Day 5

Genesis 1:20-23

Back on day 3 God created the first life, which was unconscious in the form of plants and trees. He placed it in the soil He revealed that same day, ground which contained minerals which is non life. On day 4 He moved off planet making stellar bodies…no life there whatsoever, and not hospitable to the idea.

Now on day 5 He will make fish and birds which will partake of those minerals and plants. They are conscious life, eating unconscious life. On day 6 He will create animals which are self-conscious life, and man, representing God-conscious life.

There represent different kingdoms. The lower kingdom is what we would call the mineral. That is, the minerals, the rocks, and things that are placed in the earth. That’s the lowest stratum, that’s the lowest kingdom. [non-life]

And, then above that is a higher kingdom that we would call the vegetable kingdom. These are living things. And, so that makes them higher than minerals, but the vegetable kingdom doesn’t have conscience life. [unconscious life]  You may talk to your plants, but I really doubt that it does much good.  They used to say music helps, but I don't know.

Then, above that is the animal kingdom. Animals have conscious lives and many of them are even self-conscious, so we put the animal kingdom above the vegetable kingdom, which is above the mineral kingdom, but animals don’t have a spirit like human beings do. Animals are not made in the image of God like human beings are. Humans have God-conscious life.

Above the human kingdom is the Kingdom of God. Now, the question comes. How can you move from one kingdom to another kingdom? It’s very obvious that the mineral kingdom cannot by its own efforts place itself into the vegetable kingdom. And, vegetables cannot by their own effort place themselves into the animal kingdom. And, animals by their effort cannot place themselves into the human kingdom. And, humans cannot by their efforts place themselves into the Kingdom of God.

But, the mineral kingdom may move into the vegetable kingdom. How? Well, those vegetables put down their roots into the ground and absorb those minerals and those minerals actually become vegetable. And, the vegetable kingdom may move up into the animal kingdom. Because the animal is grazing, or feeding on those green things and bringing those things up into the animal kingdom as they feed upon them.

And, then that animal kingdom may be a part of the human kingdom. Because we take old Bessie and turn her in to filet mignons, and rump roast, and such. And, then we serve her for Sunday dinner and she becomes a part of the human kingdom. And, she’s absorbed and lifted and brought up into the human kingdom and correspondingly, we can be brought up into the Kingdom of God, not by our own efforts, but God Himself can reach down and bring us up into His Kingdom. The Bible calls this being born again. We can’t do it by our own efforts. Our maker actually sent His Son to put down roots here on our sod for that purpose.

Let’s look at day 5.

v. 20 could be translated: “Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.”  We still are discovering new things there. Those dark depths are as difficult to explore as outer space. We have explored about 10% of the oceans. We have named a quarter million species, and estimate there could be 25 million more unnamed. And that’s only reflective of species currently alive. So much has gone extinct. For instance, at least 70% of land animals God created no longer exist. We can’t estimate the sea-going creatures because we know so little about them. But their habitat wasn’t as affected by the great flood as was the land. Noah brought every kind on the ark, but that was no guarantee of survival in the new barren world left behind.

So He first of all filled the waters.  This is the first time we really have a living creature that moves on its own.  “Life” here is the Hebrew word nephesh.  Literally, nephesh means “that which breathes.”  Just instantaneously, at the same moment on that same day, they all came into existence.  They were not somehow in a process of development.

Then the birds: They are free to fly, literally in the Hebrew, on the face of heaven.  That’s a wonderful picture because you could translate it they fly in front of heaven, as if heaven were all the way up into the very limitless ends of the eternity of space that God has made and the great expanse of heaven. A great mystery is how many bird species may not have survived the flood. Once land disappeared, where would they find refuge? Could they survive on floating debris?  Humans could not. Would there be enough to eat? But birds ability to fly adds another dimension to their survival ability. But in Gen. 6:17 God said He would destroy all flesh.

Then verse 21 could be translated, “created the great sea monsters.”  Why did it mention those?  You know, when it mentions the creation of plants and trees it didn’t mention apple trees or oak trees.  It didn’t mention any particular kind of plant.  Why be more specific here?  There are a lot of other things in the sea.  Why them? 

We can find several Old Testament references to sea creatures.  There’s Leviathan.  Leviathan is this massive, powerful sea creature. (Job 41) God asks Job, “Can you hook and control Leviathan?”  It was a dragon or dinosaur. There’s also mention in the Old Testament of the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent of the waters. Is that Nessie, still in Loch Ness? 

Job 26:13

¹³ By his spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent.

Why does he bring it up? 

I think the answer can be found in this.  In ancient mythology, there have always been these very bizarre legends about sea monsters.  The ancient pagans believed that the gods were sea monsters.  Even the Philistines had a god, Dagon, who’s half man/half fish.  The ancients wrote epics about them.  This began to influence that whole part of the world where they saw the sea monsters as evil gods in rebellion against the good gods. 

Isaiah 27:1

¹ In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.

When the children of Israel came to the Land of Canaan, they came across Canaanite poetic legends about the gods taking on the form of these great sea monsters.  That would have been in the minds of the people at the time of Moses when he wrote Genesis.  The Jews had been apparently influenced by these pagan myths, which were ridiculous and foolish, and just in a marvelous way, the spirit of God prompts Moses in recording the inspired account of creation that came to Moses from God to write down “and God created the sea monster.”

They aren’t false gods, they aren’t false deities, they aren’t symbols of evil.  They’re creatures that God made just the way He made all of the rest. 

Psalms 148:7

⁷ Praise the LORD from the earth, ye dragons, and all deeps:

It just puts that little note in there to dispel all of the bizarre mythology. 

“It was good.” There couldn’t be any progress, any mutation, any natural selection, because God saw it all and it was good and there was no death in the universe at all.  Animals didn’t eat each other at that point.  It’s a reasonable assumption. 

This conscious life of fish and bird was the first examples of reproductive life.  It’s enough to imagine human reproduction and how God can do that, but just take that into every species in creation, the most small, tiny, microscopic kind of creation all the way to the largest land mammals and seagoing mammals and dinosaurs, and all of the reproductive processes all encoded in the DNA, all that information put in every single cell of every single creature reproducing its own kind. 

v. 22        This is repeated to man in v. 28. It’s repeated to Noah in order to re-populate the earth.

So God gave this created order in the sky and in the sea, reproductive capability.  All living creatures are complex machines.  All living organisms characteristically have three properties.  They are self-sustaining.  Secondly, they are self-repairing.  That is they fix themselves as they go.  And most definitively, they are self-reproducing. 

So far, humans have never, by all of our science, been able to manufacture anything like that.  So what about AI? We can’t come up a computer that sustains its own life and provides its own energy, repairs itself and has little computers.  We don’t have such a machine and the reason is the complexity of it is too vast.  And yet every single cell that exists does just that.  This is an assurance of permanence.  This is an assurance of propagation.  It has nothing to do with evolution.  Each kind will multiply.  Each kind will reproduce its same kind with some slight variation, of course, within the kind. 

Some ask, “Well, why does it say birds multiply on the earth?  Birds fly.”  Well they do fly, but they don’t multiply in the air.  They’ve got to go to a nest.  That’s where they cohabitate, that’s where they land to mate and hatch their eggs. 

So man’s house is built.  It’s now ready for his occupancy and the crown of creation comes on day six.  What is so sad is that man refuses to see God in creation.  Isn’t that sad?  He refuses to hear God in conscience, suppresses the truth, plunges into deeper darkness and hopelessness. 

Donald Barnhouse once wrote, “God gives man brains to smelt iron and make a hammer,” a hammerhead and nails.  “God grows a tree and gives man the strength to cut it down and the brains to fashion a hammer handle from the wood.  And when man has the hammer and the nails, God will put out His hand and let man drive nails through it, place him on a cross in the supreme demonstration that men are without excuse.” 

It is a dishonor to God to believe anything other than what Genesis says. Anything less is an affront to God.  To make matter self-creating, to make the complex diversity of this created universe the product of chance is to give chance more credit than God.  We start worshipping God in Genesis 1, when we worship Him as creator.