Genesis 1:20-23 Day 5

Intro

This morning we come to the critter stage of the creation week. We will be able to cover day 5 in one sermon though we may go back when we finish the creation week and consider some other elements of creation science and how the various critters that were created reflect the glory and wisdom of their creator. We will do a little bit of that today but I want us primarily to see how this 6th day carries on and builds on the creation work that God has been doing and also see some of the wonderful pictures and metaphors that are brought to us later in scripture as a result of these critters that are created here on day 5.

As you could gather from Jake’s reading this day 5 sees the creation of the fish of the seas and the birds of the air. In this way it runs parallel to and is the filling of the elements that were created on day 2, the waters above and the waters below.

As we mentioned when we covered day two, there is no reason to take this poetic parallelism that is developed across these days and then try and rewrite the creation week as if it has nothing to do with history and is just a poetic account of origins or a mythical creation poem ment to teach us something about God but not about the creation itself. The literature that comes to us here in Genesis 1 is history and we must read and understand it as history if we are to lay a solid foundation for ourselves to stand firm on the rest of scripture. That God creates in this parallel form simply shows us that the God that we are introduced to here as the creator of all things is a God of order and that even as He brings the world into being and fills it with creatures He is pleased to do so in a orderly and deliberate fashion!

So lets take a moment to pray and then dive in this morning.

Pray & Read

Here as we always must do we need to start with the text and understand what it is telling us so that we can rightly apply it and that we can let it reveal to us the truths about God and His creation that the author of all scripture, the Holy Spirit, intends for us to see.

There are a few unique aspects of this text that become manifest as we take some time to consider it closely.

The first thing that we see is just what I mentioned a moment ago. We see the manifest parallelism here as God’s creative command is that the waters, think the waters below, swarm with swarms of living creatures and to let the birds fly above the earth across the expanse or across the face of the heavens. Now the fish swimming or swarming as the text says, we will get to that in a moment, but the fish are easy enough. However, if you were here for our message on day 2 I made the case for the water above being the atmosphere and we made the point that, again as we have seen is important, that when you are in the position of an observer on the earth and look up into the sky what appears to be happening most naturally explained is that you see the flying birds passing there in front of or as the text says across the face of the expanse. Now just because there are birds that fly above certain layers of clouds does not negate the general description in this text that any child could stand out and observe, “look mommy, that eagle is flying in front of that big cloud.” Again, this is a good reason to see the waters above as the atmosphere and the clouds rather than some unseen and impossible to observe layer of cosmic ice at the edge of the universe.

Swarming with Swarms

The next point that we can observe is that there is a sort of play on words here; the ESV actually tries to maintain this in the english by saying “swarm with swarms” however since we don’t have the same phonetics as Hebrew we generally don’t catch these things. Some translations phrase this a let the waters team with living creatures, which does get the point across but it looses the fact that there is an intentional phrasing here to draw attention specifically to the abundance of life that is created in the seas. The Hebrew words here, I believe I am saying this right, share the same root and so they sound the same and so this is why the ESV says swarm with swarms, that would be very similar to what the Hebrew is seeking to do and this play on words is meant to, as I said, draw attention to the abundance that God has provided us with in the sea, and we currently know of about 34,000 different species of fish! A lot of fish! In comparison there are only around 11,000 species of birds.

I think this is a particularly good point for us to pause on here and especially in the unique place that we live where our entire livelihood, even for those of us who don’t actively fish for a profession, but nearly everything here depends on the fishing industry.

This text highlights the abundance of the sea and I can’t help but think forward to Christ as He called several fishermen to follow Him and worked miracles where they caught large quantities of fish. People all around the world depend on the abundance of the seas for their sustenance. A quick query of Chat GPT revealed that nearly 40% of the people in the world or just north of 3 billion people depend on seafood for a significant portion of their regular diet.

Now while it is true that mankind would not have eaten fish before the fall and there is no command here to eat these abundant swarms of fish and other sea creatures that God created we also know that the fall did not come as a surprise to God, that even as He created the world He was working out his plans and purposes that would lead through the fall of man to the glorifying of God’s grace in the cross of Jesus Christ. And so while not originally given as food I think we can understand that God here in filling the seas and waterways with such abundance was actually preparing to provide even His fallen creation with an abundant food source. As I messaged Roger a couple of days ago, this means that in a very real sense you could trace the profession of fishing the whole way back to God’s purposes here on day 5 of creation.

I even thought of this then this week in one of the conference sessions I helped with that was about the fishing industry and some of the debate about trawl fishing came up and as I tried to apply biblical thinking, knowing that I certainly don’t understand everything about that as a complicated issue, however I would say that while we are given the dominion mandate that we will talk about in the coming weeks as we consider the creation of man and His place in creation, and that dominion mandate does entail taking care of God’s creation, never the less if God has placed this abundant source of food there in the seas for us to eat then He must also be please when we come up with ways to get out there and harvest it and consume it with thanksgiving to Him. Even though fish isn't my favorite thing to eat I am still thankful for those who take on this pursuit and think that it is one that aims to take advantage of this tremendous blessing that we find in these swarming swarms, this abundance of created living creatures.

Living Creatures

This then brings me to the next unique aspect of the text. We indeed see that these creatures are called “living creatures’ the Hebrew is nephesh chayyāh. This is a new distinction and one that will become very important. When we talk about death and life we need to understand that modern science defines living organisms differently than the bible does. This has caused some to challenge the veracity of the Bible by maintaining that death must have been in the world before Adam and Eve sinned contrary to what we find in Genesis and later in the book of Romans because every time they ate a plant it would have died and what about if they stepped on a bug or what about when their skin cells dies or when bacteria in their stomach died in digestion. Surely we cant maintain that nothing died before the fall right?!

While it is quite likely that bugs and creepy crawly creatures were created on these days along with these animals and are here included in the description of living creatures, however we find further clarification when we move onward in Scripture. First we find that when Noah takes the animals on the ark that the key distinction for creatures that are taken on the ark is that they have the breath of life in their nostrils.

English Standard Version Chapter 7

20 The waters prevailed above the mountains, covering them fifteen cubits deep. 21 And all flesh died that moved on the earth, birds, livestock, beasts, all swarming creatures that swarm on the earth, and all mankind. 22 Everything on the dry land in whose nostrils was the breath of life died. 23 He blotted out every living thing that was on the face of the ground, man and animals and creeping things and birds of the heavens. They were blotted out from the earth.

We also see further on in the book of Leviticus that there is a strong connection between life and blood.

Leviticus 17:11 ESV

For the life of the flesh is in the blood, and I have given it for you on the altar to make atonement for your souls, for it is the blood that makes atonement by the life.

Lastly one of the markers of this kind of life is consciousness. Death is precisely such an awful reality in the world because the creatures that suffer death are conscious to it. This starts with people who clearly are affected by the dreadful reality of death but we can also see that the conscious creatures also are affected by the death of those other creatures that they relate to. This is in line with Romans 8 and the groaning of creation for the making new of all things.

When we take in to account these qualifiers we understand that though creatures like insects are created on and with and may even be described here as living creatures and swarming things never the less, the entire context of scripture shows us that their death is not considered the same as that of creatures who breath air through their noses and who have blood. And so there is no need to ask what would have happened if Adam stepped on an ant as these types of creatures are, as Creation Ministries International often describes them, God’s robots. They often serve purposes similar to machines or robots in helping with natures cycles such as pollination.

Created

Next we see on verse 21 a word that we haven’t seen since verse 1, the word created.

It is interesting that Moses now chooses to use this word again, this word Bara that we saw when we talked about day 1 is a term that is only ever used of God’s divine creative acts. This type of creation is unique to God and we see here that Moses now chooses the use this word as He addresses the creation of the creatures.

One of the connections here is that this word is immediately followed by the creation of the great sea creatures. Some translations such as the KJV translate this as whale but the phrase here actually contains the Hebrew word tannin which is else ware translated as monster or dragon. Now we will likely do something specifically related to dinosaurs and many of you have seen the dragons and dinosaurs DVD that is one of my favorites but in short this phrase is not just about giant whales but rather all of the great sea monsters and or dragons which would have included the giant sea creatures like several species of Ichthyosaurs that often stretched to over 60 ft long and the Mosasaurus made famous in the newer Jurassic Park movies who was over 50 ft long. Also included would have been the giant megladon a shark who some estimate could have been as much as 65 ft long.

Now before the word dinosaur was coined in 1842 by Sir Richard Owen, a famous British paleontologist, often time these creatures were described as dragons and so it should not surprise us that if God created these creatures along with all of his other creatures that people would have interacted with them and they would have made an appearance in scripture described not as dinosaurs but rather as dragons as tannin. (I am also aware that sea reptiles are not properly speaking dinosaurs, but the word tannin can be used of sea, air, and land dragons.)

And so as we think about God’s creative acts we understand that he stars with the big ones, these great beasts of the sea, not necessarily the order in which they were created, they would have all been created at the same time, but the texts calls our attention to these great monsters first as a way to hold before us the greatness of the Creator.

In addition to expressing God’s greatness, Martin Luther also notes that this specific mention of the monsters of the deep ought to give reason not to fear these creatures. We have all heard the stories of the loch ness monster and other great sea monsters, ancient peoples had a great fear of the deeps and the great monsters that lived there.

Luther said: “Moses makes special mention of the great sea monsters because they inspire such terror. Yet we should not be afraid of them, for they too are created by God and are subject to Him. They cannot harm us apart from His will.”

We have no need to fear any creature because as their creator God is sovereign over them and they, as Luther notes, can do no harm to us appart from His will. From the greatest to the smallest God is sovereign over all of His creatures.

Created not evolved

The second connection that we need to make here is for our more modern context. We see this word create used here as God now moves into the phase of creation week in which He created living creatures. We saw the creation of the heavens and the earth marked with this word and then the earth is made ready for life and now we see this word used for the creation of living beings to fill the prepared earth and then finally we will see this word used one last time in this chapter of the creation of man.

It is as if God is making sure that we know that each subsequent level you could say of creation is solely His act alone! God made these creatures and the land animals that will follow on the next day.

There are those who believe in progressive creation and other forms of theistic evolution who would maintain that sure God is needed as an explanatory power for the origin of the universe and matter but to varying degrees they are ok, as they seek to appease modern so called scientific thought, by acquiescing and saying that various forms of evolution produced the creatures then.

However, this text is structured to prevent this error. Evolution and the materialist world view sees matter arising from nothing and then as the base elements come together and are acted on by cosmic and geologic forces eventually given enough time the building blocks for life were formed out of some primordial soup and then given enough time those building blocks came together to form the first simple cells and and then given even more time those simple cells evolved to become increasingly more and more complex beings. Molecules to microbes and microbes to Mozart over millions of years.

Now despite the fact that even the simplest lifeforms are vastly more complex than Darwin and his cronies could have ever imagined. So complex that no amount of time could have possibly generated even one of the chance reactions needed to form life; for the Christian who has a desire to submit to the authority of the word of God there is an even bigger issue. The waters here don’t produce the fish, life doesn't spring from the waters life is created in the waters and in the air. God created and we see that the water and the air swarmed, they teamed with life. Evolutionary though requires that the elements produce the life and scripture plainly proclaims that God created the life and when He did so all of these various creatures spring into existence in obedience to His creative word.

Blessing

The second to last element that we then need to see in the text is that this is the first element of creation that is accompanied by a blessing.

We read in verse 22: Genesis 1:22

Genesis 1:22 ESV

And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.”

This is the first time in scripture that God blesses anything and so that is significant and while we will spend more time looking at blessings when we see God’s blessing of man one of the key features that we see here of God’s blessing is that more often than not when God blesses His blessing has to do with reproduction and multiplication.

Tom Ascol says of this text, “The essence of God’ blessing of these creatures is their reproduction, their multiplication.”

God’s desire is that His creatures fill the earth, wether it be the fish or the birds or man God blesses multiplication and so we see that these first living creatures are blessed to multiply, to reproduce.

We will spend more time on this blessing of multiplication when we look at this blessing on Adam and Eve but this is great reminder that the blessings of God from the very first blessing in scripture are rooted in multiplication and reproduction. We live in a world where child bearing is seen as not important, for many people there is nothing like multiplication on their minds, many reproducing couples don’t even bother to produce enough offspring to replace themselves much less to multiply. We have become such lovers of self that the pursuit of our own comfort and pleasures take precedence over the very root of God’s blessing to His creatures. This is not to say that there aren't at times legitimate reasons that a couple may not be able to have multiple children and when there are legitimate and God ordained reasons those couples wont be excluded from God’s blessing and may be able to still participate in multiplying by being parents for children who need parents. However, we must remember that the general thrust of the text is that God blesses in reproduction and multiplication and one of the greatest way that we as believers can honor God and counter culturally stand against the tides of the world is to embrace this truth and be people who multiply under the blessing of God!

Kinds

The final aspect of the text to see here is back a verse in verse 21 and it is that each of these animals reproduced after their own kinds. This shows a continuity with the plant life from day 3 and that even though the plant life that was created there can not be described as nephesh chayyāh there is still a common thread to everything in God’s created order that it all reproduces or multiplies or yields seed after its kind.

This issue of kinds will become important when we talk about the ark and how it was that Noah was able to get all of those animal on there, we already mentioned in when we brought up the issue of kinds with plants, that kinds here is not congruous with any of the taxonomical structure used in modern science. The best way to determine if two animals are from the same kind is, ironically enough related to the last point, can they multiply with each other or with a shared type of reproductive partner. Since we are on fish Ill mention the wolphin, a cross between a false killer whale and a bottle nose dolphin. These sea creatures are able to reprouce and even produce ofspring that is fertile, this shows that these two aquatic mammles are part of the same created kind.

Biblical Pictures

Now that we have worked our way through the text there are two more points that I would like us to consider today. The first is how God uses these creatures from day 5 to provide pictures and examples, allegories, and analogies for us in scripture. God seems to love to use these creatures to teach us lessons.

We see actual creatures used, similar to the use in this text, to humble man and exult God. We see Job confronted with Leviathan a creature that we will talk more about when we talk about dinosaurs in the bible. Likely a type of giant crocodile like creature God humbles Job by asking what kind of control Job as a man could exert over this sea monster, the answer is none and yet God is the maker of and sovereign over leviathan.

We see God’s care for his people pictures as being gathered under his wings and as being lifted up on wings like an eagle.

We see Jonah being preserved in the belly of the great fish for 3 days and nights and then spat up on dry land.

We see Peter catch a fish and find a coin in its mouth.

We see the disciples cast their nets on the other side of the boat and catch an enormous quantity of fish.

And the one I’d like to hone in on just a little bit this morning, Jesus tells us in Matthew 6:26

Matthew 6:26 ESV

Look at the birds of the air: they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not of more value than they?

and also Matthew 10:29

Matthew 10:29 ESV

Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.

We see God’s care for these creatures held up as an example for us. These creatures are day 5 creatures, as we progress along the creation week we get closer and closer to the crown jewl of creation, man made in the image and likeness of God. These are the first of God’s creatures, the swarming creatures and the flying creatures. There are lots and lots and lots of them. Sometimes people in photography call sparrows LBB’s little brown birds. They can be beautiful but each one is so small and comparatively insignificant and yet we understand that God knows each and every one of these creatures.

Jake and I got into a discussion on God’s providence with someone and the topic of salmon came up. This man argued that all of the salmon simply swim where they swim because they are following their natural order. However, Jake and I argued for a providential guiding of these fish, that God knows each of them and has ordained each and every moment of their lives as His cared for creatures. This certainly fits with the sentiment expressed in these verses in Matthew.

Therefore when we see the all those countless salmon out there in the creek and we see that little brown bird eating seed out of our driveway we can see these creatures from day 5 can understand just how much God cares for us. These creatures become a great stay against worry and anxiety.

The Amazing Mallee Fowl

The last thing I would like to do this morning is to make mention of just one of the amazing critters that was created on day 5. I watched and read about a bunch of different birds and fish over the past couple of weeks and there are a ton of incredible designs in these creatures. It ought to be abundantly clear to anyone whose heart is not set to supress the truth about God in unrighteousness that the verity and complexity and ingenuity of the creatures in the fish and bird kingdoms put the wisdom and glory of God on brilliant display!

The bird that stuck out to me was called a mallee fowl, it is from Australia and it truly is an incredible bird. The mallee fowl comes from a family of birds called megapodes and they are the only species of bird that doesn't use body heat to incubate their eggs. Incredibly the birds in this family use scraped together piles of rotting leaf litter to produce the heat that incubates their eggs.

However, the mallee fowl is by far the most impressive member of this group. This is a bird that is maybe a little larger than a chicken yet it lays an egg that is 3 times larger than a chicken and each hen lays an egg every three days and produce around 15-24 eggs in a aying season. The females are constantly on the search for fod in their dry aird climate to produce these large eggs that are about 10% of their body weight.

What truly makes the mallee fowl incredible though is the way they maintain their nest. The region of the land own under that the mallee fowl lives in is very dry and arid and so there isn't a lot of moisture to make the leaf litter rot. What the mallee fowl does is to dig a 3 foot deep hole in the sand and then fill it with leaf litter and then when it rains the birs work together to cover the wet leaves with sand trapping in the moisture so the leaves can rot and produce heat. The birds then dig back down into this rotting leaf litter and lay an egg surrounded by more sand.

This alone would be incredible that a bird knows how to provide heat for their eggs without using body heat but it gets even more amazing. This birds eggs are very sensitive to heat, as most eggs can be and the mallee fowl has to keep their eggs between 91 and 95 degrees. Now if you are using your own body heat and this is your body temperature that is not so hard but the mallee fowl doesn't do it this way and there can be quit significant temperature shifts in this arid region.

God has given the mallee fowl the ability to correctly sense the temperature of the nest with its beak or tongue. Now when the nest is getting too warm they will open the nest and let out some of the heat by digging back down in the sand. When the nest is getting too cold the actually dig out the sane and lay it in a thin layer under the sun so that the sand heats up and then they pile it back on the nest to heat things up. For 60 to 70 day the mallee fowl maintains the perfect temperature in its nest and then when the eggs hatch the young birds swim their way back up through the sand and pop out the top of the nest and are immediately on their own, I guess the mallee fowl decided that after all that it was time for the young to take care of themselves.

The mallee fowl is incredible and wether its using rotting leaf matter to generate heat, or its precisely being able to know the temperature in their nest or the way they move so much sand and raise and lower the temp in the nest. There is just no explanatory power for this kind of design in even just this one bird not to mention all of the other incredible designs we find in the birds of the air and the creatures of the sea and waters.

God’s glory is clearly displayed in the brilliance and wonder of His creatures.

Closing

So as we close this morning I hope we maybe have our eyes turned upward and outward a bit. Like I said I spent some time reading about and watching videos about some of these creatures that were made. There are so many incredible designs that speak to the wisdom and power of God in the creatures that he has made and yet often times we can get so consumed in our own lives our in the drone of near constant amusement and entertainment that we tend to seek that we can loose the awe that we ought to carry with us as we boserve what God has made. We know so much more in our day about the incredible way these creatures were designed and yet we also likely experience less awe in our lives about these things than any people in history, this ought not be the case!

May we be people who so love our Creator and Savior that our hearts, eyes, and minds are tuned to stand in awe of all that He has made!