And isn’t it astounding and amazing the variety of it all? I mean, just the variety of a fish in the sea and animals including mammals that swim the seas is staggering and they’re even discovering more. And there are thousands of categories of animals which are extinct already. The birds that fly in the sky, some people are in to ornithology and they poke around with their little binoculars discovering all the wonders of birds in the sky. And then you see the animals and the insects and all the reptiles and all the things that crawl all over the earth and it’s just mind-boggling that God has such a vast capability intellectually to conceive of and design all these creatures. But He did.
And verse 24, “Let the earth bring forth…let the earth bring forth.” Now why did He say that? Why did He say let the earth bring forth? Well, I think it’s just another way of saying let them appear on the earth, but it also is true, and I need to point this out to you, that the bodies of animals are composed of the same elements as the earth. That’s right. The bodies of animals are composed of the same chemical elements as the earth. And they come out of the earth to be shaped and formed and when they die they go back to the earth, as it were, because they’re made of the same elements. In fact, that is true of man even. Look at chapter 2 verse 7, “The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground.” He formed man of dust from the ground, and so, with the same components that made the earth, God made the animals…same chemical material.
Now when He brought them forth, they’re called “living creatures.” And I just remind you that that’s a very important concept. Plants are never called “living creatures.” Trees are never called “living creatures.” You have the vegetation created back in verse 11 and 12, it is called vegetation there, some translate it herbs, but the best translation is vegetation, but they’re never called living creatures. When you come down to verse 20, the first time you have living creatures is when the creatures of the sea are created, and the creatures of the air, the birds and the fish and others that are in the sea…they’re called living creatures.
And what did I tell you was the characteristic of living creatures? They move. Plants don’t. They move and they have consciousness. They move and they have consciousness, different from plants. You can’t train a plant because a plant in the sense that you can train it to do anything. You can make it grow toward the sun, but that’s a matter of its natural tendency to draw its life from the light. But you cannot train a plant because a plant has no consciousness. Living creatures have consciousness and mobility, different from plants. Living creatures have consciousness but not necessarily self-consciousness. They’re conscious of their environment so they can react to it. A dog can get out of the way of a car. A dog can learn to obey a command. Even Shamoo can obey a command and dive out of the water and touch its nose on a ball 20 feet in the air. And they can train them to do that because they are conscious of their environment and they attach that to getting food. But that doesn’t mean they’re self-conscious. They can react to their environment but they don’t know they are. Self-consciousness means you know who you are and you know you’re reacting to your environment. They have consciousness without self-consciousness. And when they die, they just go back to dust. They’re in the world simply as part of the decor as God displays His wonder to the king of the earth, His creation, man who was made in His own image.
Now notice again in verses 24 and 25, it repeats the phrase “after their kind” a couple of times in verse 24, and a couple of times again, three times actually, in verse 25. That is becoming very familiar to us. We have a…we have it ten times in Genesis 1…after their kind…after their kind…after their kind. Listen, let me say it as simply as I can, this indicates limitation of variation. This indicates limitation of variation. You don’t want to get technical and say it means species, or genus, or family, or phila, or whatever the scientific terms of categorization might be. But what we will say is it means there is a limitation on variation. In each case there is a genetic code. In each case there is a DNA, a chromosomal strip that is coded in every cell of every living thing that determines that living thing’s nature. And it will be true to its nature. It can be varied within that DNA, but it cannot become something other than it is. That is controlled, as we’ve learned many timed, by the DNA and that’s implied by the concept of kind…of kind.
By the way, just as a footnote. The formation of plants occurred before the creation of any animal life, before the fish and before the birds. And that contradicts flatly the traditional evolutionary system which says that all animal life started in the sea and crawled out of the sea at some point over hundreds of millions of years, and it crawled out of the sea and coincidentally once it got on land, plants evolved. But what you see in Genesis is plants being created first, vegetation being created first, and then was the creation of the sea creatures, the air creatures and the land creatures.
So the best we can say about kind is that it possesses limitation of variation. God created these creatures the way they are. Dogs were dogs, horses were horses, dolphins are dolphins, barracuda are barracuda, ants are ants although there are many different kinds, spiders are spiders, snakes are snakes, frogs are frogs although there are variations, there are limitations on that variation. One doesn’t evolve into the other. And that’s repeated ten times in Genesis chapter 1 as if God knew somebody would come along and try to tell a lie about one kind becoming another kind and no limitation on variation existing.
It says at the end of verse 24, “And it was so.” Now we’ve heard that before. When God did it, it was so. That’s an important little phrase, it’s not just thrown in there to fill space. It occurred back in verse 9, it was so. It occurred back in verse 11, it was so. Back in verse 15, it was so. And here in verse 24, it was so. It means it was fixed, it was firm, it was permanent and that’s the way it stayed. When in the very beginning God said “Let there be light,” it doesn’t say “and it was so,” because that light when it was originally created was just light and it wasn’t yet attached to the stellar bodies, the luminaries, the moon, the sun and the stars. When God first created the earth it was just a mass of elements completely engulfed in water. God doesn’t say “it was so” because that wasn’t its permanent shape. But in verse 9 when God began to separate the waters above and the waters below and then the dry land appeared and the earth took its shape with land and water, that was the way it would permanently be…the statement is “it was so.” And so it was in verse 11 when vegetation was created on the earth, that was to be permanent and fixed and it still exists today. In verse 15 the moon, the sun, the stars were placed in the sky and it was so, it was fixed in that way. And here in verse 24 the animals were created and they’re still that way…they’re still that way. It was so, fixed, firm, permanent and has remained that way even till today. And they remain within the framework of their kind, their variation being restricted. There are some variations, there is some…some change, we know that. Genetics can do that, special breeding, but they still remain essentially the same kind of creature.
“This article originally appeared here at Bible Bulletin Board.”
