That was the final touch as God was preparing the house that man would live in. Man was the object. Man was the main issue here. It was the creation of man with his redemptive purpose that God really had in mind. Everything else in the universe will perish. Everything else in the universe will go out of existence. The stars will fall, according to the book of Revelation, the sun will go out, the moon will come to an end. The whole universe will roll up like a scroll. The whole creation will melt with fervent heat. It will be dissolved in a reverse. It will be uncreated. All of the atomic energy it took to put it into place will spin in reverse, like running the film backward and it will be uncreated and all of it will go out of existence. Everything that lives on this earth, every green thing, every plant, every tree, every occupant of the sea, every occupant of the sky and every land animal, every creature anywhere in the universe will die at the end of its life and go back to dust and go out of existence. But not man. Man is the main character and the whole unfolding of creation is to create a theater in which the great redemptive saga can be played out as God seeks a bride for His Son, as God seeks to demonstrate His grace and mercy and compassion and saving power to a universe of angels as well as men.
So the creation of man is the main issue. And we find the text of Scripture spending more time on the creation of man than any other element of the creation. And also, all of chapter 2 expands that creation of man because it is so critical.
Now let me give you a little bit of a parallel. The sixth day, the creation of animals and man, corresponds to the third day. On the third day the earth was created. On the sixth, the living creatures on the earth were made. On the third day immediately after the organization of inanimate nature had been completed, the plants whose dominion extends throughout the earth were brought into being, so too on the sixth day when vegetation and animal life had been fully established, man who bears the rule over created life on the earth was formed. So this corresponds to the sixth day. And we’ve seen those parallels all the way through. Day one corresponds to day four, day two corresponds to day five, and day three corresponds to day six.
Now the pattern is the same. Verse 24, “Then God said,” verse 25, “and God made.” Those are really parallels. God creates literally by speaking things into existence. In Hebrew fashion, typical Hebrew fashion, this work of creation is repeated in two different ways to seal the unmistakable clarity of the record. Then God said…is a parallel statement; then God made…which reinforces what then God said accomplished. And, in general, God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures…living creatures.” These are land animals. The sea animals already created on day five, the air animals, the birds and those that fly created on day five. Only the land animals remained.
By the way, they didn’t evolve. They were created instantaneously. Created living creatures and He refers to the land animals in three categories. I think they’re quite fascinating, by the way. And these would not agree with contemporary taxonomy, I guess you could call it, temporary categorization of animals such as amphibians and reptiles and all of that, mammals and so forth and so on. The Bible just gives you three simple categories; cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth.
Cattle likely, and I think almost all Hebrew scholars agree on this, is a word that speaks of animals which can be tamed and domesticated for man’s use. We think immediately when we think of domesticated we think of a dog, but that’s not what the Bible would have in mind since the dog really has no use unless you’ve trained it to get the paper. Apart from that it has no use. It can’t pull a plow and I suppose a dog could herd sheep if it’s appropriately trained, and maybe there is a use there and that would fit into that category. But generally these would be the kind of animals, for example, that would provide milk…such as a goat and a cow and an animal that could be ridden such as a beast of burden and things like that. Animals that can be tamed and domesticated and used by man.
And then second category is creeping things. And, of course, immediately comes to mind snakes and lizards and things like that, but it probably stretches beyond that. Anything that creeps or crawls on the ground, that would include a whole world of insects, as well as…and most Hebrew scholars would say also it refers to small animals with short legs who appear to just be scurrying across, like the rabbits that come all the time into our yard and eat the flowers. Short legged, and one Hebrew writer says, “Animals with short legs whose bellies are not far from the ground.” Insects, rodents, as well as snakes and amphibians, etc., etc., such animals are referred to, by the way, in Leviticus chapter 11 verse 29, “These are to you the unclean among the swarming things which swarm on the earth, the mole, the mouse, the great lizard, the gecko which is a kind of lizard, the crocodile, the lizard, the sand reptile and the chameleon. So there you have a combination of those things, the mole, the mouse, along with the reptiles. And that’s probably a pretty general category for creeping things.
And then the third category, the beasts of the earth, would be four-legged animals of some size which are generally not tamed. You know, we think immediately of lions and giraffe and elephants and rhinos and hippos and tigers and animals like that that are not domesticated for any purposes of man, generally speaking, although it is possible, I suppose, at least to use the Indian elephant, but certainly not the African elephant for some purposes…I myself having ridden an Indian elephant, they can be tamed. But in general, this would be the large mammals that roam the earth in an untamed or wild form.
And so there you have it. I mean, there’s really nothing more to say. There are domestic animals and there are non-domestic animals. There are those that are above ground and there are those that are creeping and crawling around on the ground. That’s the categories.
Now this general classification, as I say, has really no relationship to the arbitrary system of manmade taxonomy, it’s just a simple, natural system. Now I want to point out the fact that all three were simultaneously made because look at verse 24, “Cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth…” And somebody might say, “Oh, the cattle came first and out of them evolved the creeping things and out of the them evolved the beasts of the earth.” That’s a problem because you have a repeat of the very same thing in verse 25, only it’s in reverse order. The beasts of the earth come first, the cattle come second and the creeping things come third. You see, the mixing of the order is a very good way to indicate to us that these were created simultaneously, they were progressing out of each other. All simultaneously by the power of God, created. No evolution, no struggle for existence, no survival of the fittest, no mutations at all, God just created all these animals.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
