Creation Day 5
Published by Stanley Pouw in 2018 · 2 September 2018
The text says, “And God said, “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the expanse of the heavens.” 21 So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.”
“22 And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” 23 And there was evening and there was morning, the fifth day.” We have day by day gone through the Creation week with some amazing insights given to us by the word of God. But I am now sort of reintroduce you all again to the amazing diversity and complexity of the created order.
It is staggering how, as we begin to look at the Creation with any kind of thought, any kind of depth, we come face-to-face with the immensity of the intelligence and power of God. December 1996 brought the death of an evolutionist and astronomer named Carl Sagan, one of the most well-known astronomers in the world. His belief was that life just sort of happened and he ended up his life with absolute hopelessness.
Near the end of his life he was interviewed by Ted Koppel on television who asked Sagan, “Do you have any words of wisdom for the people of the world?” Sagan replied, “We live on a hunk of rock and metal that circles a 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. That is well worth pondering.” end quote.
In the end, this brilliant evolutionist only knows that the universe exists. He doesn’t know how, he doesn’t know why, and 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,” The evolutionist refuses to meet the God who wants to be known.
Some birds navigate by the stars when migrating. How can birds raised from eggs inside a building where they have never seen the sky orient themselves toward home when shown an artificial sky representing a place they’ve never been. Look at the Bombardier beetle who has two chemicals in his body which mix perfectly and at the right moment combine outside his body. When they’re fired, they explode in the face of the enemy.
However, the two chemicals that create an explosion outside the body, never combine prematurely to blow up the beetle. And how did the beetle evolve those explosives and keep them separate? Now look at God’s power. The University of Alberta, once calculated that there are an average of 1,800 storms in operation at any time, and that those 1,800 storms expend energy of one billion, three hundred million horsepower.
Rain of four inches over 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 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 every day.
The U.S. Natural Museum says there are over 10 million different species of insects. There are 2,500 kinds of ants. One colony of ants can have as many as 100 million ants. Some have estimated there are five billion birds in America. Ducks can fly 60 miles an hour, eagles can fly 100 miles an hour, and falcons can dive at 180 miles an hour. Codfish can lay nine million eggs and herring only 70,000.
Just think what God created. 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 at the same time, 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.
The sun burns up four million tons of matter per second. Consider things that are very small, like the atom. 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. If you take every molecule in one drop of water and blow it up the size of a grain of sand, you would have enough sand to make a road one foot thick, one-half mile wide from L.A. to New York City.
Let me talk about the ‘wheel of life’. That is what scientists call it, and it is found in the enzyme ATP synthase. It 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. Every cell in every living thing has thousands of these motors in just one cell.
The ATP motor’s job is to make the molecule adenosine triphosphate, ATP, from adenosine diphosphate, ADP, and phosphoric acid, a synthesis which requires 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. So energy is directed and the products are recycled constantly, of which you have 10 quadrillion motors going on all the time.
Says Dr. Walker, “We require our body weight in ATP every day.” We are turning over that amount of ATP, cycling that energy, to keep ourselves thinking and walking around, doing whatever we normally do. In 1993, Professor Boyer deduced 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. 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.
These little machines are producing, with every turn of the wheel at some 100 revolutions per second, the necessary energy 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 and energized these little wheel motors? Only God can do that.
R.C. Sproul says there are only four options for the origin of the universe. Option number one, the universe is an illusion. It doesn’t exist. 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. Either it doesn’t exist or it created itself, or it always existed or somebody created it.
Sproul says, “Option number one must be eliminated for two reasons.” “First, if it’s a true illusion, then someone must be existing to have that illusion, so therefore everything is not an illusion.” Secondly, you can eliminate the illusion theory, because if we assume the illusion is absolute then nothing exists But if something exists, then whatever exists must either be self-created, self-existent, or created by someone who is self-existent.
Option two, that the universe created itself. Well this is contradictory and logically impossible. Sproul says, “In essence, self-creation requires the existence of something before it exists.” “For something to create itself, it must be before it is.” 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 God.
Sproul points out that an entity, like God, can be self-existent and not violate logic, but He 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. Then you have option number three, that the universe, as it exists, as we know it, has always existed eternally, but you are not eternal and neither am I and neither is the world.
So we are left with only one possibility. The universe exists because it was created by someone who existed before it existed, namely God. Matter can’t create itself. Only an eternal, preexisting God could create it. CNN reported that only nine percent of Americans believe that life arose purely by chance. Over 90 percent of Americans believe that God was involved in creation, but that God used evolution as His method.
Evolutionists think they’re wise, but they are actually fools. They make the creature the creator by saying: Life creates itself. They see the creation as the life force which creates. The truth of origins is clearly given here in six 24-hour–solar days, six days defined as having an evening, a period of darkness and a morning, a period of light. In six days, God created the entire universe the way it is now.
Now on 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 moon, the stars and the sun. Now we come to day five. Here God created 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.
Genesis 1:20, “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. Now, there are two phases on day five. First phase, the creation of conscious life, secondly the creation of reproductive life.
“Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures.” So He first of all filled the waters. Swarm is the word chosen here because it has the idea of movement, Plants are not called living creatures because they aren’t mobile. Cassuto, the Jewish commentator, writes, “The primary significance is abundant, swift movement of many creatures as they proceed to crisscross in all possible directions.”
The seas would include 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. This is the first time we really have a living creature that moves on its own. Living things are conscious, though animals are not self-conscious. They respond to their environment as individuals, it is a mechanism that we call instinct.
When God created the fish and all those animals, whether you’re talking about fish or whales or sea-going dinosaurs or plankton or whatever is in the food chain, when God created all of that there was no evolutionary process. Verse 20 indicates the same thing, “Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.” And the birds that are flying around the globe do go very far.
Verse 21, “So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good.” Remember reading about Leviathan, this massive, powerful sea creature? God says in Job 41, “Can you put your hooks in and control Leviathan?” God is describing a dinosaur, a seagoing monster.
And God saw that it was good. And that includes the sea monsters. That’s why it says in Psalm 148:7, “Praise the Lord from the earth you great sea monsters and all deeps.” God created everything that lives in the water and that flies in the air at the same time on the same day, and He created them after their kind. We could conclude at that point that animals didn’t eat each other.
Evil came into the world after the fall of men. So day five first brought the creation of conscious life and secondly, of reproductive life. The more you know about reproductive systems, the more incredible it is. Every species, from the most small kind all the way to the largest land and seagoing mammals and dinosaurs, all have different reproductive processes, all encoded in their own DNA.
That’s what it says in verse 22, “And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Be fruitful and multiply is an Old Testament phrase for reproduction. In Genesis 1:28 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 produce offspring.
All living creatures are like complex machines. 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 wheels going around inside of you. Secondly, they are self-repairing. That is they fix themselves as they go. And most definitively, they are self-reproducing.
What is so sad is that man refuses to see God in creation. What grieves me most of all is people who say they’re Christians, who believe the Bible, and then claim evolution. Why would you blaspheme God or dishonor God in order to honor a Godless evolutionist; or in order to buy some scientific credibility. I don’t know about you, but I better start believing the Bible in 1 Genesis 1. I don’t have to wait until Genesis 3. What about you, do you believe the bible? Let us pray.