Genesis 1:20-25 comments: after their kind

1:20 ¶  And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21  And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his 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 fowl multiply in the earth. 23  And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.

    1:24 ¶  And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. 25  And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

In this passage we can see the origination of living things from the sea and the earth. God calls for abundance. From the evidence available some scientists have estimated the biomass or total life on earth, at various points in their assumed epochs or time periods, to be 500 times the biomass of earth we find today on an earth that was uniformly tropical in climate. Based on the fossil evidence available to us, which does not show a uniform progression of life from simple to complex as theoretical scientists would have you believe, remains of tropical plants can be found all over the earth. Fossil fuels such as oil, coal, and natural gas are thought to be by the majority of scientists the result of an immense decaying biomass formed under intense pressure over time.

Contradicting evolutionary theory God brought great creatures of a large size into being in one day along with birds and other fowls, or any winged creature.

A whale is a large sea creature and can be what we today would call a mammal or it can be one of the many types of fish we observe. The scientific classifications of mammal and reptile came after the Bible was written and are purely man’s way of categorizing animals as the word mammal once had to do with the breast and a reptile was any creeping or crawling thing, not just a snake, but included an earthworm.

Cattle includes sheep and beeves or bovine creatures useful to man.

Genesis 30:32  I will pass through all thy flock to day, removing from thence all the speckled and spotted cattle, and all the brown cattle among the sheep, and the spotted and speckled among the goats: and of such shall be my hire.

Numbers 31:28  And levy a tribute unto the LORD of the men of war which went out to battle: one soul of five hundred, both of the persons, and of the beeves, and of the asses, and of the sheep:

God divides creatures into categories based on their usefulness to mankind although they are God’s property and He knows them all and regards their lives very closely.

Psalm 50:10  For every beast of the forest is mine, and the cattle upon a thousand hills. 11  I know all the fowls of the mountains: and the wild beasts of the field are mine.

Matthew 10:29  Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father.

And their uses by man are limited by God’s standards of mercy and kindness.

Proverbs 12:10  A righteous man regardeth the life of his beast: but the tender mercies of the wicked are cruel.

Luke 14:5  And answered them, saying, Which of you shall have an ass or an ox fallen into a pit, and will not straightway pull him out on the sabbath day?

2Samuel 12:3  But the poor man had nothing, save one little ewe lamb, which he had bought and nourished up: and it grew up together with him, and with his children; it did eat of his own meat, and drank of his own cup, and lay in his bosom, and was unto him as a daughter.

It is clear here that God created some plants to be used by man and some animals to be the object of man’s agricultural efforts and even his companions. And as we have seen in history and know, in fact, if we are honest wild animals rarely are useful as domesticated companions of mankind. A unicorn is a one-horned animal, probably the rhinoceros, which once had a range from China to Spain as evidenced by the Lascaux cave paintings in France.

Job 39:9  Will the unicorn be willing to serve thee, or abide by thy crib? 10  Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow? or will he harrow the valleys after thee? 11  Wilt thou trust him, because his strength is great? or wilt thou leave thy labour to him? 12  Wilt thou believe him, that he will bring home thy seed, and gather it into thy barn?

They reproduce after their kind meaning no cat ever became a dog and, contrary to the musings of theoretical scientists, no giant lizard ever became a bird. Fossil evidence suggests there were a few prototypes of all of the species we have today. Diversity within a kind is immense but there is no evidence that a dog-like creature became a possum, so get over it.

Some final thoughts on evolution, as understood, for this section. Standard evolutionary thought is that mutations cause changes in an organism which are then selected for survivability which is called natural selection. This is supposed to be how the original one-celled creature became the diverse life on earth in spite of the relative genetic complexity of even the simplest organism. However, this survival of the fittest breaks down on a number of intellectual levels. One, a pod of shrimp, save for a few, being eaten by a whale would more likely be called the survival of the luckiest, wouldn’t you say? Two, creatures do live long enough to pass along harmful mutations, of which most mutations are harmful or even deadly, so this survival of the fittest also includes survival of the unfittest, too. Third, even scientists who believe in evolution understand that basic structures like the limb, wing, leg and foot, arm and hand of many creatures don’t reflect any necessary survival trait that came into being but a common form that looks more like the design of an engineer than an accident caused by brute forces of nature working with accidental mutations. There are so many problems and questions raised by atheistic evolution that are simply solved by believing what God has said here through Moses.

One thing is sure. God loves diversity in nature and has created an abundant and varied bundle of life. (1Samuel 25:29)

It would appear to me that the living creatures that surround the throne of God in Revelation 4:6-7 and Ezekiel, chapters 1 and 10 may be representative of the prototypes in the spiritual world for living creatures on earth and, hence, what we are told about represent only a small part of what we will see. It is important to note that Satan is one of these cherubim, these spiritual creatures, as per Ezekiel 28, and we do get a glimpse of animals, notably horses, in the spiritual world in 2Kings 6 and other places.