Creation Day 5 B

I'll tell you what grieves me most of all. What grieves me most of all is people who say they're Christians who believe the Bible and then claim evolution. You cannot find evolution in Genesis 1 anywhere.

It's not there. If you check the latest news, you'll find multiple, seemingly unrelated stories that actually share a common bond. Stories, for example, about a proposed law to protect transgender rights, or the availability of abortions, and maybe a science article on the latest thoughts on the origin of the universe. What is the common thread? It's a subtle, or not so subtle, rejection of the God who made us. The God who declared the standards of conduct for each one of us.

So how do you respond to that kind of thinking? How can you best defend biblical truth when it comes to those and other hot-button topics? John's going to help you with that today as he continues his look at the battle for the beginning.

And now here's John with the lesson. How did the universe come into existence? Let's go back to chapter 1 of Genesis and go back to where we've been all along. It came into existence exactly the way it's described in the opening chapter of the Bible, which is inspired by God, which is true and inerrant and infallible. The truth of origins is clearly given here in six 24-hour, nearly 24-hour solar days, six days defined as an evening and a morning, or a period of darkness and a period of light.

Six normal days. In six days, God created the entire universe the way it is now. And we've been showing you through this study that that was about six or seven thousand years ago and that is all. And when you look and you say, well, what about all the strata and what about the appearance of age and all of that? The answer is God created everything old, everything mature.

And the Flood also, which occurs later on, changes the face and the configuration of the earth and answers a lot of the questions that are brought up with regard to topography and sedimentary rock and fossils and all of that. But the Bible is very clear, God created it all in six days. Now, 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 luminaries, the moon, the stars and the sun. Now we come to day five and I just read it to you and it has to do with God creating 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, the first living beings. Verse 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. I just remind you, if you're looking at the sequence, day five corresponds to day two as day four corresponded to day one. On day one, God created light. On day four, He created the stellar bodies to be the light givers. On day two, He created the seas and the heavens. And on day five, He populated the seas and the heavens. On day three, He created the earth and its vegetation correspondingly. On day six, He created the animals and man to populate the earth and to consume its vegetation.

So the parallels run consistently through. The sea and the sky on day two and the inhabitants of the sea and the sky on day five. The sea was given, of course, its final form on day three, but it was created on day two.

Now, as we look at the text here, there are two phases to the day five creation. First phase, the creation of conscious life. Secondly, creation of reproductive life.

Two things are clearly identified for us. Conscious life, that's living creatures who are conscious. That is, they react to their environment and they move around from place to place.

Plants do not, obviously. And secondly, reproductive life. Verse 20, let's pick it up at the text. Then God said, and I stop you there again, always the method of creation. God speaks non-existing things into existence. He speaks them into existence out of nothing. Then God said, let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures. So He, first of all, filled the waters. Now in the Hebrew, this is what is called a para-nomasia, which is a term describing a kind of literary device.

A para-nomasia is basically this. The text says, let the waters swarm with swarming things. It's a repetition. It's the same in verse 11, let the earth sprout vegetation.

Actually in the Hebrew is, let the earth vegetate with vegetation. And here it's let the waters swarm with swarming things. Swarm with swarming living things, actually. Or swarm with swarming things that live. Swarm is the word chosen here because it has the idea of movement. And I remind you that the distinctiveness of living creatures is that they move. Plants are not called living creatures because they aren't mobile.

They don't move. Living creatures move. In fact, He filled the seas so that the verb here is to swarm. And again, it pictures a large population of these creatures in motion.

Again, Kasuto, the Jewish commentator, writes, the primary significance of the stem saros in Hebrew is movement, with specific reverence to the abundant, swift movement of many creatures who jostle one another as they proceed crisscross in all possible directions. God willed that into the midst of the waste and inanimate waters from one end of the sea to the other. There should now enter a living being and that there should be born in their midst moving animate beings subject to no limitation of numbers or intermission of movement. The sea began to just swarm with all these living creatures swimming everywhere.

And that would include, the seas would include the fresh water as well, all the waters of the earth. The term living is that very familiar Hebrew word nefesh which speaks of soul or being or life. It's used here for the very first time. This is the first time we really have a living creature that moves on its own. Plants have no such life in the sense that creatures do because plants can't move and they are not conscious. Living things are conscious, though animals are not self-conscious. That is, they are conscious, they respond to their environment as individuals, but they are not aware of that response.

It is purely a mechanism that we call instinct. They are not self-conscious. They do not know they are alive. They do not know they are dead. They do not know one another.

They do not communicate with one another in personal self-conscious ways, although instinctively they are under tremendous control by the DNA codes that have been given to them for the preservation of their species and the function of their species as God has designed it. But they are distinguished from plants by the word nefesh. Literally, nefesh means that which breathes, that which breathes. These beings are created and here he uses bara, the word for create. This is an epic-making achievement that demands the verb to create. As a monumental thing takes place, he creates conscious beings that can move and they move through the sea in swarms. It's such a massive amount of created beings. Now, that is to say, and I stop you here because this is a very important thing, when God created the fish and all those mammals and all those animals, whether you're talking about fish or whether you're talking about whales or whether you're talking about sea-going dinosaurs or whether you're talking about eels or whether you're talking about plankton or whatever anywhere in the food chain, when God created all of that, there was no evolutionary process. He literally in a moment spoke into existence all the creatures that swim, just instantaneously at the same moment on the same day they all came into existence. They were not somehow in a process of development as species evolved into other species and mutated into other species.

They were all instantaneously created in massive swarms moving through the seas. Verse 20 indicates the same thing, let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens. Of course, he doesn't talk about swarming because there wasn't such a dense creation of birds.

We know that today. If you look in the depths of the sea where it hasn't been polluted significantly, you will find an almost uncountable and limitless amount of life and you look into the air and, of course, there are less birds. So you find here that it doesn't use the word swarming. Let the birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of heaven. They are free to fly, literally in the Hebrew, on the face of heaven. And that's a wonderful picture because you could translate it, they fly in front of heaven as if heaven were all the way out, heaven were all the way up into the very limitless ends of the eternity of space that God has made in the great expanse of heaven. And the birds that are flying around the globe don't go very far, they just kind of fly what appears to us to be on the surface of the vast heaven behind or on the face of heaven, in front of heaven with the great heaven behind them. And then I think this is quite fascinating. And God, verse 21, created the great sea monsters. Why do you mention those? You know, when it mentions the creation of plants and trees, it didn't mention apple trees or oak trees.

It didn't mention any particular kind of plant. Why here? It's just birds and just swarms of living creatures that swim in the seas, fish and more. So, why bring up great sea monsters?

Why introduce them? There are a lot of other things in the sea, why them? I find that fascinating. The Hebrew word is tanin, t-a-n-n-i-n. And you know, there's a reason for this. If you study the Old Testament, you find several Old Testament references to sea creatures. There's Leviathan, remember reading about Leviathan?

Leviathan is this massive, massive powerful sea creature. Job 41, God, you know, says to Job, where were you? You know, can you...he says, where were you when I created everything? And then he comes to chapter 41 and he says, can you put your hooks in and control Leviathan? Some people...and then he goes on to describe this massive beast, fierce. You can read Job 41 yourself and read the characteristics of this beast.

I wrote a little note on it. Some have suggested it might be an alligator or a crocodile, but they're not in the sea as such. The best guess is that he's describing some kind of dinosaur, some kind of massive sea-going monster, Leviathan. There is also mention in the Old Testament of the fleeing serpent, the twisting serpent, Job 7, 12, the serpent of the sea or the sea-servant, there is Rahab, R-a-h-a-b, Rahab, and it refers to massive sea-going animals and very likely refers to dinosaurs. But why does he mention this?

Why does he bring it up? And I think the answer can be found in this. In ancient mythology, for example, in Egypt, in Mesopotamia, the fertile crescent area east of Israel, in the land of Canaan as well, the countries of the east generally, there have always been these very bizarre and very highly complex fabricated legends about sea monsters. And the ancient pagans believed that the gods were sea monsters.

Even the Philistines had a god, Dagon, who was half man, half fish. So the ancients saw these, perhaps these great fierce sea monsters as the deities, the gods. They wrote epics about them.

Some of them, for example, you read about in some of the Ugaritic, which is a different language, Ugaritic epics with regard to the enemies of Baal. The enemies of Baal took the form...one form was this god, Mot, who was called the Lord of the Sea, who was a great sea monster. And this began to influence that whole part of the world where they saw the sea monsters as gods, the sea monsters as gods in rebellion against the good gods. In the case of Israel, the gods in rebellion against the good god. Isaiah 27, 1, you have mentions of these sea gods who were so much a part of Canaanitish culture when the children of Israel went into the land of Canaan, they came across this Canaanite poetry, Canaanite legends about the gods taking on the form of these great sea monsters. So the sea monster then became a picture of the principle of evil, the anti-god evil was sort of personified in the great sea monster, the great dragon of the sea, the great dinosaurs of the sea. A number of verses, as I said then, refer to Leviathan, the great sea monster, always seemingly depicted as the great enemies of the true God, implying that they were somehow a supernatural deity or supernatural force that rose up against their Creator. That was all in the ancient epics and that would have been in existence in the minds of the people at the time of Moses when he wrote Genesis. The Jews had been apparently influenced by these pagan myths which were ridiculous and foolish.

And just in a marvelous way, the Spirit of God prompts Moses in recording the inspired account of creation that came to Moses from God to write down, and God created the sea monsters. They aren't false gods. They aren't false deities.

They aren't symbols of evil. They're creatures that God made just the way He made all the rest. And God created the great sea monsters along with every living creature that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind and God saw that it was...what?...and that includes the sea monsters. So much for all that in mythology.

The Old Testament is opposed to such foolish myths and voices its protest in its own quiet way, doesn't it? So God created the great sea monsters and God saw that it was good. It's as if the Torah said, far be it from anyone to suppose that the sea monsters are some mythological forces of evil, some divine gods or demigods in opposition to the true and living God and revolt against the true and living God. They are as natural as anything else God created and they were formed in their proper time and their proper place by the Word of the Creator.

In order to fulfill His will, He made them because He wanted to make them and He looked at them and He said, they are good. That's why it says in the Psalms, praise the Lord from the earth, you sea monsters and all deeps. The poet in the Psalms is inviting all created forms of life to praise the Lord, all of them.

That's Psalm, I think, 148, 7. So Moses just puts that little note in there to dispel all of the bizarre mythology. God created then, verse 21, the sea monsters every living creature that moves with which the waters swarmed after their kind and every winged bird after its kind.

Just a note, after its kind, after its kind is used twice. God created everything that lives in the water at the same time on the same day. He created everything that flies in the air at the same time on the same day and He created them after their kind. There is no evolution of species from kind to kind to kind to kind. He created them after their kind. All the species were created by God.

There can be variation within the species, but there's no moving outside that DNA, that information encoded in each species. So day five first brought the creation of conscious life. Secondly, of reproductive life...reproductive life.

This is just...I just...the more I read about this, and I'm not going to take the time to get into it, you can do your own research. The more I get into reproductive systems, the more incredible it is. I mean, it's enough to imagine human reproduction and how God can do that.

But just take that into every species in creation, the most small, tiny microscopic kind of creation all the way to the largest land mammals and seagoing mammals and dinosaurs and all of the reproductive processes, all encoded in the DNA, all that information put in every single cell of every single creature to reproduce its own kind. That's what it says, verse 22, and God blessed them saying, here's the blessing. He granted them this benefit, the blessing is a benefit, be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the sea and let birds multiply on the earth. Obviously, birds don't fill the heaven above, but they do multiply. Fish tend to fill the waters of the sea, be fruitful and multiply. This is an assurance of permanence. This is an assurance of propagation. It has nothing to do with evolution. Each kind will multiply.

Each kind will reproduce its same kind with some slight variation, of course, within the kind. And let birds multiply on the earth. Now somebody said, well why does it say on the earth birds fly? Well they fly, but they don't multiply in the air. They got to go to the nest. That's where they cohabitate. That's where they land to mate and hatch their eggs.

God knows. There's no evolution here. Creatures of the sea and the creatures of the sky were all made in one day in every single species, the largest legendary sort of fierce sea monsters down to the smallest marine organism, all made in one day. All the creatures that fly, all made the same day in their species with movement. They move through the air, they move through the sea, and they are conscious. That is to say, if you drive your car down the road, isn't it interesting how the birds avoid it?

They have a consciousness, although it is not a self-consciousness. So man's house is built. It's now ready for his occupancy, and the crown of creation comes on day six.

Crown of creation is man. You know what's so sad? We'll stop at this point, but what is so sad is that man refuses to see God in creation. Isn't it sad? Man refuses to see God in creation, refuses to hear God in conscience, suppresses the truth, plunges into deeper darkness and hopelessness.

I'll tell you what grieves me most of all. What grieves me most of all is people who say they're Christians who believe the Bible and then claim evolution. You cannot find evolution in Genesis 1 anywhere.

It's not there. There's no way to exegete that chapter and come out with evolution, no way possible. You have to suppress the truth.

Why do that? Why would you...why would you affront God, or blaspheme God, or dishonor God in order to honor a godless evolutionist, in order to buy some scientific credibility? We take Scripture at its face value, don't we? I don't know about you, but I start believing the Bible in Genesis 1, 1.

I don't have to wait till chapter 3. Donald Barnhouse once wrote, God gives man brains to smelt iron and make a hammer, hammerhead and nails. God grows a tree and gives man the strength to cut it down and the brains to fashion a hammer handle from the wood. And when man has the hammer and the nails, God will put out His hand and let man drive nails through it, place him on a cross in the supreme demonstration that men are without excuse. They reject the Creator to the degree that when He was incarnate, they killed Him.

They killed Him. It is a dishonor to God to believe anything other than what Genesis says, right? Does it honor God to believe He made all this? Does it honor God to believe the creation account of Genesis? Does it give Him glory?

Is it a proper representation of who He is and what He's done? And is it a source of worship? Anything less is an affront to God. To make matter self-creating, to make the complex diversity of this created universe the product of chance is to give chance more credit than God, and chance doesn't even exist.

It's a non-existent reality. We start worshiping God in Genesis 1, do we not? And we worship Him as Creator.

You're listening to Grace to You with John MacArthur. John is pastor of Grace Community Church, he's chancellor of the Masters University and Seminary, and he is currently making his way through this series titled, The Battle for the Beginning. Now, John, Genesis clearly outlines what God created when He formed the world in just six days. But let me ask, does Scripture ever tell us why God created the world in six days instead of creating it all at once, or over millions of years? Well, yeah, I think God clearly declares that He created everything in six days to display His glory and His power.

There cannot be any natural explanation to that. And to the degree that you try to make a natural explanation fit into creation, you are directly taking glory from God. I mean, you go through the Psalms, the heavens declare the glory of God, the firmament shows His handiwork, day unto day, night unto night utters speech, and you read about how the sun has its own orbit and drags our solar system with it through a massive orbit. And all of this is putting the handiwork of God on display. So I think that to any degree that you minimize the glory of six-day creation, you rob God of His glory.

You diminish the glory that He intended to put on display in His creation. And in Romans, it says that there is within us a rational mechanism so that we can look at the creation and go from the creation to the Creator. Only someone with a faulty mind or defective thinking would look at this and say, there's no Creator. The very fact of reason drives you from the effect back to the cause. And the massive effect of the universe, which we know more about now than any generations ever in the past, speaks of one who is even greater than the effect, and that gives full glory to God.

I believe that God has created and laid it out as a six-day creation to demonstrate that He is fully responsible for everything in creation, all of it instantaneous, all of it out of His Word. And again, if God can create the universe with His Word, He can create new life with His Word. He can do regenerating work in the hearts of sinners with His Word. And in the future, He can recreate the heavens and the earth with His Word. So I think the fact that we can see in the creation the power of His Word leads us to believe that that same power can be granted to the sinner, who by the Word of God is transformed into a new creation who possesses eternal life and will live forever with God.

You have a great book on this subject. Yeah, all of this and a whole lot more is in the book on The Battle for the Beginning. Every Christian has to understand the creation account. The Battle for the Beginning is the book that will help you to get a grip on it and to believe it with all your heart and have no more doubts. Soft cover book, The Battle for the Beginning, available from Grace to You. Right, and this is an important book. It gives you an in-depth look at all six days of creation.

It shows you why you can trust the entire Bible, starting with the very first chapter of Genesis. You can order The Battle for the Beginning when you contact us today. The Battle for the Beginning costs $11 and shipping is free. To order, call 800-55-GRACE or visit our website, gty.org.

The title of the book again, The Battle for the Beginning. You can order a copy for yourself and maybe get a few for friends when you call 800-55-GRACE or visit us at the website, gty.org. And while you're at gty.org, make sure you dig into all the study tools there, including daily devotionals and the MacArthur Daily Bible. These are a great way to take in a healthy portion of biblical truth every day, and you can also listen to what John is currently preaching at his home church or download any of the 3500 messages he has already preached.

Those are all free resources and there are many others available at gty.org. Now for John MacArthur and the entire Grace To You staff. I'm Phil Johnson, reminding you to watch Grace To You television this Sunday on DirecTV channel 378, or check your local listings for station and times, but then be back here all next week when John continues his look at the clear teaching of Scripture about creation. That starts Monday with another 30 minutes of unleashing God's truth, one verse at a time, on Grace To You.