Creation Day 6, Part 1
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 9 September 2018
Satan is the archenemy of God. Satan is an incurable liar and a deceiver, and the Bible says he is the father of lies. Satan hates the truth of God and he dominates the world that he rules with falsehood. Romans 1 says that civilization in general has exchanged the truth of God for the lie that pervades all human thought governing all intellectual work, all science, all philosophy, all sociology, all psychology and everything else.
But there are two lies in particular. Lie number one is that life is random. That life is just the way it happened with nobody planning and it just evolved that way. There is no purpose to it. There is no sovereign unfolding plan being carried out by a powerful creator. To put it another way, the universe, as it exists, was not created by God, nor is God the authority over this creation. It’s just a matter of random chance.
The second lie: Truth is relative. The Bible does not give us the truth about right and wrong, life and death, morality and immorality in the past and the future. There is no authority beyond yourself. Those two lies are so established in our society that people hate the Christian worldview, which opposes those lies. We believe the universe was created by God and is sustained by God and ruled by God.
We believe that the Bible is the Word of God, no matter what it says, whether it’s talking about history, morality or creation. A truly Christian view, is that God is the creator, God is the moral law giver, and the universe around us is the work of his creative hand, and the Bible is the revelation of his moral and spiritual law. We believe that what Genesis 1 says is as true as any other part of Scripture.
In fact, any disbelief in or tampering with or altering of Genesis 1 is an act of rebellion against God and his Word. Anyone who attacks the veracity of God and the Word of God brings upon himself the threat of divine judgment. Revelation 22:18-19, “if anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book, 19 and if anyone takes away from the words of the book, God will take away his share in the tree of life.”
Most professing Christians would deny the testimony of Genesis 1, that God created the entire universe as it is now in 6 - 24-hour days about 7,000 years ago. Satan is very clever and subtle, and has done a successful job in selling the lie of evolution. In fact, when most people think about evolution, they think about man. They think about that picture in National Geographic of the apelike creature becoming a man.
And they say, there is fossil evidence for this. Well, the fact of the matter is there isn’t. John Ankerberg and John Weldon wrote in ‘Darwin’s Leap of Faith’, “Despite widespread belief to the contrary, the fossil record of mankind is woefully inadequate to justify any belief in evolution. Despite 130 years of searching, there are no fossils that have convincingly related man to any other species.”
Duane Gish writes, “There is no evidence, either in the present world or in the world of the past that man has arisen from some lower creature. He stands alone as a separate and distinct created type or basic morphological design, endowed with qualities that sets him far above all other living creatures.” The evolution of man has been divided into three sort of Latin terms: Ramapithicus, Australopithecus, and Pithecanthropus.
Ramapithicus, the first one, is just one of a long series of creatures that have been suggested at one time or another. All different kind of bones have been thrown into that category and they all have been suggested as missing links, but they were all related to the ape family. And then there’s Australopithecus. Zuckerman headed a research team which studied the anatomical features of apes, man, and the Australopithecan fossils.
Most evolutionists seem to classify Australopithecus as a genus of the hominoid or family of man, rather than apes. But Zuckerman replies to all of them, “I myself remain totally unpersuaded. Almost always when I have tried to check the anatomical claims on which the status of Australopithecus is based, I have ended in failure.” And he concludes that this was just an ape.
And that’s also the way it goes with Pithecanthropus. You might know him as the Java man or the Peking man, the creation of some kind of transitional form out of some minute skeletal fragment. They now believe it was never a man at all, but some creatures related to the gibbons which are apes. And Cro-Magnon man, Neanderthal man, they now know were nothing more than just human skeletons.
Here are some quotes from some leading evolutionists. Robert Martin writes, “So one is forced to conclude there is no clear-cut scientific picture of human evolution.” Leaky is a very famous name in human evolution, a noted paleo-anthropologist, says, “It may never be possible to say exactly what evolved into what.” That’s pretty comprehensive. Spend your whole life to come to that conclusion.
The bones that they think are 4.5 million years old are identical to humans today. That means that there was no evolution in 4.5 million years. Scientists and those who follow their deception about evolution are like the Jews of Jesus’ day who said, “We will not have this man to reign over us. We will not come under the sovereignty of God.” And so they are described in Psalm 14:1, “The fool said in his heart, ‘There is no God.”
Look at the creation of man on day six. Genesis 1:24-25, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds—livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so. 25 And God made the beasts of the earth according to their kinds and the livestock according to their kinds, and everything that creeps on the ground according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”
Verse 26-27, “Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.” 27 So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
Now we’ve already been through the first five days of creation. The first five days really were outfitting the environment in which man would live. Man is king of the earth. Man is the pinnacle of God’s creation created in God’s image. And all the rest of the creation simply provided his surroundings, preparation for man’s arrival. And even on day six, as I just read, there was a finishing touch in creation.
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.
Now we find the text of Scripture giving more time on the creation of man than any other element of the creation, and all of Genesis 2 expands that creation of man because it is so critical. So, on the sixth day, when vegetation and animal life had been fully established, man who rules over all created life on the earth was formed. God refers in the Bible to the land animals in three categories: Cattle, creeping things and beasts of the earth.
Cattle is a word that speaks of animals which can be tamed for man’s use. Generally, these would be animals that would provide milk, such as a goat and a cow. And animals that could be ridden such as a horse and a donkey. And then the creeping things, like snakes and lizards. Anything that creeps or crawls on the ground, which would include all insects, as well as rabbits and squirrels and the like.
And then the third category, beasts of the earth would be four-legged animals of some size which are generally not tamed. Lions, giraffes, elephants, rhinos etc. that are not domesticated. In general, this would be the large mammals that roam the earth in an untamed form. Now this general classification has no relationship to the man-made system of taxonomy.
Now somebody might say, “Ah, the cattle came first and out them evolved the creeping things, and out of them evolved the beasts of the earth.” That’s a problem because the very same thing is repeated in verse 25, only in reverse order. The beasts of the earth come first, the cattle come second, and the creeping things come third. So the mixing of the order is a good way to indicate that these were created simultaneously.
Now when God brought them forth in verse 24, they are called “living creatures.” Living creatures have consciousness, but not necessarily self-consciousness. They are conscious of their environment so they can react to it. They are in the world simply as part of the environment of Man, as God displays his wonder to the king of the earth, his creation, mankind, who is made in His own image.
Now notice again in verses 24 and 25 it repeats the phrase “after their kind.” That is becoming familiar to us. We see it 10 times in Genesis 1. This indicates limitation of variation. You don’t want to get technical and say it means species or genus or family or fila 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 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 what it is. That is controlled, as we’ve learned many times, by the DNA. And that’s implied by the concept of “after their kind.”
Notice the formation of plants occurred before the creation of any animal life, before the fish and before the birds. That contradicts the traditional evolutionary system, which says that all animal life started in the sea and crawled out of the sea over billions of years, and once it got on land, plants evolved. But in Genesis plants are created first, and then the creation of the sea creatures, the air creatures, and the land creatures.
God created all creatures the way they are. 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 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.” It means it was permanent, and that’s the way it stayed.
Let’s look again at verses 26 and 27, the culmination of God’s creation. “And then God said, ‘Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness. And let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.’ And God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.”
God speaks and creates. This is what is called “fiat creation.” Fiat because the Latin word fiat means “let there be.” God speaks it into existence. We’ve heard that over and over. But verse 26 doesn’t say, “Let there be.” It says, “Let us make man.” This is a major shift. Because God is a trinity when he introduces himself personally, it is in the plural language. He’s letting us in on a Trinitarian plan.
So there are Trinitarian references in the Old Testament. But the full understanding of the trinity really blossoms in the New Testament. Because the second member of the trinity becomes a man. Their conversation was about redemption of people because the earth had already been formed. And according to Revelation 13:8, Revelation 17:8, our names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life before the foundation of the earth.
God perfectly loved the Son. He wanted to demonstrate his love for the Son, the pure love that he had for the second member of the trinity. And he determined that he would do that in a remarkable way. That is, he would get a bride for his Son. And by “a bride” he meant he would get a redeemed humanity who would honor his Son, adore his Son, love his Son, worship his Son, and serve his only Son forever.
He would bring that redeemed humanity up to where the trinity lives in the glories of heaven and they would live there forever. Creating the whole universe and everything that was in it was merely the stage for the plan to unfold. Because that creation spoke about God and who he was, and it told man of his greatness and his glory and his power. The heavens declare the glory of God.
But what puts God on display in a remarkable way is that he is gracious enough to save sinners. God is gracious, God is merciful, God is forgiving, God is kind, and that could never be displayed unless there were sinners out there that God could be gracious to. Angels were created for the glory of God. But there’s no grace shown to angels, so God can’t display his grace and mercy to angels.
Angels were either holy or they were fallen and are and damned to the lake of fire. God didn’t have to create any of us, just like he didn’t have to create anything else. But he created everything else to create a stage to reveal himself to us. That’s why Jesus said in John 6, “All that the Father gives to me will come to me.” And he wrote their names in a book before the foundation of the world.
We were predestined before the world was ever created. “Let us make man.” God gets very personal here because now he’s creating those who are eternal. And those who will eternally bring him glory either in heaven or in hell. How did he do it? He formed man of dust from the ground. That’s why bodies decompose and go back to the dust. But our soul goes to heaven where God provides us with an eternal body, Amen? Let us pray.