Day 6, pt. 1

A Turnkey Earth

Genesis 1:24-26

It’s Day 6! The first five days really were just outfitting the house in which man would live.  Man is the pinnacle of God’s creation made in His image.  And all the rest of the creation simply provided preparations for man’s arrival on the scene.  And even on day six, there was a finishing touch added in the form of land animals. The earth is move-in-ready…turnkey!

That was the final touch as God was preparing the house in which man would live.  Man was the object.  Man was the main focus.  It was the creation of man that God really had in mind. His plan was not only to create man, but to redeem him from the sin which He foresaw. 

In the end, everything else in the universe, other than man, will perish and go out of existence.  The stars will fall – according to the book of Revelation – the sun will go out.  The moon will come to an end.  The whole universe will roll up like a scroll.  The whole creation will melt with fervent heat.  It will be dissolved in an act of uncreation.

All of the atomic energy it took to put it into place will spin in reverse like running the film backward in the projector, and it will be uncreated and all of it will go out of existence.  Everything that lives on this earth, every green thing, every plant, every tree, every occupant of the sea, every occupant of the sky, and every land animal, every creature anywhere in the universe will die and go back to dust and even that dust will go out of existence.  But not man.

Man is the main character and the whole unfolding of creation is to create a theater in which the great redemptive saga can be played out as God seeks a bride for his Son, as God seeks to demonstrate his grace and mercy and compassion and saving power to a universe of angels, as well as men.

We find the text in Genesis spending far more time on the creation of man than any other element of the creation, and also all of chapter 2 expands on that creation of man because it is so critical. But let’s talk today about the animals created on Day 6.

He created living creatures, and he refers to the land animals in three broad categories.  This breakdown isn’t intended to be a detailed taxonomy of animals such as amphibians and reptiles and mammals and so forth.  The Bible just gives you three simple categories:  Cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth.

Cattle –almost all Hebrew scholars agree on this – is a word that speaks of a wide range of animals which can be tamed and domesticated for man’s use.  We think immediately when we think of domesticated, we think of a dog, but that’s not what the Bible would have in mind, since a dog really has no use unless you’ve trained it to get the paper.  It can’t pull a plow. I suppose a dog can herd sheep if it’s appropriately trained, and maybe then it would fit into that category.  But generally, these would be the kind of animals, for example, that would provide milk, such as a goat and a cow.  Or an animal that could be ridden such as a beast of burden. 

And then the second category is creeping things.  And, of course, immediately comes to mind snakes and lizards and such.  But it probably stretches way beyond that.  Insects would be part of this. We don’t like insects, we don’t want to see them, and so we make great efforts to kill them. We feel like we have them subdued. But it is estimated that there are 1.4 billion insects…per person on earth! Even bacteria are alive and creeping. There’s a billion of them in a teaspoon of dirt! The total estimate of bacteria that live around us is five million trillion trillion. The number would look like this: 5,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000. An easier way of putting this would be “five with 30 zeros after it’’ or, if you are a strict mathematician: 5 x 10 to the 30th power. And that’s just the kiosk at McDonalds! Though microscopic, if stacked on top of each other they would be a trillion light years long, or wider than the known universe! And God created it all.

Anything that creeps or crawls on the ground or in the ground, that would include small animals with short legs who appear to just be scurrying across like squirrels, chipmunks, and the rabbits that come into our yard and eat the flowers. The Hebrew here suggests short legged animals whose bellies are not far from the ground. Such animals are referred to, by the way, in…

Leviticus 11:29

²⁹ These also shall be unclean unto you among the creeping things that creep upon the earth; the weasel, and the mouse, and the tortoise after his kind,

And then the third category, beasts of the earth, would be four-legged animals of some size which are generally not tamed.  We think immediately of lions and giraffes and elephants and rhinos and hippos and tigers and animals like that that are not domesticated for any purposes of man.

Now I want to point out the fact that all three were simultaneously made.  Because look at verse 24.  “Cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth.”  Somebody might say, “Ah, the cattle came first and out them evolved the creeping things, and out of them evolved the beasts of the earth.”  That’s a problem because you have repeat of the very same thing in verse 25, only it’s in reverse order.  The beasts of the earth come first, the cattle come second, and the creeping things come third.  So, the mixing of the order is a very good way to indicate to us that these were created simultaneously.

No evolution, no struggle for existence, no survival of the fittest, no mutations at all.  God just created all these animals.  And isn’t it astounding the variety of it all?  It all bears the marks of the Creator. They all have such incredible design that you know there must be some incredible Designer! It’s just mind boggling that God has such a vast capability intellectually to conceive of and design all these creatures.  But he did.

And verse 24, “Let the earth bring forth.”  Now why did he say that?  I think it’s just another way of saying “let them appear on the earth.”  But it also is true – and I need to point this out – that the bodies of animals are composed of the same elements as the earth.  That’s right.  The bodies of animals are composed of the same chemical elements as the earth and they come out of the earth to be shaped and formed, and when they die they go back to the earth, as it were.  Because they’re made of the same elements.

In fact, that is true of man, even. 

2:7           And so with the same components that made the earth, God made the animals. 

Living creatures have consciousness, but not necessarily self consciousness.  They are conscious of their environment so they can react to it.  A dog can get out of the way of a car, or learn to obey a command.  Even Shamu can be trained to dive out of the water and touch its nose on a ball 20 feet in the air.  And they can train them to do that because they are conscious of their environment and they attach that to getting a reward of food.

But that doesn’t mean they’re self conscious.  They can react to their environment, but they don't know they exist. They don’t ponder their place in the world.  They have consciousness without self consciousness.  And when they die, they just go back to dust.  They’re in the world simply as part of the décor as God displays his wonder to the intended inhabitant of the earth, man, the only one who is made in God’s image.

By the way, the formation of plants occurred before the creation of any animal life, before the fish and before the birds.  And that contradicts flatly the traditional evolutionary system, which says that all animal life started in the sea and crawled out of the sea at some point over hundreds of millions of years, and it crawled out of the sea and coincidentally, once it got on land, then plants evolved.  But what you see in Genesis is plants being created first, vegetation, and then was the creation of the sea creatures, the air creatures, and the land creatures.

“after their kind”

Although there are variations, there are limitations on that variation.  One doesn’t evolve into the other.  And that’s repeated ten times in Genesis chapter 1, as if God knew somebody would come along and try to tell a lie about one kind becoming another kind.

It says at the end of verse 24, “And it was so.”  And we’ve heard that before.  When God did it, it was so.  That’s an important little phrase.  It’s not just thrown in there to fill space.  It occurred back in verse 9.  It was so.  It occurred back in verse 11.  It was so.  Back in verse 15, it was so.  And here in verse 24 it was so.  It means it was fixed, it was firm, it was permanent, and that’s the way it stayed.

The creation of these land creatures gets a comment from God at the end of verse 25.  Basically, God saw that it was good.  And God has been saying this, by the way, all along.  Verse 4 tells us that God saw the light was good.  Verse 10, God saw that the dry land and the sea was good.  Verse 12, the plants were good.  Verse 18, the stellar bodies, that was good, too.  Verse 21 the creatures of the sea and the air, that was good.  Verse 25, the land animals, that was good.  And finally verse 31, after he made man, it was very good.

How good is His animal creation?

Consider the giraffe. Look at that long neck. It’s good at reaching high foliage. But it has predators. It must be cautious. When it bends down to drink all the blood tries to go to its head. It’s heart is very powerful in order to be able to pump blood up to the brain when it is upright, but when it goes down to drink the blood pressure would normally cause its head to explode. But God put a valve in there that closes in that moment. No other animal has such a valve. It regulates that pressure. But oh no, it senses a pack of predators coming its way. It must quickly raise its head and start to run. But you can’t just raise your head that fast and not pass out when the valve was closed. You can’t wait for the heart to pump more blood all the way up that long neck. You’ve gotta raise up fast and get out of Dodge! And so God gave it another little gift like no other has. A little sponge right beside that valve and the brain, and it stays soaked with a reserve of fresh blood for such an occurrence. It squeezes into the brain in the panic of the moment. Evolution says giraffes evolved from zebras who kept trying to stretch for higher and higher foliage. Are they saying that right at the same moment as they transitioned to have longer necks they also developed the valve and the sponge? No, they say they developed it of necessity over a long period. So you’re telling me all my ancestors didn’t have this trait but somehow they all avoided passing out and being eaten? And why didn’t the brachiosaur beside him have the valve and sponge? He moved slowly all the time with almost no predators. Only God could conceive such a grand design! Yes, God saw that it was good.

The woodpecker would have deadly brain damage from traumatic head injury if not for having a very long tongue that wraps entirely around its brain, cushioning it on the inside. But evolution says they came from another kind of bird that decided to start pecking out holes in trees. But again, their ancestors had to peck their brains out for generations, but somehow here I exist, their descendant! These evolutionists make fools of themselves and all I can say is “ah-huh-ha-huh-huh!” [Woody] Yes, God saw that it was good.

Everything God made was good.  No deformities.  No mutations.  No inferiorities.  No natural selection, no survival of the fittest, because there were no unfit animals.  It was all good.  There was no imperfection.  There wasn’t even death in the world.  Death wouldn’t come until man sinned in chapter 3.  But at this point the earth was ready for man.  Man, who was to be the king of the earth and have dominion over it.

By the way, the Lord must have created all the animals in just the first part of day six.  Because the rest of the day was for creating man, and it was somewhat involved. 

Creating the earth and the whole universe and everything that was in it was merely the stage for the plan of God to unfold.  You ask, “Well, was it necessary to do all that creation?”  Sure.  Because that creation spoke about God and who he is, and it told man of his greatness and his glory and his power, didn’t it?  The heavens declare what?  The glory of God.  The firmament shows his handiwork.  Consider the heavens! In Romans 1 says you look at the earth and you can see that God exists so that his invisible nature is manifest by his visible creation and we’re without excuse.  All that was to reveal who God is.

And you look at the creation and you see his power, and you see his intelligence, and you see his wisdom, and you see his love of beauty, his incredible mind, and staggering wisdom.  You see his softness and gentleness and tenderness in the petal of a flower.  You see his power in the lightning, in the thunder and in the massive bodies that careen through endless space in the billions of galaxies that exist out there.  All of that puts God on display.

But what puts God on display in an especially remarkable way is that he is gracious enough to save sinners.  And that could never be demonstrated, that God is gracious, God is merciful, God is forgiving, God is kind, God is tenderhearted, that could never be displayed unless there were some sinners out there that God could be gracious to, right?

So somewhere before the foundation of the world there was a plan put in place.  And God, who cannot lie – 2 Timothy 1:9 says, “purposed in Christ Jesus to redeem humanity.”  First he had to purpose to create them.  And then the plan was we’re going to bring to glory a redeemed humanity.

We have angels also being created at this time, and they were created for the glory of God.  But beyond that there’s no grace shown to angels, so God can’t display his grace and mercy and his forgiveness to angels because there is no salvation for angels.  Angels were either holy or they were fallen and the fallen ones are irremediably fallen and damned to the lake of fire.

God determined at some point before the foundation of the world that he would save sinners, fallen humans.  He would create them, he would save them.  He would bring them to glory and they would be a bride for his Son, who would serve and love and adore his Son forever and ever, and he would populate heaven, literally, with a hallelujah chorus that would do nothing but praise and serve him through all eternity.

He didn’t have to create any of us, just like he didn’t have to create anything else.  But he created everything else to create a stage to reveal himself to us. 

Next, the whole Trinity gets involved.  “Let us make man.”  It’s not “Let there be.” in an impersonal way.  God gets very personal here because now he’s creating those who have eternal souls.  This is the apex of everything.

The earth is move-in-ready…turnkey!