My friend, Ron, handed me a little article out of the Los Angeles Times from Friday, June 25th – just a couple of weeks ago.  It says a Delta two rocket carried a NASA telescope off Cape Canaveral Thursday on a three year, $204 million mission to try to discover the origin of the universe.  Now that’s $204 of your million dollars and mine to try to find out what’s in the first chapter of Genesis.  Amazing.

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.  In fact, Romans 1 says that civilization in general has exchanged the truth of God for the lie.  In other words, the world lives under pervasive deception and falsehood.  And Satan’s lies literally pervade 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 that provide the basic paradigm for modern culture.  Two lies.  Lie number one is that life is random.  That is that the way things are is just the way they kind of happened with nobody planning and nobody carrying it off, it just sort of evolved that way.  Life is random.  There is no purpose to it.  There is no reason for it.  There is no sovereign unfolding plan being carried out by a designing and powerful creator.  Life is just random.  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 chance, random chance.

Second lie.  First one:  Life is random.  Second lie:  Truth is relative.  Truth is relative.  The Bible is not the Word of God.  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.  Life is random.  Truth is relative.

Now those two lies are so established in our society that people hate the Christian worldview, which opposes those lies.  We don’t believe life is random.  We believe the universe as it is right now was created by God and is sustained by God and ruled by God.  We do not believe that truth is relative.  We believe truth is absolute and it it absolutely revealed on the pages of scripture, which is the revelation of God.

To say that life as we know it, the universe as we know it, is the work of the creator God who is its sovereign and its sustainer and who, as he began it, will bring it to its end, is to go against the grain of our culture, to say that truth is absolute and the truth is as revealed in the Bible is to generate the hostility of the society around us.  Two great ideologies rule.  No creator and no moral law.  And that dispossess man of any accountability. 

Now in this series, we’re looking really at both of these lies.  Because the lie that life is random flies in the face of Genesis chapter 1.  Genesis chapter 1 does away with all evolution, establishing the fact that God is the creator of everything as it is.  And we also, by accepting at face value the teaching of Genesis chapter 1, are countering the attack on the Bible as the Word of God.  We believe the Bible is the Word of God, not matter what it says, whether it’s talking about history, morality, or creation.

These two lies go together.  Evolutionists who reject the idea of a creator God, therefore reject the idea of the Bible as an authoritative document written by that creator God.  But beyond that, evolutionists both theistic evolutionists – those who say that evolution occurred but there is a God, he sort of launched evolution – and those who are theistic or humanistic evolutionists, in any case, any evolutionist at all, whether he believes there is a God or not, in order to espouse evolution, has to deny Genesis chapter 1. 

He has to deny, then, that God created the universe as it is and that the record of that creation as contained in scripture is infallible, inerrant, and true.  So we’re really running across the grain of these two great deceptions.  Because Genesis 1 affirms God as the creator and it affirms that the account of that creation in the Bible is in fact infallible, inerrant, and true.

A truly Christian view is that the Bible is the Word of God and God exists and has in scripture revealed himself.  A truly Christian view, then, 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.

Genesis 1 is just as true as Exodus 20, which gives us the Ten Commandments.  It’s just as true as Isaiah 53, which describes the suffering servant who would be the Messiah and bear our iniquities.  It’s just as true as Matthew chapter 1, which indicates that Jesus was to be born of Mary and to be the savior of the world.  It’s just as true as John chapter 3 which says you must be born again.  It’s just as true as any other and every other part of scripture. 

There is no basis for tampering with, questioning, or denying the veracity of Genesis 1 any more than 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.  It’s a serious thing to do that because, like any other such rebellion, one who attacks the veracity of God and the Word of God brings upon himself the threat of divine judgment. 

Listen to the words of the last chapter of the Bible.  Revelation 22:18.  “I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book: if anyone adds to them, God shall add to him the plagues described in this book, and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his share in the tree of life and in the holy city, which are written in the book.”

The bottom line, the Bible ends with a warning that you better not tamper with scripture.  And anyone who tampers with scripture to add to it or take away from it brings himself under divine judgment.  So we could readily conclude that altering the scripture, tampering the scripture, or just flatly not believing the scripture is unthinkable for a faithful, wise believer.  It’s unthinkable.  It is only reasonable that an ungodly and foolish unbeliever would attack the testimony of scripture.  And they do that all the time.  That’s just a way of life with them.

For a believer to assault the veracity of scripture is an unimaginable thing.  And yet, there are many so-called Christians who do that.  They wouldn’t deny the morality of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20.  They wouldn’t deny the prophetic testimony of the coming suffering Messiah in Isaiah 53.  They wouldn’t deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.  They wouldn’t deny the gospel of grace and the need for the new birth.  They wouldn’t deny other things in scripture.  But they do deny the clear teaching of Genesis chapter 1. 

Why do they do that?  Why do so-called Christians bring themselves under such jeopardy under the threat of the closing portion of scripture, which says their names could be taken out of the Book of Life and from the holy city and the plagues that are written in scripture could be pronounced upon them as divine curses? 

Why would people jeopardize themselves by tampering with scripture in the light of such warnings?  Do they do it because they desire to please evolutionary scientists rather than Holy God?  Do they love the applause of men?  Do they love the reputation of academics more than God?  Do they seek the approval of departmental committees more than the Holy God of the universe? 

Fair questions, aren’t they?  It’s unthinkable to me that so-called Christians would deny Genesis.  On the basis of what?  This is the Word of God.  But Satan has managed to be extremely successful in getting his evolutionary lie out, so much so that most professing Christians by far – most professing Christians – would deny the simple, straightforward testimony of Genesis 1, that God created the entire universe as it is now in 6 24-hour days.  And that, about 6,000 or 7,000 years ago.

Far and away, most evangelical Christians, professing Christians, would deny that.  Why would they deny the clear teaching of scripture, tamper with the voracity and integrity of the Word of God and bring themselves into such jeopardy?  Satan is very clever, very subtle, and has done an immensely successful job in selling the lie of evolution. 

Now no part of the evolutionary lie is more loudly proclaimed or more widely believed than the evolution of man.  In fact, when most people think about evolution, they think about man.  They think about the picture in National Geographic of the apelike creature on fours, and all of a sudden the sequence of about ten different pictures as this four-legged creature all of a sudden becomes erect and takes the posture of a man.  And they tell us that’s the progression of human evolution.  We’ve all seen those imaginary human evolution lines, where we go from ape to man in a series of drawings.  Every schoolchild in public education is constantly taught that man has come like this, from apes.

And supposedly, they say, there is fossil evidence for this.  And I want to speak of this for a minute because if I don’t somebody’s going to ask me about it.  But there supposedly are fossils.  Every once in awhile somebody finds a bone somewhere in Africa or somewhere, and out of that bone they tell us they have identified the missing links in this sequence.  Supposedly, there is fossil evidence. 

Well, the fact of the matter is there isn’t.  And most all of those fossils are hoaxes.  The presupposition is that evolution is true.  They’re trying to make the bones fit the drawings in National Geographic.  In a book written by John Ankerberg and John Weldon called Darwin’s Leap of Faith, it says, “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.  Most have been conclusively proven false.”

And, as I said, many were outright hoaxes.  Anthropologist Kathleen J. Reichs, editor of Hominoid Origins cited many authorities who disagree about the interpretations of these many alleged human ancestry discoveries.  Until accurate dating of the fossils is possible – “ she writes “ - reconstruction of hominoid relationships must remain tenuous, at best.”  Now there’s an honest anthropologist, an honest evolutionist who says none of the fossils prove anything.

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.”

Now I don’t want to get too technical, but just to kind of show you that you can do your homework on this and the Bible will stand.  The evolution of man has sort of been divided into three sort of Latin terms:  Ramapithicus, Australopithecus, and Pithecanthropus.  And those names will be on the quiz, of course.  These have all been – these are the Latin terms given to the supposed fossils, and they have been heralded as transitional forms between ape and man.

The average person on the street probably still believes these classifications represent genuine intermediate forms, but they don’t.  Even evolutionists are seriously divided and none of these classifications documents any human evolution at all.  For example, Ramapithicus, the first one, is just one of a long series of creatures that have been suggested at one time or another.  In other words, all different kind of bones have been thrown into that Ramapithicus title.  They’ve all been suggested as missing links but when more complete evidence has become available, were all related to the ape family. 

And then there’s Australopithecus.  They said that that was evidence of human evolution, the view that these fossils represent genuine intermediates has been challenged by the famous British anatomists, Solly Lord Zuckerman and Dr. Charles Oxnard, formally director of the graduate studies professor, by the way, of anatomy at the University of Southern California Medical School.

Zuckerman headed a research team for over 15 years, studied the anatomical features of apes, man, monkeys, and the Australopithecan fossils and the anatomical specimens from hundreds of apes, humans, and monkeys, compared along with almost all available important fossil fragments of this particular category.  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 nothing but an ape and, as such, in no way related, at all, to the ancestry of man.  An honest evolutionary look at these things debunks them.  The work of Zuckerman and Oxnard literally has tended to be so conclusive that many other scientists have had to fall in line behind it. 

And that’s the way it goes with the final one that I mentioned to you, Pithecanthropus, it’s the same story.  Pithecanthropus you might know 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 was never a man at all, but some creatures related to the gibbons.  The gibbons not being a family down the street, but an ape, as you know.  Cro-Magnon man, Neanderthal man, they now know were nothing more than just human skeletons.

There’s a fascinating book on this if you really want to read – I don’t want to talk any more about it.  But there’s a fascinating book called Bones of Contention.  It’s a good title.  It’s a creationist assessment of human fossils by a very outstanding creationist scientist by the name of Marvin Lubenow.  It’s published by Baker in 1992.  Bones of Contention.  If you want more study, you will find the debunking of all of these supposed transitional fossil forms.

Now, here’s the simple understanding.  Because man did not evolve, it’s impossible to prove he did.  Okay?  Can you handle that one?  They’re having a hard time proving man evolved because he didn’t.  And so they’re in hopeless confusion because they’re trying to make this whole deal fit the drawings in National Geographic, and it doesn’t work. 

And I’m going to give you 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, period.”  Leaky is a very famous name in human evolution, a noted paleoanthropologist, 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.

Another Leaky, Richard Leaky, in an interview concerning the study of early man said – and I quote – “I think we’re still doing a great deal of guessing.”  David Pilbeam commented, “There is no clear-cut and inexorable pathway from ape to human being.”  As to whether man evolved from chimps, orangutans or gibbons, he said, “The fossil record has been elastic enough the expectation sufficiently robust to accommodate almost any story.”

And in a further telling statement, he says, “Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark.  Our database is too sparse, too slippery, for it to be able to mold our theories.  Rather, the theories are more statements about us and our ideology than about the past.”

And another Leaky, Mary Leaky, well known anthropologist, commenting as to the effort that she’d made all her life long to construct an evolutionary family tree.  She says, “I do not believe it is possible to fit the known hominoid fossils into a reliable pattern.”

Of course it’s not possible because it’s not the way it happened.  Not at all the way it happened.  In fact, you know, they shoot themselves in the foot.  The oldest human fossil is identified as KP271.  They believe that’s the oldest human fossil evolutionary anthropologist have found.  They date it at 4.5 million years ago. 

Now you and I know that the whole thing was done about 6,000 or 7,000 years ago, but they’ve got their own uniformitarian dating systems, evolutionary dating systems, that are invented to accommodate their theory of evolution, which they believe can only happen if you have enough time.  And so they stretch everything out millions of years.  The interesting thing about it is they say the oldest human fossil is dated 4.5 million years ago. 

And furthermore, it seems that this human fossil appears on the scenes suddenly without any evolutionary ancestors.  And if, indeed, this is human, the theory of human evolution is totally discredited.  Totally discredited.  Because if you have humans 4.5 million years ago, then evolution can’t happen because that’s when they also date other animals.  In fact, other animals that they thought were in the evolutionary scheme are dated after that.  They have a real problem.

And furthermore, the bones that are 4.5 million years old are identical to humans today.  No evolution in 4.5 million years.  I mean, the whole thing is just a figment of their imagination because they do not like to retain God in their knowledge, Romans 1, and they have exchanged the truth of God revealed in scripture for the lie. 

Men don’t want God and they don’t want the Bible, right?  They don’t want God crowding their lives.  They don’t want the Bible establishing moral standards for them.  Scientists and those who follow their deception and hoaxes about evolution are like the Jews of Jesus’ day who said, “We will not have this man to – “ what?  “ - to reign over us.  We will not come under the sovereignty of God.”  And so they fit into the classification of Psalm 14:1 and Psalm 53:1.  “The fool has said in his heart, ‘There is no God.’ ”

I understand the ungodly believing that.  I understand the ungodly not wanting God crowding their lives.  I understand those who love sin and want to commit sin not wanting a moral judge looking over their shoulder and holding them accountable and sentencing them to eternal hell.  I understand their desire to get rid of God.  I understand why they don’t want to accept the first chapter of the Bible, why they don’t want to accept a clear record of Genesis.  

But I do not understand the ridiculous intolerable affection for this deception which belongs to professing Christians.  I cannot understand that.  Even the prophet Malachi, Malachi 2:10, put it simply, “Has not one God created us?”  We are all the product of God’s creation.  All things are made by him and for him and without him was not anything made that was made. 

The truth about the origin of man is that he was created as he now is.  Adam wasn’t any different than you.  In fact, if anything, you’re not what he was.  You’re inferior.  And I’m sure that’s true.  Not because of you personally, but because of sin.  Now we find out about the creation of man on day six.  Let’s look at the text of Genesis 1:24.

And the pattern of creation is the same as it was on the other days.  “And God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kinds - cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind.’  And it was so.  And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind.  And God saw that it was good.

“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 sky 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. 

“And God blessed them.  And God said to them, ‘Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.’  Then God said, ‘Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit-yielding seed, it shall be food for you.  And to every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth, which has life, I have given every green plant for food.’ 

“And it was so.  And God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good.  And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.”

Now we’ve already been through the first five days of creation.  The first five days really were outfitting the house 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 house, preparation for man’s arrival on the scene.  And even on day six, as I just read, there was a finishing touch in creation. 

On day five, you remember, God had created all the animals in the sea and all of the birds in the sky.  And so at the beginning of day six, it was necessary to create the earth creatures who are identified in verse 24 and 25 in three categories: Cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth.

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.  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 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 all 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 “and 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 remain.  By the way, they didn’t evolve.  They were created instantaneously. 

He 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 would call it, temporary categorization of animals such as amphibians and reptiles and all of that, and 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 a 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 can 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.  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 the 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 who – one Hebrew writer says, “Animals with short legs whose bellies are not far from the ground.  Insects, rodents, as well as snakes and amphibians, et cetera, et cetera.”  Such animals are referred to, by the way, in Leviticus 11:29.  “And these are to you the unclean among the swarming things that 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, beasts of the earth would be four-legged animals of some size which are generally not tamed.  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 man made 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.”  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 you have 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.  So see, the mixing of the order is a very good way to indicate to us that these were created simultaneously. 

They weren’t 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.  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 into 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 2:7.  “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 are 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 on 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 are 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 Shamu 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 conscious just 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 décor as God displays his wonder to the king of the earth, his creation, man, who is 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 it 10 times in Genesis 1.  “After their kind,” “after their kind,” “after their kind.” 

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 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 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 what it is.  That is controlled, as we’ve learned many times, 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 they 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.”  And 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 until today.  And they remained within the framework of their kind, their variation being restricted. 

There are some variations.  There is some change.  We know that.  Genetics can do that.  Special breeding.  But they still remain essentially the same kind of creature. 

Finally, the creation of these land creatures gets a comment from God at the end of verse 25.  Basically, God saw that it was good.  And God has been saying this, by the way, all along.  Verse 4 tells us that God saw the light was good.  Verse 10, God saw that the dry land and the sea was good.  Verse 12, the plants were good.  Verse 18, the stellar bodies, that was good, too.  Verse 21 the creatures of the sea and the air, that was good.  Verse 25, the land animals, that was good.  And finally verse 31, after he made man, it was very good.

Everything God made was good.  Now listen to this.  No deformities.  No deformities.  NO mutations.  No inferiorities.  No natural selection, the survival of the fittest, because there were no unfit animals.  It was all good.  There was no imperfection.  There was no natural selection.  There was no inferiority at all.  It was very good.  And we’ll say more about what “very good” means when we get to verse 31.

At this point, everything was good.  It was good.  There wasn’t even death in the world.  There wasn’t even death in the world.  Death wouldn’t come until man sinned in chapter 3.  But at this point the earth was ready for man.  Man, who was to be the king of the earth and have dominion over it. 

By the way, the Lord must have created all the animals in just the first part of day six.  Because the rest of the day was for creating man, and it was somewhat involved.  It doesn’t give us all the involvement here in this chapter, but in chapter 2 it unfolds it.  And we’ll look at that later on.

But let’s look at verses 26 and 27, at least look at it very briefly.  We come to the epitome 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.”

Here it is.  That’s the apex of creation.  That is the reason for it all.  And again, you have the same formula.  Verse 26, “Then God said,” verse 27, a parallel statement, “and God created.”  And God created.  The very same formula.  God speaks and creates.  One and the same.  This is what is called “fiat creation.”  Fiat because the Latin word fiat means “let there be.”  God speaks it into existence. 

Let there be.  Let there be.  We’ve heard that over and over and over.  Let there be.  Let there be.  Let there be.  Hmm.  Verse 26 doesn’t say, “Let there be.”  It says what?  “Let us make man.”  This is brand new, folks.  This is brand new.  This is a very important difference.  This is a major shift in the language. 

All the way along, verse 3, verse 6, verse 9, verse 11, verse 14, verse 20, verse 24.  Let there be.  Let there be.  Let there be.  Let there be.  That is an impersonal form of the Hebrew verb.  Let there be.  Let there be.  Almost as if God is not intimately involved.  Let there be.  Let there be.  But here, “Let us make.”

At this point God becomes personal and, listen, because God is a trinity when he introduces himself personally, it is in the plural language.  It is in the plural language.  I mean, in John chapter 1 is says that Jesus Christ created.  “All things were made by him and without him was not anything made that was made.”  Here it says God created.  In John 1 it says Jesus created everything.

Even the Spirit of God is said to have shaped the creation earlier in Genesis 1.  The whole trinity is engaged in this.  And when God comes to the creation of the human race, he doesn’t employ the impersonal fiat terminology, “Let there be,” but he uses language that reveals he is speaking within himself, “Let us.”  “Let us make man in our own image.”  You know what he’s letting us in on?  He’s letting us in on a trinitarian plan.  He’s in communion with himself about this most important of all creatures. 

Now I believe that this is a clear and – actually, it’s an unmistakable and inarguable reference to the trinity.  I admit – I think any Bible student does – that the full clarification of the doctrine of the trinity waits the New Testament, in the New Testament where you get the full theology, the full clarification of the theology of the trinity.  But certainly the trinity is evident in the Old Testament. 

You have the Spirit of God repeatedly referred to in the Old Testament.  You have the angel of the Lord who is none other than the pre-incarnate Son of God.  You have God himself.  You have an inner trinitarian communication here.  “Let us make man in our own image.”  You have the Psalmist saying, “And the Lord said to my Lord.”  A conversation between the Father, no doubt, and the Son.

There are a number of revelations of the trinity in the Old Testament.  Psalm 2, the father saying to the son, “Today I have begotten you and given you the nations as an inheritance,” a messianic promise, a prophetic promise in Psalm 2.

There are a number of trinitarian references in the Old Testament.  I don’t mean to imply that there are not because there are.  In fact, talking of Christ, the second member of the trinity, Psalm 45:7.  “Thou hast loved righteousness, and hated wickedness: Therefore God, thy God, has anointed thee With the oil of joy above thy fellows.”  Well, that is a statement directly attributed to the Messiah, the Lord Jesus Christ.  That’s, again, an indication that God is communing with the Son.

And there are a number of other passages like that.  I hesitate to go to all of them, but just a couple might be good.  Psalm 110, I think it is, I could be wrong – but yes, that’s the one.  “The Lord says to my Lord, Sit at my right hand, Until I make thine enemies thy footstool.”  Well, that’s referred to even in the New Testament as applying to Christ.  So you have God the Father communicating with God the Son in a conversation between the two.

So there are trinitarian references in the Old Testament.  It’s important to acknowledge that.  But the full understanding of the trinity really blossoms in the New.  We understand why, don’t we?  Because the second member of the trinity becomes what?  Becomes man.  Becomes incarnate.  Now what you have then, what do you have in “Let us” here?  I confess to you that I could launch on this because I know to some degree what that discussion was about or what it had been about. 

Say, “How in the world do you know that?”  Well, there’s only one way I know anything, and that’s because it’s in the Bible.  But I know something of what that conversation was about.  It was about redemption.  It was about redemption because - listen to this – the earth had already been formed, right?  Is that true?  Okay.  And according to the Bible, Revelation 13:8, Revelation 17:8, our names were written in the Lamb’s Book of Life when?  Before the foundation of the earth.  Okay? 

So we know something of what that conversation was about before the shaping and the creating of the earth and before the creation of man.  It was a conversation that had reached such a level that names were actually recorded in God’s book.  Names, whose names were there?  Mine, right?  Yours, if you’re a believer.  And I also know, according to Ephesians chapter 1, that we were predestined to be in Christ from before the foundation of the world.  Right?  Isn’t that what Ephesians 1 says?

So I know something of what that conversation was about.  They had been talking about redemption in the trinity or communicating about redemption.  And a plan had unfolded in the mind of God, and this was the plan.  God perfectly loved the Son.  God wanted to demonstrate his love to the Son, and we’ve gone over this in the past.  This is a perfect place to insert it. 

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 Son forever.  And literally he would bring that redeemed humanity up to where the trinity lives in the glories of heaven and they would live there forever.  That was the plan. 

Creating the earth and the whole universe and everything that was in it was merely the stage for the plan to unfold.  You say, “Well, was it necessary to do all that creation?”  Sure.  Because that creation spoke about God and who he was, and it told man of his greatness and his glory and his power, didn’t it?  The heavens declare what?  The glory of God.  The firmament shows his handiwork.  In Romans 1 says you look at the earth and you can see that God exists so that his invisible nature is manifest by his visible creation and we’re without excuse.  All that was to reveal who God is. 

And you look at the creation and you see his power, and you see his intelligence, and you see his wisdom, and you see his love of beauty, his incredible mind, staggering wisdom.  You see his softness and gentleness and tenderness in the petal of a flower.  You see his power in the lightning, in the thunder and in the massive bodies that careen through endless space in the billions of galaxies that exist out there.  You see so much about God there.  All of that puts God on display. 

But what puts God on display in an especially remarkable way is that he is gracious enough to save sinners, right?  And that could never be demonstrated, that God is gracious, God is merciful, God is forgiving, God is kind, God is tenderhearted, that could never be displayed unless there were some sinners out there that God could be gracious to, right? 

So somewhere before the foundation of the world there was a plan put in place.  And God, who cannot lie – 2 Timothy 1:9 says, “purposed in Christ Jesus to redeem humanity.”  First he had to purpose to create them.  And so the plan was we’re going to bring to glory a redeemed humanity. 

We have angels also being created at this time, and they were created for the glory of God.  But beyond that there’s no grace shown to angels, so God can’t display his grace and mercy and his forgiveness to angels because there is no salvation for angels.  Angels were either holy or they were fallen and the fallen ones are irremediably fallen and damned to the lake of fire.

God determined at some point before the foundation of the world that he would save sinners, that he would save humans.  He would create them, he would save them.  He would bring them to glory and they would be a bride for his Son, who would serve and love and adore his Son forever and ever and ever and ever, and he would populate heaven, literally, with a hallelujah chorus that would do nothing but praise and serve him through all eternity.

Now this was something of the trinitarian discussion.  It’s just this staggering amazing purpose of God.  He didn’t have to create any of us, just like he didn’t have to create anything else.  But he created – listen to this – 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.”  He determined out of all of humanity who he would bring, give to his Son as a love gift. 

And he wrote their names in a book before the foundation of the world.  We were predestined before the world was ever created.  So I know something about that communication.  And you can know that when the scripture says “God said let us make man,” this was the moment for which the trinity had planned, right?  This was it.  This was it.  This was the climactic day six.

And so now they’re all involved.  “Let us make man.”  It’s not “Let there be.  Let there be.  Let there be” in an impersonal way.  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.  This is the apex of everything.  “Let us make man.”  And God gets very, very personal.

Now as incredible as we are, being made in his image, I remind you, verse 7, again, “The Lord God formed man.”  He said that.  “Let us make man.”  And he did it.  He created us.  And how did he do it?  He formed man of dust from the ground.  And we’re made of the same basic elements as everything else.  And material elements are made of certain chemicals.  We’re all made of the same stuff.  That’s why bodies decompose and go back to the dust.  Dust to dust. 

And he breathed into his nostrils the breath of life and man became a living creature, living being.  Just like the others who are living creatures, he had mobility and consciousness.  He had mobility and consciousness.  Your body is basically formed from the same raw material as the rest of the created order.  Remember a few weeks ago I told you your body is made mostly of what?  Nothing.  You’re 90 percent nothing – 99 point something percent nothing.  Because at least that percentage of an atom is nothing. 

And the body is formed out of the same atomic raw material as everything else in the created order.  And like all the other animals, you were given the breath of life.  You were made a living creature in the sense that you have consciousness and you have mobility.  By the way, it says of the animals in Genesis 7:22 that in their nostrils was “the breath of the spirit of life.”

So this is simply talking about our physical formation in 2:7.  We were made out of the dust.  We were made out of the same atomic particles as everybody else and every other creature, and we have consciousness like every other living creature.  But there’s a huge difference here, and that is this.  We were made in the image of God.  You want to know what that means, you have to come back next week.  That’s the main deal, folks.  But I look over here, I can’t believe what time it is and we got to stop.

Oh, this is so important.  I hate to stop, but here I have spent all this time and haven’t gotten where we get to this great point.  Well, it will be good for next time, right?

Father, thank you for the Word.  Thank you for the great hope in our hearts for the future because we trust you as a faithful God.  Our creator, our savior, our redeemer, our coming king.  Amen.