DESIGNED FOR DIRTY WORK

I want to thank The Creation Club for posting this article on their website! The Creation Club was formed by David Rives Ministries to give gifted writers and contributors a place to share their content relating to Biblical Creation. Check out their website for tons of great content on Biblical creation. ​

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2 Corinthians 5:5 Now it is God who has made us for this very purpose…

What was that created for? 

Turkey vulture perched on barbed wire fence in Athens, Georgia. June 3, 2015.

God created all things; and He created all things with a purpose.  But have you ever wondered why He created certain things? Other than to bring about man’s demise in the garden, what is the purpose of the snake? And why in the world did God create the mosquito?  Certainly, our backyard picnics and camping trips have not been enhanced by the presence of this irritating insect. Not only is its annoying buzz heard in the ears, but his sting is still felt three or four days after the bite.

But everything on this earth has a purpose. Sure we loathe the snake, but would you rather be overrun with rats and mice or tolerate the few snakes that inhabit your area? Mosquitoes may appear useless to us, but to bats, tadpoles, lizards and other critters, the little stinger is a primary source of food and can’t be lived without!  

Every person is also created with a purpose.  In Christian vocabulary, purpose is also known as “the will of God”. There is a “will of God” for every created thing. Webster’s dictionary defines will as “a particular desire, purpose, or choice of a certain person or group; a compelling command or decree; a strong and fixed purpose.”  God has a strong, fixed purpose for each and every person. In other terms, everything has a job to do and God has set the job description for each. 

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Whether Christian or not, God has a specific will for every individual. The apostle Paul recounted that immediately after conversion, God revealed the will for his life: “I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will show unto thee.” (i)

Even those hostile to God have a job assignment. To the hard-hearted pharaoh of Egypt God proclaimed, “But I have raised you up for this very purpose, that I might show you my power and that my name might be proclaimed in all the earth.” (ii)  

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“I have appeared unto thee for this purpose, to make thee a minister and a witness both of these things which thou hast seen, and of those things in the which I will show unto thee.” Acts 26:16

Somewhere in the middle are others that have a divinely appointed purpose but only begrudgingly complete it. One such person was the prophet Jonah. Jonah, like other prophets, was no doubt called to his task from before he was born. The Bible specifically states that the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah were ordained for their jobs before they were even born. To Jeremiah he said, “Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations.” (iii) Jonah’s divinely appointed job description was to reach the much despised foreigners of Nineveh; a task he considered a dirty job and “it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry.” (iv)  But that was what God had created him for, whether he liked it or not. ​​

Doing the dirty work...

When you consider different animals and their job duties, you quickly find that not every God-assigned purpose seems very attractive. Some animals have a very dirty job. Like the Dung Beetle. Who would want that job?! Many dung beetles, known as rollers, roll dung into round balls, which are used as a food source for brooding chambers. Other dung beetles, known as tunnelers, bury the dung wherever they find it. A third group, the dwellers, neither roll nor burrow: they simply live in manure. (v)

Another critter with a disgusting duty is the vulture. We have two species in Georgia: the Black Vulture and the Turkey Vulture. Both are large, sooty black birds often seen soaring the skies. The Black Vulture has a bald, wrinkled, black head. Turkey Vultures are larger, have longer and straighter wings, and bear scaly red heads. While they differ somewhat in appearance and biology, both carry the same job of carrion cleanup. Our roadways are often littered with lumps of fur and entrails; all that remains of the poor critters that didn’t make it across the road the night before. Normally, standing around these piles are a macabre host of ominous, large, black buzzards picking apart these rotten corpses. The word vulture likely comes from the Latin vellere, which means to pluck or tear. (vi)

Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura (left), and Black Vulture, Coragyps atratus (right), perched side by side in a dead tree. Athens, Clarke County, Georgia. USA. January, 2018.

It is no doubt for this disgusting habit of ripping into rotten carcasses that God pronounced, 'These, moreover, you shall detest among the birds; they are abhorrent, not to be eaten: the eagle and the vulture and the buzzard”. (vii)  I’m sure none would argue with God and substitute a Turkey Vulture as the main course on Thanksgiving! We abhor this big black bird as a disgusting creature. Our disgust comes from an assumption that this is what the vulture likes to do. But this is the job it has been assigned by God.  A nasty, but necessary job! He is God’s carrion cleanup crew. Its scientific name, Cathartes aura, means “golden purifier” (viii), perhaps because he helps keep America beautiful! 

I thank God that in my 18 years of animal control, I’ve never been assigned the duty of dead animal pickup. But some poor highway department employee’s job has been made so much easier by the vultures. A fresh, entire road-kill deer seen on the drive to work in the morning can be just a rib cage and fur on the drive back home later that evening. The vultures are quite efficient at quickly cleaning a corpse. To experiment, the Forensic Anthropology Research Facility in Texas placed a camera near a human cadaver and watched as a group of about 30 Black Vultures picked the dead body to a skeleton in just five hours. (ix) They excel at the job to which God has appointed them. ​​

Black Vulture on roadkill Deer. Walton County, Monroe, Georgia. August 2016.

No complaining...

Vultures always do their job without complaint. In my opinion, this makes them smarter than man. In fact, I think all animals are smarter than man in this aspect! We often laud the human species as the most intelligent life on this planet. But is this really the case? Humans the only species dumb enough to disobey God and buck at the duties assigned us. Animals never do this and always carry out their God-given tasks. Man is the only creature that disobeys! Often, when God says to a man, “don’t do that”, he does it. And when told “do this”, he doesn’t! But animals always obey. 

When an enemy nation attempted to hire the prophet Balaam to curse Israel, God told him, “Thou shalt not go with them”; a clear command not open to too much interpretation. Yet, “Balaam rose up in the morning, saddled his donkey, and went with the princes of Moab.” (x) But the prophet’s donkey, the “less intelligent creature”, three times halted course in an attempt to obey God. God said, “don’t do”, but the prophet did. Yet the donkey is considered the @$$ in this story? 

Turkey Vulture, Cathartes aura, in flight in blue sky. New world vultures are carrion crows that eat corpses, dead animals and roadkill. Athens, Clarke County, Georgia. USA.

On the other end, God says do, and we don’t. God specifically told the prophet Jonah, “Arise, go to Nineveh, and preach.” This was again a very clear command with little room for alternative interpretations. Not only did Jonah disobey and refuse to go, but “Jonah got up and went in the opposite direction in order to get away from the LORD. He went down to the seacoast, to the port of Joppa, where he found a ship leaving for Tarshish. He bought a ticket and went on board, hoping that by going away to the west he could escape from the LORD.” (xi) Yet when “the Lord appointed a great fish to swallow Jonah” (xii) , it instantly obeyed and went where God wanted it, when God wanted it, and swallowed up the disobedient prophet. Yet the fish is the more “primitive creature” in this story?

D.L. Moody wrote: Did you ever notice all but the heart of man obeys God? If you look right through history, you will find that this is true. In the beginning God said, "Let there be light," and there was light. "Let the waters bring forth," and the water brought forth abundantly. And one of the proofs that Jesus Christ is God is that He spoke to nature, and nature obeyed Him. At one time he spoke to the sea, and the sea recognized and obeyed Him. He spoke to the fig tree, and instantly it withered and died. It obeyed literally and at once. He spoke to devils, and the devils fled. He spoke to the grave, and the grave obeyed Him and gave back its dead. But when He speaks to man, man will not obey Him; that is why man is out of harmony with God, and it will never be different until men learn to obey God. 

Have you ever had a coworker who complains all the time? It can be very frustrating. Not only are we to get a job done, but as Christians, it matters with what attitude we get the job done.  Webster’s Dictionary also defines purpose as determination, energy and enthusiasm; to do something “with purpose”. For the Vultures – eating rotten carcasses is what they live for! They live to do what they were created to do – riding the thermals high in the sky in search of rotting flesh – enthusiastic to do the will of God! 

Even Jesus, who had the dirtiest job of all, being tortured and executed for crimes He did not commit, “opened not His mouth” in complaint and accepted the will that God had for His life. Paul wrote to the Philippian church members, “Your attitude should be the same that Christ Jesus had. God is working in you, giving you the desire to obey him and the power to do what pleases him. 14 In everything you do, stay away from complaining and arguing.” (xiii) A vulture will stick his head in a rotten corpse in obedience to the job God assigned it, yet we won’t obey in simpler, much less disgusting things? So you tell me, who is the smarter species? Perhaps we humans should learn the lesson that creation speaks and do His will without question! ​

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Perfectly designed to do His will...

Not only has God given the vulture a specific job description of cleaning up carcasses, but He has also equipped him for the task.  Many animals will eat carrion, but few are as perfectly designed so like the vulture. God has designed them for their job in several specific ways:

• Eye Black. A vulture spends much of its time soaring in the sky looking for his next meal. To enhance their ability at spotting their job, they are designed by God with black around their eyes to reduce the glare of bright sunlight. The Turkey Vulture’s red head has black stripes under his eyes like the black greasepaint under a football players eyes.  (xiv)
• Sense of Smell. While we would rather not smell the odor of a dead animal, the vulture is designed with an enhanced sense in order to locate that next rotten carrion meal. The part of its brain responsible for processing smells is particularly large compared to other birds. It can detect just a few parts per trillion which allows it to find dead animals below a forest canopy. (xv)
• Featherless heads. Eating a carcass is nasty, but imagine eating one with your hands tied behind your back! You would be forced to stick your face right into the cadaver. All the putrid flesh and guts would stick in your hair. (God help you if you have a mustache and beard!) Vultures are designed by God with featherless heads. A bald head of skin, rather than a feathered head, makes it much easier to shake off those nasty bits of bacteria-laden carrion after a hearty meal.  
  
• Strong stomachs. Few stomachs in the animal kingdom can match the strong stomach of the vulture. Vultures can eat carrion that has lain rotting for days and has succumbed to the effects of decay and disease. God gave them strong stomach acids to kill the bacteria of the rotting flesh before it makes them ill.  Their stomach acids are almost 1,000 times more acidic than ours; so acidic that it can dissolve many metals! (xvi)
  
• Acidic Urine. When you stand around rotting road-kill, your feet and legs have the tendency to become contaminated. The vulture was designed with strong, acidic, bacteria-burning urine. After each meal he urinates down his legs to burn off the bacteria and “clean” his feet and legs.  (xvii)
  
• Immune system. To battle the host of bacteria and diseases in rotting flesh, God has equipped the vulture with an incredible immune system. Vultures are noted as having one of the “strongest immune systems of all vertebrates” and there are few food-borne diseases that truly pose a threat to it. They are immune to botulism and anthrax; they also have no problem eating an animal infected with rabies, hog cholera and numerous other diseases that would ultimately be lethal to most other scavengers. *(xviii)
  

It is clearly illustrated that the vulture is perfectly designed to accomplish his God-given job of carcass clean up. God not only gives His creatures a specific job, but equips them to complete that job. We too are created, designed, and custom made to do the will of God. He has equipped us with talents, abilities and personalities to do His will.  And the will of God is the only thing that matters in life. Jonah’s biography begins with his call to Nineveh. From an eternal perspective, nothing else that had occurred in Jonah’s life up to this point was worth chronicling in Scripture. His God-appointed job was the most important thing in his life. Jonah was created for his time and purpose.  The will of God is what is most important in our lives. 

Stopping the plague...

Although vultures carry the reputation of being nasty, disease and death spreading creatures, the opposite is true. Vultures help decrease the spread of disease, plague and death. Without vultures, unless we quickly bury them, corpses will litter the landscape, decaying flesh will contaminate the water supplies and bacteria and disease could spread without check. Vultures truly play a role in stopping the plague. 

Vultures are known as “dead-end hosts” and do not further spread diseases. Think about it, as other animals come to feed on a rotten corpse, they end up with bacteria on their heads, feet, feathers and fur. Finishing their meal, they then walk off with contaminated footprints, go back to their dens, raid the cat food in your garage, pollute the stream, and pass it on through their feces to other animals to get sick and spread further. But with vultures, the strong acids in their digestive systems kill off most bacteria present in carrion. So when a vulture eats a diseased animal, the spread of the disease ends there because it will likely be neutralized by the vulture’s body. Therefore, in areas with a high vulture population, the risk of disease spreading from dead bodies is relatively low. However, when a vulture population declines, the rate of disease will climb as the bodies of animals are inevitably left to rot and are consumed by, not dead-end hosts, but potential carriers. (xix)

We can halt the plague of disease and death when we accept and carry out our God-assigned job descriptions. Jonah was called to preach to the Ninevites in order to clean up the rotting disease of sin within their city and halt its contaminating spread to surrounding cultures. When he finally decided to obey and did his job, “the people of Nineveh believed God, and proclaimed a fast, and put on sackcloth, from the greatest of them even to the least of them.” (xx)  In the book of Numbers, because of the sin of rebellion, a plague began to spread among the people and over 14,000 people succumbed to illness and died. To end the plague, God told Aaron to light a censor and bring the smoking incense between the diseased and the living. Aaron’s quick, unquestioning acceptance of his job stopped the spread from the corpses to the people. “And he stood between the dead and the living; and the plague was stayed.” (xxi)

God puts a hold on the spread of bacteria and diseases by assigning carrion clean up to the vulture. But aside from this practical aspect, the vulture speaks a valuable lesson: we Christians are called to halt a plague. Like Aaron with his flaming censer, we are to place ourselves in front of the tide of advancing sin and decay; to “stand between the living and the dead” and preach the cleansing Gospel of Jesus Christ. We do this by simple obedience to the will of God. But will God find us, like the vultures, ready and willing to “do the dirty work” which He has assigned us? Can creation speak to us? If a vulture can stick his face in a putrid carcass without complaint, can we not be willing to do the will of God? If Jesus can silently accept the cross shouldn’t we accept any job which always works to the good in our lives?

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Donations help me print materials such as flyers, coloring books and brochures to aid in talks in schools and church groups. I am looking to expand and improve my responsible pet care talks at schools and other groups and wish to purchase props and other materials. Since I am not a hunter, donated funds are also used to purchase mounts for presentations.

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i  Acts 26:16
ii  Exodus 9:16 NIV
iii  Jeremiah 1:5
iv Jonah 4:1
v  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dung_beetle
vi  http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Turkey_Vulture/lifehistory
vii  Leviticus 11:13
viii  http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Turkey_Vulture/lifehistory
ix  https://sciencebasedlife.wordpress.com/2012/02/08/how-long-does-it-take-for-vultures-to-eat-a-human-body/
x  Numbers 22:12, 21
xi  Jonah 1:3 New Living Translation
xii  Jonah 1:17
xiii  Philippians 2:5, 13-14
xiv  https://answersingenesis.org/birds/lesser-yellow-headed-vulture/
xv  http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Turkey_Vulture/lifehistory
xvi  http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/10/dont-vultures-get-sick-eating-dead-things-cant/
xvii  https://answersingenesis.org/birds/lesser-yellow-headed-vulture/
xviii  http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/10/dont-vultures-get-sick-eating-dead-things-cant/
xix  http://www.todayifoundout.com/index.php/2014/10/dont-vultures-get-sick-eating-dead-things-cant/
xx  Jonah 3:5
xxi  Numbers 16:48