Satan cheers for, but other times it is self-less, which must be an imperfect reflection of God's hatred of sin, realized in death, both physical and eternal. Animals, as I understand it, are born without souls, but humans do possess that immortal element, that droplet of the everlasting Spring that is God, and I think this desire for eternal life, which God represents, is present in all of us but is shown in various ways, some sinfully. Though animals are incapable of longing for or attaining eternal life, I think God has still provided them with a measure of His love for life, however much it may be overshadowed by their need to kill other animals and even humans for food and territory. After all, why else would animal mothers try to protect their young if not due to some inborn trait whereby it is essential that life must perpetuate itself, whatever the cost? Don't you think it pained God that this camel cricket died and other creatures fed off of it? This and every similar circumstance in nature is the result of sin, and to provide humans, who have souls that would ordinarily live in Hell after death, with redemption from this sin, it cost God, who is infinitely powerful and loving, the humiliation of living, suffering, and dying as a human (a criminal human, actually), and having to turn away from His Son (a part of Himself) as if He were the most sinful being ever created!

I challenge you to think about that.