Post by Les Brewer on Sept 27, 2017 16:41:01 GMT
Creation Day 5 Genesis 1:20-23
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We’re looking at day five in the Creation, (1 Genesis 20-23). (1 Genesis 20-23). The text says, “Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth and the open expanse of the heavens.” And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good and God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning the fifth day.
We are in day five as the text indicates. We have day by day gone through Creation week with some amazing, amazing insights given to us by the word of God. One of the things that continues to strike me as I read more and more, what happens in a series like this pretty typically, is once I start a series all of you out there who are trying to help me start sending me things: books, email, faxes, stuff off the internet until my library swells beyond comprehension. And I have been reading, trying to read as much as I can possibly read and the more I read the more interested I become. And I just have to kind of unload some of it on you.
The thing that continues to strike me in my reading, because I really have never spent a large part of my life studying science; I took in college whatever was required and not once ounce of science beyond that, and managed to forget most of what I learned. But I am now sort of reintroduced to the amazing diversity and complexity of the created order. Those are the two words that stick in my mind: the diversity and the complexity of the created order, which speaks to me of the immensity of God’s intelligence. It is staggering how, as you begin to look at the Creation with any kind of thought, any kind of depth, you come face-to-face with the immensity of the intelligence and power of God. And it continues to amaze me as I read evolutionists that want to deny God, to see the utter folly of their conclusions – the utter hopelessness of it.
December 1996 brought the death of an evolutionist and astronomer named Carl Sagan, probably the most well-known astronomer in the world. His perception was that life just sort of happened and he ended up his life with absolute emptiness – absolute hopelessness. And near the end of his life he was interviewed by Ted Koppel on television. Koppel asked Sagan, realizing he was at the end of his life, that he had spent his life in science studying the universe as an astronomer, he said, “Do you, sir, have any words of wisdom for the people of the world?” To which Sagan replied, and I quote, “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400-plus-billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe, which may be one of a large number – perhaps an infinite number – of other universes. That is well worth pondering.” End quote.
He thought about it and he thought about it and he thought about it and he never let God be a reality. In the end, the most brilliant evolutionist only knows that the universe exists. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, and mostly he doesn’t know who the creator is. How sad. Everything in the universe points to God, the Creator. Even Albert Einstein said, “Of course there is a massive intelligence behind the universe. A man is a fool who doesn’t believe that,” and then went on to say, “But we could never know him.” The humanistic evolutionist refuses to see what is obvious, refuses to meet the God who wants to be known.
Back to the created order itself. Again, the complexity and diversity leave you with no other possible explanation than divine intelligence and divine power of proportions beyond our comprehension. I just pick out little pieces of the created order that speak to this complexity and diversity and share a few of them with you. Some birds navigate by the stars when migrating. How do they know how to do that? In fact, birds raised from eggs inside a building where they have never seen the sky can orient themselves toward home when shown an artificial sky representing a place they’ve never been.
Moths have two ears. Mites, little microscopic bugs, like to live in a moth’s ear. But interestingly enough, mites occupy only one ear of a moth. If mites get in both ears, the moth can’t fly, so scientists find mites only in one ear. How do the mites know that one ear is occupied? And then the fascinating Bombardier beetle has two chemicals in his little body which mix perfectly and at the right moment combine outside his body. When they’re fired and they intersect, they explode in the face of the enemy. That’s why they’re called Bombardier beetles. However, the two chemicals that create an explosion outside the body, never combine prematurely to blow up the beetle. And by the way, how did the beetle evolve those explosives and keep them separate?
The University of Alberta, Canada, once showed that in that temperate climate there are an average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and that those 1,800 storms in operation at any time expend energy at the inconceivable figure of one billion, three hundred million horsepower. Where does that come from? A Canadian physicist said a rain of four inches over an area of 10,000 square miles would require the burning of 640 million tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain. And to cool again the vapors and collect them in clouds would take another 800 million horsepower of refrigeration working 24 hours a day for 100 days. And yet God, by the massive power of the sun evaporates the water, refrigerates it in the sky, and sends it back down again as water. By the way, the average farmer in Minnesota is provided, free of charge, 407,510 gallons of water per acre per year by that process if the annual rainfall of 24 inches is occurring. Where does all this power come from?
The U.S. Natural Museum says there are over 10 million different species of insects. There are 2,500 kinds of ants. I know, they were all at your last picnic. One colony of ants can have as many as 100 million ants. How do those little tiny things have such a reproductive system? Some have estimated there are five billion birds in America. Mallards can fly 60 miles an hour, eagles can fly 100 miles an hour, and falcons can dive at 180 miles an hour. By the way, codfish, not that you need to know, can lay nine million eggs and herring only 70,000. I don’t have any other comment, just that is enough to stagger me. Nine million eggs? Nine million little codfish? That’s why there’s so many fish-and-chips places in England. They never run out of that stuff.
The Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, weighs 6,586 sextillion tons, hangs in empty space, spins at 1,000 miles an hour with perfect balance. And that’s important, so you’re not just jumping every time the Earth moves. At the same time that it’s spinning at 1,000 miles an hour, it is moving through space around the sun at 1,000 miles a minute in an orbit of 580 million miles. It does so at a perfect angle set to create the seasons, which provide all the crops which feed its inhabitants. Comet heads can be from 10,000 miles to one million miles long and the tails can be 100 million miles long. They travel at 350 miles per second. Your heart, about the size of your fist, weighs less than half a pound, pumps 1,800-plus gallons of blood a day, does enough work in 12 hours to lift 65 tons off the ground.
Did you know that the sun burns up – this is staggering – four million tons of matter per second? Consider things that are very small, like the atom. They’re not visible. We know they exist, but to this day they’re not visible. Atoms are so small it takes three atoms to make up one water molecule, and if you were to take every water molecule in one drop of water and blow them up so that each molecule was the size of a grain of sand – this is one water molecule. If you were to take every molecule in one drop of water and blow it up the size of a grain of sand, you would have enough grains of sand to make a road one foot thick, one-half mile wide that would go from L.A. to New York City. That’s how many molecules in a drop of water and there’s three atoms in every molecule. And yet the atom is mostly empty space. The actual material in the atom takes up only one trillionth of the atoms volume and when atoms combine they only join together at their outer electron orbit, that’s all. What makes matter seem solid are the motions within the atoms.
This is not really solid. Everything is mostly empty space. If the average person had all the space squeezed out of them – that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? If the average person had all the space squeezed out of it, how much volume do you think you’d occupy? If you had all the space squeezed out of you, you’d be lost on the head of a pin for you could only occupy 1/100,000,000 of a cubic inch. So when somebody comes along and says you’re nothing, they’re right. But on the other side you see you’re thinking diet, I know. You’re thinking there’s got to be a way to make this work. But I want you to know a full cubic inch of that material would weigh a billion pounds. A teaspoon full of water contains a million billion trillion atoms. I mean it’s just staggering, isn’t it? Did this all happen by accident? Come on.
Let me talk about the wheel of life. This fascinates me. I mentioned this morning who invented the wheel and somebody said, “The Mayans did.” No, the Mayans didn’t, God did. There’s a wheel of life. You’ve got them all through you. The wheel that I’m talking about, the wheel of life – scientists call it the wheel of life – is found in the enzyme ATP synthase. Its structure has only recently been elucidated. It’s won a joint Nobel Prize in 1997 for two scientists, Paul Boyer of the USA and John Walker of the U.K. The wheel in this enzyme rotates at about 100 revolutions per second. This miniature motor is 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead and it’s revolving 100 revolutions per second. Every cell in your body and every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors. Every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors in just one cell. Someone estimated that your body has 10 quadrillion little motors. Let me tell you what the little motor does.
The ATP motor’s job is to make the molecule adenosine triphosphate, ATP, from adenosine diphosphate, ADP, and phosphoric acid a synthesis which requires an input of energy. The ATP can then break down into ADP again giving up the energy by coupling itself to another chemical process within the cell which requires the energy in order to react. So energy is directed and the products are recycled constantly, constantly, in that little tiny motor, of which you have 10 quadrillion going on all the time. Says Dr. Walker, “We require our body weight in ATP every day.” So those little motors have to reproduce your entire body weight every day. We’re turning over that amount of ATP, cycling that energy, to keep ourselves thinking and walking around, doing whatever we do. If we have a lazy day, we’ll only use about half our body weight of ATP and if we work hard, up to one ton of ATP is recycled in a day. In 1993, Professor Boyer deduced by indirect means how ATP was produced, but it was left to Dr. Walker in 1994 to provide the first detailed picture of how the motor works. He used x-rays and an electron microscope to take an atomic snapshot. And then some Japanese fellow came along in 1997 with a tiny fluorescent filament attached to the electron microscope so that the motor could be seen spinning under the microscope.
These extremely complex little spinning motors are brilliantly designed. Each motor is built from 31 separate proteins, and remember this is 200,000 times smaller than the head of a pin and they have 31 protein components that are made from thousands of precisely-arranged amino acids. Am I losing you? It gets worse. This thing goes on paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. These little machines are producing with every turn of the wheel at some 100 revolutions per second. They are producing the necessary energy cycle to keep you alive and keep you functioning. “It’s incredible,” says Dr. Walker, “to think of these motors of life spinning around in all the cells of our bodies and they are spinning in all the cells of everything that lives.” Who designed these little wheel motors? Who energized them?
(Psalm 139:14) says, “We were fearfully and wonderfully made.” Now my friend, R.C. Sproul, is part theologian and part philosopher and I appreciate him for his theology, but I really appreciate him for his philosophy. He is actually – he is actually a funny philosopher because he can make people look so foolish that you can hardly help but chuckle. Sproul says there are only four options for the origin of the universe. You only have four. Option number one, the universe is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. That’s option number one. Option number two, it is self-created. Option number three, is it self-existent and eternal. Option number four, it was created by someone who is self-existent. Sproul says there aren’t any other options. Either it doesn’t exist or it created itself, or it always existed or somebody created it. That’s it. He says, “I have puzzled over this for decades and sought the counsel of philosophers, theologians and scientists. I have been unable to locate any other theoretical options that cannot be subsumed under these four options.” That’s all you’ve got. Then Sproul says, “Option number one must be eliminated for two reasons.” That’s the option that says it doesn’t exist, it’s all an illusion.
“First, if it’s a false illusion then it isn’t an illusion. If it’s a true illusion, then someone or something must be existing to have that illusion. If this is the case, then that which is having the illusion must either be self-created, self-existent or caused by someone ultimately self-existent, so therefore everything is not an illusion.” Secondly, he says you can eliminate number one, the illusion theory, because if we assume the illusion is absolute – that is, nothing does exist including that which is having the illusion – then there is no question of origins even to answer because literally nothing exists. But if something exists, then whatever exists must either be self-created, self-existent, or created by someone who is self-existent.
Let’s look at option two, that the universe created itself. Well this is, by all logic, formally false. It is contradictory and logically impossible. Sproul says, “In essence, self-creation requires the existence of something before it exists.” You get that? You can’t create yourself unless you exist to create yourself. “Self-creation is a logical and rational impossibility,” he writes. “For something to create itself, it must be before it is.” This is impossible. It’s impossible for solids, liquids and gases. It’s impossible for atoms and subatomic particles. It is impossible for light. It is impossible for heat. It is impossible for God. Nothing anywhere, anytime can create itself because if it could it would have to exist before it created itself. Sproul points out that an entity can be self-existent and not violate logic, but it can’t be self-created. When scientists say, “Well, 15 to 20 billion years ago the universe created itself,” what are they saying? They’re saying nothing exploded into something. That is a logical impossibility. To retain a theory of self-creation is totally irrational and rejects all logic. Such a theory can be believed, but it can’t be argued reasonably.
Then you’ve got option number three, that the universe, as it exists, as we know it, has always existed eternally. Well that doesn’t fly. You’re not eternal and neither am I. We didn’t always exist. There was a time when we didn’t exist. There was a time when our children didn’t exist. There are all kinds of things in this world that once did not exist. In fact, everything around us once did not exist. How could the universe exist forever and then do in time, i.e. create life, what it had never done forever. If the universe always existed, then everything in it always existed, and we know everything in it didn’t always exist because you and I didn’t always exist. Our parents will verify that. We cannot be born and be always existing. Cars and watches and chairs, all that, were brought into existence at some point in time.
Option one, option two, option three are impossible. We’re left with only one possibility. The universe exists because it was created by someone who existed before it existed, a preexisting, intelligent power, namely God. Matter can’t create itself. Only an eternal, preexisting God could create it. I was encouraged this week. CNN reported that only nine percent of Americans believe that life arose purely by chance. That’s good, isn’t it? But the vast majority can flip the figures over. Over 90 percent of the people in America believe that God was involved in creation, but that God used evolution as His method. We’ve been trying to point out to you that that can’t be how God created because evolution is what? Impossible. Absolutely impossible. That’s why there’s no evidence for it, because it can’t happen. The sin of evolutionists is described in (1 Romans). “The wrath of God,” verse 18, “is revealed from heaven against all un-Godliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The truth of the Creator God is obvious. It’s absolutely obvious, reasonable, logical, but they suppress the truth. Verse 19, “That which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them by reason, by logic, by cause and effect. It is apparent, since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made.”
You cannot conclude anything other than that there was an eternal, preexisting creator. That is the only reasonable conclusion, and consequently those who reject that and suppress that truth, (Romans 120) says, “Are without excuse.” Without excuse, even though they knew God. I mean there’s no other possible, reasonable conclusion. They refuse to honor him as God, refuse to think and became empty in their speculations, their foolish heart is darkened. They think they’re wise. They have all their Ph.D’s and all of that, but they are actually fools. They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of a corruptible man, birds, four-footed animals, crawling creatures. They worship the creature more than the creator. They make the creature the creator. Life creates itself. (1 Romans), “They worship the creation. They see the creation as the life force which creates.” Logically ridiculous as we noted a moment ago. How did the universe come into existence? Let’s go back to chapter one of Genesis and go back to where we’ve been all along. It came into existence exactly the way it’s described in the opening chapter of the Bible, which is inspired by God, which is true and inerrant and infallible. The truth of origins is clearly given here in six 24-hour – nearly 24-hour – solar days, six days defined as an evening and a morning or a period of darkness and a period of light. Six normal days. In six days, God created the entire universe the way it is now.
We’ve been showing you through this study that that was about six or seven thousand years ago and that is all. And when you look and you say what about all the strata and what about the appearance of age and all of that, the answer is God created everything old, everything mature. And the flood also, which occurs later on, changes the face and the configuration of the earth and answers a lot of the questions that are brought up with regard to topography and sedimentary rock and fossils and all of that. But the Bible is very clear, God created it all in six days. Now day one, God created the material and light. Day two, the seas and the heavens. Day three, the earth and vegetation and day four, the lights – the luminaries – the moon, the stars and the sun. Now we come to day five, and I just read it to you. It has to do with God creating all the creatures that populate the seas and the skies. This is the day when God completes the home for man and He creates the first living beings; the first living beings. Verse 20, “Swarms of living creatures.” That is the first time anything is said to be living. Plants aren’t so designated. They are organisms that have a kind of life, but it is not a conscious life. The first living beings created by God came on day five. I’ll just remind you, if you’re looking at the sequence, day five corresponds to day two as day four corresponded to day one. On day one, God created the light. On day four he created the stellar bodies to be the light givers. On day two He created the seas and the heavens and on day five Je populated the seas and the heavens.
On day three, He created the earth and its vegetation, corresponding with on day six He created the animals and man to populate the earth and to consume its vegetation, so the parallels run consistently through. The sea and the sky on day two and the inhabitants of the sea and the sky on day five. The sea was given, of course, its final form on day three, but it was created on day two. Now as we look at the text here, there are two phases to the day five creation. First phase, the creation of conscious life, secondly the creation of reproductive life. Two things are clearly identified for us. Conscious life that’s living creatures who are conscious, that is they react to their environment and they move around from place to place. Plants do not, obviously. And secondly, reproductive life. Verse 20, let’s pick it up at the text. “Then God said,” and I’ll stop you there again. Always the method of creation, God speaks non-existing things into existence. He speaks them into existence out of nothing.
“Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.” So he first of all filled the waters. Now in the Hebrew, this is what is called a paronomasia, which is a term describing a kind of literary device. A paronomasia is basically this. The Hebrew says, “Let the waters” – the text says, “Let the waters swarm with swarming things.” It’s a repetition. It’s the same in verse 11, “Let the earth sprout vegetation.” Actually, in the Hebrew is, “Let the earth vegetate with vegetation.” And here it’s, “Let the waters swarm with swarming things.” Swarm with swarming, living things actually or swarm with swarming things that live. Swarm is the word chosen here because it has the idea of movement, and I remind you that the distinctiveness of living creatures is that they move. Plants are not called living creatures because they aren’t mobile. They don’t move. Living creatures move. In fact, He filled the seas so that the verb here is to swarm. And again, it pictures a large population of these creatures in motion. Again, Cassuto, the Jewish commentator, writes, “The primary significance of the stem, sherets in Hebrew, is movement with specific reference to the abundant, swift movement of many creatures who jostle one another as they proceed to crisscross in all possible directions. God willed that into the midst of the waste an inanimate waters from one end of the sea to the other. There should now enter a living being and that there should be born in their midst moving animate beings subject to no limitation of numbers or intermission of movement.
The sea began to just swarm with all these living creatures swimming everywhere and that would include – the seas would include the freshwater as well; all the waters of the earth. The term living is that very familiar Hebrew word nephesh, which speaks of soul or being or life. It’s used here for the very first time. This is the first time we really have a living creature that moves on its own. Plants have no such life in the sense that creatures do because plants can’t move and they are not conscious. Living things are conscious, though animals are not self-conscious. That is they are conscious. They respond to their environment as individuals, but they are not aware of that response. It is purely a mechanism that we call instinct. They are not self-conscious, they do not know they are alive. They do not know they are dead. They do not know one another. They do not communicate with one another in personal, self-conscious ways, although instinctively they are under tremendous control by the DNA codes that have been given to them for the preservation of their species and the function of their species as God as designed it. But they are distinguished from plants by the word nephesh. Literally, nephesh means “that which breathes.” That which breathes.
These beings are wayibārā. That is to say they are created, and here He uses bārā, the word for create. This is an epic-making achievement that demands the verb “to create.” As a monumental thing takes place, He creates conscious beings that can move and they move through the sea in swarms; such a massive amount of created beings. Now that is to say, and I stop you here because this is a very important thing. When God created the fish and all those mammals and all those animals, whether you’re talking about fish or whether you’re talking about whales or whether you’re talking about sea-going dinosaurs or whether you’re talking about eels or whether you’re talking about plankton or whatever anywhere in the food chain, when God created all of that there was no evolutionary process. He literally, in a moment, spoke into existence all the creatures that swim. Just instantaneously, at the same moment on the same day, they all came into existence. They were not somehow in a process of development as species evolved into other species and mutated into other species.
They were all instantaneously created in massive swarms moving through the seas. Verse 20 indicates the same thing, “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.” Of course He doesn’t talk about swarming because there wasn’t such a dense creation of birds. We know that today. If you look in the depths of the sea where it hasn’t been polluted significantly, you will find an almost uncountable and limitless amount of life. And you look into the air, and of course there are less birds. So you find here that it doesn’t use the word “swarming.” “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven.” 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 out, 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. And the birds that are flying around the globe don’t go very far. They just kind of fly what appears to us to be the surface of the vast heaven behind or on the face of heaven; in front of heaven with the great heaven behind them.
And then I think this is quite fascinating. “And God,” verse 21, “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 here? Just birds and just swarms of living creatures that swim in the seas, fish and more. Why bring up great sea monsters? Why introduce them? There are a lot of other things in the sea. Why them? I find that fascinating. The Hebrew word is tannin. And you know, there’s a reason for this. If you study the Old Testament, you find several Old Testament references to sea creatures. There’s Leviathan. Remember reading about Leviathan? Leviathan is this massive, massive, powerful sea creature. (41 Job), God says to Job, “Where were you?” He says, “Where were you when I created everything?” Then he comes to chapter 41 and He says, “Can you put your hooks in and control Leviathan?” Some people, I think, have described this massive beast, fierce. You can read (41 Job) yourself and read the characteristics of this beast. I wrote a little note on it. Some have described it as an alligator or a crocodile, but they’re not in the sea as such. The best guess is that he’s describing some kind of dinosaur, some kind of massive seagoing monster, Leviathan.
There’s also mention in the Old Testament of the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent. (7 Job 12) the serpent of the sea or the sea serpent. There is Rehab, and it refers to massive seagoing animals, very likely refers to dinosaurs. But why does He mention this? Why does he bring it up? I think the answer can be found in this. In ancient mythology, for example in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent area east of Israel and the Land of Canaan as well – the countries of the East generally – there have always been these very bizarre and very highly-complex fabricated 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. So the ancients saw these, perhaps these great, fierce sea monsters as the deities, the gods. They wrote epics about them. Some of them, for example, you read about in some of the Ugaritic, which is a different language, Ugaritic epics with regard to the enemies of Baal. The enemies of Baal took the form, one form was this god, Mot, who was called the Lord of the Sea. He was a great sea monster. This began to influence that whole part of the world where they saw the sea monsters as gods, the sea monsters as gods in rebellion against the good gods. In the case of Israel, the gods in rebellion against the good God.
(27 Isaiah 1) you have mention of these sea gods who were so much a part of Canaanite culture. When the children of Israel came to the Land of Canaan, they came across this Canaanite poetry, Canaanite legends about the gods taking on the form of these great sea monsters. So the sea monster then became a picture of the principal of evil, the anti-god evil was sort of personified in the great sea monster, the great dragon of the sea, the great dinosaurs of the sea. A number of versus, as I said then, refer to Leviathan, the great sea monster always seemingly depicted as the great enemies of the true God, implying they were somehow a supernatural deity or supernatural force that rose up against their creator. That was all in the ancient epics. That would have been in existence of 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. And God created the great sea monsters along with every living creature that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind and God saw that it was what? And that includes the sea monsters. So much for all that mythology. The Old Testament is opposed to such foolish myths and voices its protest in its own quiet way, doesn’t it? So God created the great sea monsters and God saw that it was good. It’s as if the Torah said far be it from anyone to suppose that the sea monsters are some mythological forces of evil, some divine gods or demigods in opposition to the true and living God and revolt against the true and living God. They are as natural as anything else God created and they were formed in their proper time and their proper place by the word of the Creator in order to fulfill His will. He made them because He wanted to make them and he looked at them and He said they are good.
That’s why it says in Psalms, “Praise the Lord from the earth you sea monsters and all deeps.” The poet in the Psalms is inviting all created forms of life to praise the Lord – all of them. That’s Psalm, I think, 148:7. It just puts that little note in there to dispel all of the bizarre mythology. God created, in verse 21, the sea monsters, every living creature that moves, which with the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind. Just a note: “after its kind” is used twice. God created everything that lives in the water at the same time on the same day. He created everything that flies in the air at the same time on the same day, and He created them after their kind. There is no evolution of species from kind to kind to kind to kind. He created them after their kind. All the species were created by God. There can be variation within the species, but there’s no moving outside that DNA, that information encoded in each species.
Henry Morris says, “The first introduction of animal life was not a fragile blog of protoplasm that happened to come together in response to electrical discharges over a primeval ocean as evolutionists believe.” God just made it all in its kind. Everything that lives in the sea, everything that lives in the sky, God created the way it is in its own species. By the way, 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. There was no death in the world at that time. Nothing died. Nothing died. I suppose we could conclude at that point that animals didn’t eat each other. That’s a moot question in scripture, but it’s a reasonable assumption. That’s why the theologian von Rad once said, “Outside of God, there’s nothing to fear.” The Jews needed to hear that. They didn’t need to fear the imaginary gods of the sea monsters. Von Rad said something profound, “Outside of God, there’s nothing to fear.” There’s only one to be feared. Who’s that? The one that can destroy both soul and body and hell, the New Testament says.
Evil came into the world after creation. Evil came into the world after the creation of sea monsters; huge, massive sea creatures. The whole creation was made by God and was originally good. So day five first brought the creation of conscious life. Secondly, of reproductive life. Reproductive life. This is just – I just – the more I read about this, and I’m not gonna take the time to get into it. You can do your own research. The more I get into reproductive systems, the more incredible it is. I mean 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. That’s what it says in verse 22, “And God blessed them saying, “Here’s the blessing.”” He granted them this benefit. The blessing is a benefit. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas. And let birds multiply on the earth.”
Obviously, the birds don’t fill the heaven above, but they do multiply. Fish tend to fill the waters of the sea. “Be fruitful and multiply.” Be fruitful and multiply is kind of an Old Testament phrase for reproduction. It’s exactly what it means – to reproduce. In (1 Genesis 28) when God is creating man, it says, “God blessed them,” that is male and female, “and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.”” That was his command for them to procreate. (9 Genesis) “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them,” Noah and his wife and their sons and their wives, “Be fruitful and multiply and repopulate the earth.” (17 Genesis 16), “I will bless her.” God is talking about Sarah. “I’ll give you a son,” to her and then I will bless her and she shall be a mother of nations. Kings of people shall come to her. In verse 20, as for Ishmael, “Behold I will bless him. I will make him fruitful and will multiply him.” To make him fruitful and multiply means reproduction. You find it in (28 Genesis 3), (35 Genesis 9-11), (48 Genesis 3-4). That is a phrase meaning reproduction.
So God gave this created order in the sky and in the sea, reproductive capability. All living creatures are complex machines. I said this long ago in the series. They’re named for a scientist who discovered complexity. It’s called a von Neumann machine after the scientist von Neumann. Wilder Smith writes a whole book on the von Neumann machine. All living organisms characteristically have three properties. They are self-sustaining. That is they have the capability to sustain their own life like those little, tiny, tiny wheels going around inside of you. They are self-sustaining. Secondly, they are self-repairing. That is they fix themselves as they go. And most definitively, they are self-reproducing. A von Neumann machine is self-sustaining or self-perpetuating, self-repairing and self-reproducing. So far we have never, by all of our science, been able to manufacture anything like that. We can’t come up, for example, with a computer that sustains its own life and 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. The complexity of it is too complicated. It can’t be done. If we could get something complicated enough to do that, it would be in disrepair all the time. It couldn’t keep up with the self-repairing process.
We can’t create a von Neumann machine, and yet every single cell that exists is just that. This amazing capability, biochemical reproductive systems being placed in every little DNA strip in every cell of every creature, and with that comes the capability to be fruitful and multiply. 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. And let birds multiply on the earth. Somebody said, “Well, why does it say on the earth? Birds fly.” Well they 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. God knows. There’s no evolution here. Creatures of the sea and the creatures of the sky were all made in one day.
In every single species, the largest legendary sort of fierce sea monsters down to the smallest marine organisms, all made in one day. All the creatures that fly, all made the same day in their species with movement. They move through the air. They move through the sea. And they are conscious. That is to say if you drive your car down the road, isn’t it interesting how the birds avoid it? They have a consciousness, although it is not a self-consciousness. So man’s house is built. It’s now ready for his occupancy and the crown of creation comes on day six. The crown of creation is man. You know what’s so sad, we’ll stop at this point, but what is so sad is that man refuses to see God in creation. Isn’t that sad? Man refuses to see God in creation. He refuses to hear God in conscience, suppresses the truth, plunges into deeper darkness and hopelessness. I’ll tell you what grieves me most of all. What grieves me most of all is people who say they’re Christians, who believe the Bible, and then claim evolution. I’ll say this again. I said it weeks ago. You cannot find evolution in (1 Genesis) anywhere. It’s not there. There’s no way to execute that chapter and come out with evolution. No way possible. You have to suppress the truth. Why do that? Why would you – why would you affront God or blaspheme God or dishonor God in order to honor a Godless evolutionist; in order to buy some scientific credibility.
We take scripture at its face value, don’t we? I don’t know about you, but I start believing the Bible in (1 Genesis 1). I don’t have to wait until chapter three. 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.” They rejected the creator to the degree that when he was incarnate they killed him. They killed him. It is a dishonor to God to believe anything other than what Genesis says, right? Does it honor God to believe He made all this? Does it honor God to believe the creation account of Genesis? Does it give Him glory? Is it a proper representation of who He is and what He’s done? And is it a source of worship? 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, and chance doesn’t even exist. It’s a nonexistent reality. We start worshipping God in (1 Genesis), do we not, when we worship him as creator.
Father, thank you again for tonight as we’ve worked our way through day five and now have the glorious anticipation of that final day of creation, the day You created all the animals and the crown of creation made in your own image – man. We worship You. We adored You. We praise You. We thank You. We glorify You. We honor You as the God of Creation. You’re not only the God of Creation, but the God of Salvation. Einstein was wrong. We can know You because you desire to know us. You’ve made Yourself known to us in your creation and more than that, You’ve made yourself known to us in conscience by the law written in our hearts. Beyond that, You’ve made Yourself known to us in revelation through the scripture and You’ve shown us that You’re not only a God of immensity, a God of immutability who doesn’t change, a God of omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence, a God of unlimited power and knowledge. You’re a God of vast complexity and vast, vast beauty and order. You are a God that fills an endless and infinite universe and yet you are a God who cares about sinners, who loves sinners, who came into the world and was born in a humble, humble, humble place in an obscure town called Bethlehem, laid in a feed trough, who came all the way down to take the place of sinners, to die on a cross so You might know us and we might know you. Oh, how we rejoice that we know You, the true and living God, the Creator of the universe, and our friend and our redeemer. We thank You. Amen.
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We’re looking at day five in the Creation, (1 Genesis 20-23). (1 Genesis 20-23). The text says, “Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures and let birds fly above the earth and the open expanse of the heavens.” And God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind. And God saw that it was good and God blessed them saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning the fifth day.
We are in day five as the text indicates. We have day by day gone through Creation week with some amazing, amazing insights given to us by the word of God. One of the things that continues to strike me as I read more and more, what happens in a series like this pretty typically, is once I start a series all of you out there who are trying to help me start sending me things: books, email, faxes, stuff off the internet until my library swells beyond comprehension. And I have been reading, trying to read as much as I can possibly read and the more I read the more interested I become. And I just have to kind of unload some of it on you.
The thing that continues to strike me in my reading, because I really have never spent a large part of my life studying science; I took in college whatever was required and not once ounce of science beyond that, and managed to forget most of what I learned. But I am now sort of reintroduced to the amazing diversity and complexity of the created order. Those are the two words that stick in my mind: the diversity and the complexity of the created order, which speaks to me of the immensity of God’s intelligence. It is staggering how, as you begin to look at the Creation with any kind of thought, any kind of depth, you come face-to-face with the immensity of the intelligence and power of God. And it continues to amaze me as I read evolutionists that want to deny God, to see the utter folly of their conclusions – the utter hopelessness of it.
December 1996 brought the death of an evolutionist and astronomer named Carl Sagan, probably the most well-known astronomer in the world. His perception was that life just sort of happened and he ended up his life with absolute emptiness – absolute hopelessness. And near the end of his life he was interviewed by Ted Koppel on television. Koppel asked Sagan, realizing he was at the end of his life, that he had spent his life in science studying the universe as an astronomer, he said, “Do you, sir, have any words of wisdom for the people of the world?” To which Sagan replied, and I quote, “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a humdrum star that is one of 400-plus-billion other stars that make up the Milky Way galaxy, which is one of billions of other galaxies which make up a universe, which may be one of a large number – perhaps an infinite number – of other universes. That is well worth pondering.” End quote.
He thought about it and he thought about it and he thought about it and he never let God be a reality. In the end, the most brilliant evolutionist only knows that the universe exists. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, and mostly he doesn’t know who the creator is. How sad. Everything in the universe points to God, the Creator. Even Albert Einstein said, “Of course there is a massive intelligence behind the universe. A man is a fool who doesn’t believe that,” and then went on to say, “But we could never know him.” The humanistic evolutionist refuses to see what is obvious, refuses to meet the God who wants to be known.
Back to the created order itself. Again, the complexity and diversity leave you with no other possible explanation than divine intelligence and divine power of proportions beyond our comprehension. I just pick out little pieces of the created order that speak to this complexity and diversity and share a few of them with you. Some birds navigate by the stars when migrating. How do they know how to do that? In fact, birds raised from eggs inside a building where they have never seen the sky can orient themselves toward home when shown an artificial sky representing a place they’ve never been.
Moths have two ears. Mites, little microscopic bugs, like to live in a moth’s ear. But interestingly enough, mites occupy only one ear of a moth. If mites get in both ears, the moth can’t fly, so scientists find mites only in one ear. How do the mites know that one ear is occupied? And then the fascinating Bombardier beetle has two chemicals in his little body which mix perfectly and at the right moment combine outside his body. When they’re fired and they intersect, they explode in the face of the enemy. That’s why they’re called Bombardier beetles. However, the two chemicals that create an explosion outside the body, never combine prematurely to blow up the beetle. And by the way, how did the beetle evolve those explosives and keep them separate?
The University of Alberta, Canada, once showed that in that temperate climate there are an average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and that those 1,800 storms in operation at any time expend energy at the inconceivable figure of one billion, three hundred million horsepower. Where does that come from? A Canadian physicist said a rain of four inches over an area of 10,000 square miles would require the burning of 640 million tons of coal to evaporate enough water for such a rain. And to cool again the vapors and collect them in clouds would take another 800 million horsepower of refrigeration working 24 hours a day for 100 days. And yet God, by the massive power of the sun evaporates the water, refrigerates it in the sky, and sends it back down again as water. By the way, the average farmer in Minnesota is provided, free of charge, 407,510 gallons of water per acre per year by that process if the annual rainfall of 24 inches is occurring. Where does all this power come from?
The U.S. Natural Museum says there are over 10 million different species of insects. There are 2,500 kinds of ants. I know, they were all at your last picnic. One colony of ants can have as many as 100 million ants. How do those little tiny things have such a reproductive system? Some have estimated there are five billion birds in America. Mallards can fly 60 miles an hour, eagles can fly 100 miles an hour, and falcons can dive at 180 miles an hour. By the way, codfish, not that you need to know, can lay nine million eggs and herring only 70,000. I don’t have any other comment, just that is enough to stagger me. Nine million eggs? Nine million little codfish? That’s why there’s so many fish-and-chips places in England. They never run out of that stuff.
The Earth is 25,000 miles in circumference, weighs 6,586 sextillion tons, hangs in empty space, spins at 1,000 miles an hour with perfect balance. And that’s important, so you’re not just jumping every time the Earth moves. At the same time that it’s spinning at 1,000 miles an hour, it is moving through space around the sun at 1,000 miles a minute in an orbit of 580 million miles. It does so at a perfect angle set to create the seasons, which provide all the crops which feed its inhabitants. Comet heads can be from 10,000 miles to one million miles long and the tails can be 100 million miles long. They travel at 350 miles per second. Your heart, about the size of your fist, weighs less than half a pound, pumps 1,800-plus gallons of blood a day, does enough work in 12 hours to lift 65 tons off the ground.
Did you know that the sun burns up – this is staggering – four million tons of matter per second? Consider things that are very small, like the atom. They’re not visible. We know they exist, but to this day they’re not visible. Atoms are so small it takes three atoms to make up one water molecule, and if you were to take every water molecule in one drop of water and blow them up so that each molecule was the size of a grain of sand – this is one water molecule. If you were to take every molecule in one drop of water and blow it up the size of a grain of sand, you would have enough grains of sand to make a road one foot thick, one-half mile wide that would go from L.A. to New York City. That’s how many molecules in a drop of water and there’s three atoms in every molecule. And yet the atom is mostly empty space. The actual material in the atom takes up only one trillionth of the atoms volume and when atoms combine they only join together at their outer electron orbit, that’s all. What makes matter seem solid are the motions within the atoms.
This is not really solid. Everything is mostly empty space. If the average person had all the space squeezed out of them – that’s an interesting thought, isn’t it? If the average person had all the space squeezed out of it, how much volume do you think you’d occupy? If you had all the space squeezed out of you, you’d be lost on the head of a pin for you could only occupy 1/100,000,000 of a cubic inch. So when somebody comes along and says you’re nothing, they’re right. But on the other side you see you’re thinking diet, I know. You’re thinking there’s got to be a way to make this work. But I want you to know a full cubic inch of that material would weigh a billion pounds. A teaspoon full of water contains a million billion trillion atoms. I mean it’s just staggering, isn’t it? Did this all happen by accident? Come on.
Let me talk about the wheel of life. This fascinates me. I mentioned this morning who invented the wheel and somebody said, “The Mayans did.” No, the Mayans didn’t, God did. There’s a wheel of life. You’ve got them all through you. The wheel that I’m talking about, the wheel of life – scientists call it the wheel of life – is found in the enzyme ATP synthase. Its structure has only recently been elucidated. It’s won a joint Nobel Prize in 1997 for two scientists, Paul Boyer of the USA and John Walker of the U.K. The wheel in this enzyme rotates at about 100 revolutions per second. This miniature motor is 200,000 times smaller than a pinhead and it’s revolving 100 revolutions per second. Every cell in your body and every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors. Every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors in just one cell. Someone estimated that your body has 10 quadrillion little motors. Let me tell you what the little motor does.
The ATP motor’s job is to make the molecule adenosine triphosphate, ATP, from adenosine diphosphate, ADP, and phosphoric acid a synthesis which requires an input of energy. The ATP can then break down into ADP again giving up the energy by coupling itself to another chemical process within the cell which requires the energy in order to react. So energy is directed and the products are recycled constantly, constantly, in that little tiny motor, of which you have 10 quadrillion going on all the time. Says Dr. Walker, “We require our body weight in ATP every day.” So those little motors have to reproduce your entire body weight every day. We’re turning over that amount of ATP, cycling that energy, to keep ourselves thinking and walking around, doing whatever we do. If we have a lazy day, we’ll only use about half our body weight of ATP and if we work hard, up to one ton of ATP is recycled in a day. In 1993, Professor Boyer deduced by indirect means how ATP was produced, but it was left to Dr. Walker in 1994 to provide the first detailed picture of how the motor works. He used x-rays and an electron microscope to take an atomic snapshot. And then some Japanese fellow came along in 1997 with a tiny fluorescent filament attached to the electron microscope so that the motor could be seen spinning under the microscope.
These extremely complex little spinning motors are brilliantly designed. Each motor is built from 31 separate proteins, and remember this is 200,000 times smaller than the head of a pin and they have 31 protein components that are made from thousands of precisely-arranged amino acids. Am I losing you? It gets worse. This thing goes on paragraph after paragraph after paragraph. These little machines are producing with every turn of the wheel at some 100 revolutions per second. They are producing the necessary energy cycle to keep you alive and keep you functioning. “It’s incredible,” says Dr. Walker, “to think of these motors of life spinning around in all the cells of our bodies and they are spinning in all the cells of everything that lives.” Who designed these little wheel motors? Who energized them?
(Psalm 139:14) says, “We were fearfully and wonderfully made.” Now my friend, R.C. Sproul, is part theologian and part philosopher and I appreciate him for his theology, but I really appreciate him for his philosophy. He is actually – he is actually a funny philosopher because he can make people look so foolish that you can hardly help but chuckle. Sproul says there are only four options for the origin of the universe. You only have four. Option number one, the universe is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. That’s option number one. Option number two, it is self-created. Option number three, is it self-existent and eternal. Option number four, it was created by someone who is self-existent. Sproul says there aren’t any other options. Either it doesn’t exist or it created itself, or it always existed or somebody created it. That’s it. He says, “I have puzzled over this for decades and sought the counsel of philosophers, theologians and scientists. I have been unable to locate any other theoretical options that cannot be subsumed under these four options.” That’s all you’ve got. Then Sproul says, “Option number one must be eliminated for two reasons.” That’s the option that says it doesn’t exist, it’s all an illusion.
“First, if it’s a false illusion then it isn’t an illusion. If it’s a true illusion, then someone or something must be existing to have that illusion. If this is the case, then that which is having the illusion must either be self-created, self-existent or caused by someone ultimately self-existent, so therefore everything is not an illusion.” Secondly, he says you can eliminate number one, the illusion theory, because if we assume the illusion is absolute – that is, nothing does exist including that which is having the illusion – then there is no question of origins even to answer because literally nothing exists. But if something exists, then whatever exists must either be self-created, self-existent, or created by someone who is self-existent.
Let’s look at option two, that the universe created itself. Well this is, by all logic, formally false. It is contradictory and logically impossible. Sproul says, “In essence, self-creation requires the existence of something before it exists.” You get that? You can’t create yourself unless you exist to create yourself. “Self-creation is a logical and rational impossibility,” he writes. “For something to create itself, it must be before it is.” This is impossible. It’s impossible for solids, liquids and gases. It’s impossible for atoms and subatomic particles. It is impossible for light. It is impossible for heat. It is impossible for God. Nothing anywhere, anytime can create itself because if it could it would have to exist before it created itself. Sproul points out that an entity can be self-existent and not violate logic, but it can’t be self-created. When scientists say, “Well, 15 to 20 billion years ago the universe created itself,” what are they saying? They’re saying nothing exploded into something. That is a logical impossibility. To retain a theory of self-creation is totally irrational and rejects all logic. Such a theory can be believed, but it can’t be argued reasonably.
Then you’ve got option number three, that the universe, as it exists, as we know it, has always existed eternally. Well that doesn’t fly. You’re not eternal and neither am I. We didn’t always exist. There was a time when we didn’t exist. There was a time when our children didn’t exist. There are all kinds of things in this world that once did not exist. In fact, everything around us once did not exist. How could the universe exist forever and then do in time, i.e. create life, what it had never done forever. If the universe always existed, then everything in it always existed, and we know everything in it didn’t always exist because you and I didn’t always exist. Our parents will verify that. We cannot be born and be always existing. Cars and watches and chairs, all that, were brought into existence at some point in time.
Option one, option two, option three are impossible. We’re left with only one possibility. The universe exists because it was created by someone who existed before it existed, a preexisting, intelligent power, namely God. Matter can’t create itself. Only an eternal, preexisting God could create it. I was encouraged this week. CNN reported that only nine percent of Americans believe that life arose purely by chance. That’s good, isn’t it? But the vast majority can flip the figures over. Over 90 percent of the people in America believe that God was involved in creation, but that God used evolution as His method. We’ve been trying to point out to you that that can’t be how God created because evolution is what? Impossible. Absolutely impossible. That’s why there’s no evidence for it, because it can’t happen. The sin of evolutionists is described in (1 Romans). “The wrath of God,” verse 18, “is revealed from heaven against all un-Godliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness.” The truth of the Creator God is obvious. It’s absolutely obvious, reasonable, logical, but they suppress the truth. Verse 19, “That which is known about God is evident within them for God made it evident to them by reason, by logic, by cause and effect. It is apparent, since the creation of the world, His invisible attributes, His eternal power, His divine nature, have been clearly seen being understood through what has been made.”
You cannot conclude anything other than that there was an eternal, preexisting creator. That is the only reasonable conclusion, and consequently those who reject that and suppress that truth, (Romans 120) says, “Are without excuse.” Without excuse, even though they knew God. I mean there’s no other possible, reasonable conclusion. They refuse to honor him as God, refuse to think and became empty in their speculations, their foolish heart is darkened. They think they’re wise. They have all their Ph.D’s and all of that, but they are actually fools. They exchange the glory of the incorruptible God into the image of a corruptible man, birds, four-footed animals, crawling creatures. They worship the creature more than the creator. They make the creature the creator. Life creates itself. (1 Romans), “They worship the creation. They see the creation as the life force which creates.” Logically ridiculous as we noted a moment ago. How did the universe come into existence? Let’s go back to chapter one of Genesis and go back to where we’ve been all along. It came into existence exactly the way it’s described in the opening chapter of the Bible, which is inspired by God, which is true and inerrant and infallible. The truth of origins is clearly given here in six 24-hour – nearly 24-hour – solar days, six days defined as an evening and a morning or a period of darkness and a period of light. Six normal days. In six days, God created the entire universe the way it is now.
We’ve been showing you through this study that that was about six or seven thousand years ago and that is all. And when you look and you say what about all the strata and what about the appearance of age and all of that, the answer is God created everything old, everything mature. And the flood also, which occurs later on, changes the face and the configuration of the earth and answers a lot of the questions that are brought up with regard to topography and sedimentary rock and fossils and all of that. But the Bible is very clear, God created it all in six days. Now day one, God created the material and light. Day two, the seas and the heavens. Day three, the earth and vegetation and day four, the lights – the luminaries – the moon, the stars and the sun. Now we come to day five, and I just read it to you. It has to do with God creating all the creatures that populate the seas and the skies. This is the day when God completes the home for man and He creates the first living beings; the first living beings. Verse 20, “Swarms of living creatures.” That is the first time anything is said to be living. Plants aren’t so designated. They are organisms that have a kind of life, but it is not a conscious life. The first living beings created by God came on day five. I’ll just remind you, if you’re looking at the sequence, day five corresponds to day two as day four corresponded to day one. On day one, God created the light. On day four he created the stellar bodies to be the light givers. On day two He created the seas and the heavens and on day five Je populated the seas and the heavens.
On day three, He created the earth and its vegetation, corresponding with on day six He created the animals and man to populate the earth and to consume its vegetation, so the parallels run consistently through. The sea and the sky on day two and the inhabitants of the sea and the sky on day five. The sea was given, of course, its final form on day three, but it was created on day two. Now as we look at the text here, there are two phases to the day five creation. First phase, the creation of conscious life, secondly the creation of reproductive life. Two things are clearly identified for us. Conscious life that’s living creatures who are conscious, that is they react to their environment and they move around from place to place. Plants do not, obviously. And secondly, reproductive life. Verse 20, let’s pick it up at the text. “Then God said,” and I’ll stop you there again. Always the method of creation, God speaks non-existing things into existence. He speaks them into existence out of nothing.
“Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.” So he first of all filled the waters. Now in the Hebrew, this is what is called a paronomasia, which is a term describing a kind of literary device. A paronomasia is basically this. The Hebrew says, “Let the waters” – the text says, “Let the waters swarm with swarming things.” It’s a repetition. It’s the same in verse 11, “Let the earth sprout vegetation.” Actually, in the Hebrew is, “Let the earth vegetate with vegetation.” And here it’s, “Let the waters swarm with swarming things.” Swarm with swarming, living things actually or swarm with swarming things that live. Swarm is the word chosen here because it has the idea of movement, and I remind you that the distinctiveness of living creatures is that they move. Plants are not called living creatures because they aren’t mobile. They don’t move. Living creatures move. In fact, He filled the seas so that the verb here is to swarm. And again, it pictures a large population of these creatures in motion. Again, Cassuto, the Jewish commentator, writes, “The primary significance of the stem, sherets in Hebrew, is movement with specific reference to the abundant, swift movement of many creatures who jostle one another as they proceed to crisscross in all possible directions. God willed that into the midst of the waste an inanimate waters from one end of the sea to the other. There should now enter a living being and that there should be born in their midst moving animate beings subject to no limitation of numbers or intermission of movement.
The sea began to just swarm with all these living creatures swimming everywhere and that would include – the seas would include the freshwater as well; all the waters of the earth. The term living is that very familiar Hebrew word nephesh, which speaks of soul or being or life. It’s used here for the very first time. This is the first time we really have a living creature that moves on its own. Plants have no such life in the sense that creatures do because plants can’t move and they are not conscious. Living things are conscious, though animals are not self-conscious. That is they are conscious. They respond to their environment as individuals, but they are not aware of that response. It is purely a mechanism that we call instinct. They are not self-conscious, they do not know they are alive. They do not know they are dead. They do not know one another. They do not communicate with one another in personal, self-conscious ways, although instinctively they are under tremendous control by the DNA codes that have been given to them for the preservation of their species and the function of their species as God as designed it. But they are distinguished from plants by the word nephesh. Literally, nephesh means “that which breathes.” That which breathes.
These beings are wayibārā. That is to say they are created, and here He uses bārā, the word for create. This is an epic-making achievement that demands the verb “to create.” As a monumental thing takes place, He creates conscious beings that can move and they move through the sea in swarms; such a massive amount of created beings. Now that is to say, and I stop you here because this is a very important thing. When God created the fish and all those mammals and all those animals, whether you’re talking about fish or whether you’re talking about whales or whether you’re talking about sea-going dinosaurs or whether you’re talking about eels or whether you’re talking about plankton or whatever anywhere in the food chain, when God created all of that there was no evolutionary process. He literally, in a moment, spoke into existence all the creatures that swim. Just instantaneously, at the same moment on the same day, they all came into existence. They were not somehow in a process of development as species evolved into other species and mutated into other species.
They were all instantaneously created in massive swarms moving through the seas. Verse 20 indicates the same thing, “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.” Of course He doesn’t talk about swarming because there wasn’t such a dense creation of birds. We know that today. If you look in the depths of the sea where it hasn’t been polluted significantly, you will find an almost uncountable and limitless amount of life. And you look into the air, and of course there are less birds. So you find here that it doesn’t use the word “swarming.” “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven.” 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 out, 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. And the birds that are flying around the globe don’t go very far. They just kind of fly what appears to us to be the surface of the vast heaven behind or on the face of heaven; in front of heaven with the great heaven behind them.
And then I think this is quite fascinating. “And God,” verse 21, “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 here? Just birds and just swarms of living creatures that swim in the seas, fish and more. Why bring up great sea monsters? Why introduce them? There are a lot of other things in the sea. Why them? I find that fascinating. The Hebrew word is tannin. And you know, there’s a reason for this. If you study the Old Testament, you find several Old Testament references to sea creatures. There’s Leviathan. Remember reading about Leviathan? Leviathan is this massive, massive, powerful sea creature. (41 Job), God says to Job, “Where were you?” He says, “Where were you when I created everything?” Then he comes to chapter 41 and He says, “Can you put your hooks in and control Leviathan?” Some people, I think, have described this massive beast, fierce. You can read (41 Job) yourself and read the characteristics of this beast. I wrote a little note on it. Some have described it as an alligator or a crocodile, but they’re not in the sea as such. The best guess is that he’s describing some kind of dinosaur, some kind of massive seagoing monster, Leviathan.
There’s also mention in the Old Testament of the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent. (7 Job 12) the serpent of the sea or the sea serpent. There is Rehab, and it refers to massive seagoing animals, very likely refers to dinosaurs. But why does He mention this? Why does he bring it up? I think the answer can be found in this. In ancient mythology, for example in Egypt and Mesopotamia, the Fertile Crescent area east of Israel and the Land of Canaan as well – the countries of the East generally – there have always been these very bizarre and very highly-complex fabricated 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. So the ancients saw these, perhaps these great, fierce sea monsters as the deities, the gods. They wrote epics about them. Some of them, for example, you read about in some of the Ugaritic, which is a different language, Ugaritic epics with regard to the enemies of Baal. The enemies of Baal took the form, one form was this god, Mot, who was called the Lord of the Sea. He was a great sea monster. This began to influence that whole part of the world where they saw the sea monsters as gods, the sea monsters as gods in rebellion against the good gods. In the case of Israel, the gods in rebellion against the good God.
(27 Isaiah 1) you have mention of these sea gods who were so much a part of Canaanite culture. When the children of Israel came to the Land of Canaan, they came across this Canaanite poetry, Canaanite legends about the gods taking on the form of these great sea monsters. So the sea monster then became a picture of the principal of evil, the anti-god evil was sort of personified in the great sea monster, the great dragon of the sea, the great dinosaurs of the sea. A number of versus, as I said then, refer to Leviathan, the great sea monster always seemingly depicted as the great enemies of the true God, implying they were somehow a supernatural deity or supernatural force that rose up against their creator. That was all in the ancient epics. That would have been in existence of 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. And God created the great sea monsters along with every living creature that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind and God saw that it was what? And that includes the sea monsters. So much for all that mythology. The Old Testament is opposed to such foolish myths and voices its protest in its own quiet way, doesn’t it? So God created the great sea monsters and God saw that it was good. It’s as if the Torah said far be it from anyone to suppose that the sea monsters are some mythological forces of evil, some divine gods or demigods in opposition to the true and living God and revolt against the true and living God. They are as natural as anything else God created and they were formed in their proper time and their proper place by the word of the Creator in order to fulfill His will. He made them because He wanted to make them and he looked at them and He said they are good.
That’s why it says in Psalms, “Praise the Lord from the earth you sea monsters and all deeps.” The poet in the Psalms is inviting all created forms of life to praise the Lord – all of them. That’s Psalm, I think, 148:7. It just puts that little note in there to dispel all of the bizarre mythology. God created, in verse 21, the sea monsters, every living creature that moves, which with the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind. Just a note: “after its kind” is used twice. God created everything that lives in the water at the same time on the same day. He created everything that flies in the air at the same time on the same day, and He created them after their kind. There is no evolution of species from kind to kind to kind to kind. He created them after their kind. All the species were created by God. There can be variation within the species, but there’s no moving outside that DNA, that information encoded in each species.
Henry Morris says, “The first introduction of animal life was not a fragile blog of protoplasm that happened to come together in response to electrical discharges over a primeval ocean as evolutionists believe.” God just made it all in its kind. Everything that lives in the sea, everything that lives in the sky, God created the way it is in its own species. By the way, 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. There was no death in the world at that time. Nothing died. Nothing died. I suppose we could conclude at that point that animals didn’t eat each other. That’s a moot question in scripture, but it’s a reasonable assumption. That’s why the theologian von Rad once said, “Outside of God, there’s nothing to fear.” The Jews needed to hear that. They didn’t need to fear the imaginary gods of the sea monsters. Von Rad said something profound, “Outside of God, there’s nothing to fear.” There’s only one to be feared. Who’s that? The one that can destroy both soul and body and hell, the New Testament says.
Evil came into the world after creation. Evil came into the world after the creation of sea monsters; huge, massive sea creatures. The whole creation was made by God and was originally good. So day five first brought the creation of conscious life. Secondly, of reproductive life. Reproductive life. This is just – I just – the more I read about this, and I’m not gonna take the time to get into it. You can do your own research. The more I get into reproductive systems, the more incredible it is. I mean 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. That’s what it says in verse 22, “And God blessed them saying, “Here’s the blessing.”” He granted them this benefit. The blessing is a benefit. “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters and the seas. And let birds multiply on the earth.”
Obviously, the birds don’t fill the heaven above, but they do multiply. Fish tend to fill the waters of the sea. “Be fruitful and multiply.” Be fruitful and multiply is kind of an Old Testament phrase for reproduction. It’s exactly what it means – to reproduce. In (1 Genesis 28) when God is creating man, it says, “God blessed them,” that is male and female, “and God said to them, “Be fruitful and multiply.”” That was his command for them to procreate. (9 Genesis) “God blessed Noah and his sons and said to them,” Noah and his wife and their sons and their wives, “Be fruitful and multiply and repopulate the earth.” (17 Genesis 16), “I will bless her.” God is talking about Sarah. “I’ll give you a son,” to her and then I will bless her and she shall be a mother of nations. Kings of people shall come to her. In verse 20, as for Ishmael, “Behold I will bless him. I will make him fruitful and will multiply him.” To make him fruitful and multiply means reproduction. You find it in (28 Genesis 3), (35 Genesis 9-11), (48 Genesis 3-4). That is a phrase meaning reproduction.
So God gave this created order in the sky and in the sea, reproductive capability. All living creatures are complex machines. I said this long ago in the series. They’re named for a scientist who discovered complexity. It’s called a von Neumann machine after the scientist von Neumann. Wilder Smith writes a whole book on the von Neumann machine. All living organisms characteristically have three properties. They are self-sustaining. That is they have the capability to sustain their own life like those little, tiny, tiny wheels going around inside of you. They are self-sustaining. Secondly, they are self-repairing. That is they fix themselves as they go. And most definitively, they are self-reproducing. A von Neumann machine is self-sustaining or self-perpetuating, self-repairing and self-reproducing. So far we have never, by all of our science, been able to manufacture anything like that. We can’t come up, for example, with a computer that sustains its own life and 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. The complexity of it is too complicated. It can’t be done. If we could get something complicated enough to do that, it would be in disrepair all the time. It couldn’t keep up with the self-repairing process.
We can’t create a von Neumann machine, and yet every single cell that exists is just that. This amazing capability, biochemical reproductive systems being placed in every little DNA strip in every cell of every creature, and with that comes the capability to be fruitful and multiply. 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. And let birds multiply on the earth. Somebody said, “Well, why does it say on the earth? Birds fly.” Well they 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. God knows. There’s no evolution here. Creatures of the sea and the creatures of the sky were all made in one day.
In every single species, the largest legendary sort of fierce sea monsters down to the smallest marine organisms, all made in one day. All the creatures that fly, all made the same day in their species with movement. They move through the air. They move through the sea. And they are conscious. That is to say if you drive your car down the road, isn’t it interesting how the birds avoid it? They have a consciousness, although it is not a self-consciousness. So man’s house is built. It’s now ready for his occupancy and the crown of creation comes on day six. The crown of creation is man. You know what’s so sad, we’ll stop at this point, but what is so sad is that man refuses to see God in creation. Isn’t that sad? Man refuses to see God in creation. He refuses to hear God in conscience, suppresses the truth, plunges into deeper darkness and hopelessness. I’ll tell you what grieves me most of all. What grieves me most of all is people who say they’re Christians, who believe the Bible, and then claim evolution. I’ll say this again. I said it weeks ago. You cannot find evolution in (1 Genesis) anywhere. It’s not there. There’s no way to execute that chapter and come out with evolution. No way possible. You have to suppress the truth. Why do that? Why would you – why would you affront God or blaspheme God or dishonor God in order to honor a Godless evolutionist; in order to buy some scientific credibility.
We take scripture at its face value, don’t we? I don’t know about you, but I start believing the Bible in (1 Genesis 1). I don’t have to wait until chapter three. 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.” They rejected the creator to the degree that when he was incarnate they killed him. They killed him. It is a dishonor to God to believe anything other than what Genesis says, right? Does it honor God to believe He made all this? Does it honor God to believe the creation account of Genesis? Does it give Him glory? Is it a proper representation of who He is and what He’s done? And is it a source of worship? 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, and chance doesn’t even exist. It’s a nonexistent reality. We start worshipping God in (1 Genesis), do we not, when we worship him as creator.
Father, thank you again for tonight as we’ve worked our way through day five and now have the glorious anticipation of that final day of creation, the day You created all the animals and the crown of creation made in your own image – man. We worship You. We adored You. We praise You. We thank You. We glorify You. We honor You as the God of Creation. You’re not only the God of Creation, but the God of Salvation. Einstein was wrong. We can know You because you desire to know us. You’ve made Yourself known to us in your creation and more than that, You’ve made yourself known to us in conscience by the law written in our hearts. Beyond that, You’ve made Yourself known to us in revelation through the scripture and You’ve shown us that You’re not only a God of immensity, a God of immutability who doesn’t change, a God of omniscience and omnipresence and omnipotence, a God of unlimited power and knowledge. You’re a God of vast complexity and vast, vast beauty and order. You are a God that fills an endless and infinite universe and yet you are a God who cares about sinners, who loves sinners, who came into the world and was born in a humble, humble, humble place in an obscure town called Bethlehem, laid in a feed trough, who came all the way down to take the place of sinners, to die on a cross so You might know us and we might know you. Oh, how we rejoice that we know You, the true and living God, the Creator of the universe, and our friend and our redeemer. We thank You. Amen.
