Clough Genesis Lesson 8

The fifth day – Genesis 1: 20-23; The sixth day – Genesis 24-31

Finally I remembered to bring into the pulpit the feedback cards that some of you have had questions on some of the teaching. Could you explain more about what a disciple is? Can a person be a Christian and not a disciple? The very definite answer is yes, that’s the whole argument of the Gospel of John, and the reasons is that the word “disciple” comes from a Greek word which means an indoctrinated one, or a trained one, and a person can believe and be untrained and not know much doctrine and such a person is not a disciple.

It appeared in a Genesis lesson to be a contradiction or perhaps I misunderstood; it was in the area of the formation of natural law. We cannot assume the temperature in reference to water [tape slips, some missing] in a liquid state at 32 degrees, okay, well then what we do about time with the same during creation as it is today. And the answer is because of the fact of Exodus 20:11 which states that the universe was created in that particular time interval.

Another question, can this verse, Genesis 1:6 be interpreted to say that the waters surrounded our known universe as the water beyond the space of our universe. I’d say rather that, as we said in the lesson, spread throughout the universe, would be a better designation.

How can one help a person being attacked by Satan? Well, that’s a whole bucket of worms, it involves areas of sanctification and if you have questions like that just come to me and ask me. If some of you are afraid to just call Barbara on the telephone and she’ll make you an appointment.

Does the doctrine of good stewardship of one’s resources contradict the idea of the holy waste (this was made in connection with the family training) or the very best for God’s house? And the answer is no because stewardship is defined to be using products the way God wants you to use them, and if God wants us to use them for His glory, then it’s by definition not a lack of stewardship.

We’ve been studying in the morning series the first chapter of Genesis. We have looked over some of the structure of this book; we have noticed that the structure of Genesis is symmetrical, that is that the first three days correspond to the second three days and we’ve seen, for example, one of the correspondences between day two where God creates the expanse of space and sea, there’s the environment being generated, and then we find on day five the birds and the fish are specifically mentioned as filling that environment. So we have a matching sequence: day one, light energy is made, day four the light bearers are made, and here we have animals and man who specifically are given herbs for food and on the third day plant life was created. So there is this internal harmony in the text; it’s one of the structural features that you want to pay attention to as you read and study Genesis.

There are several other things that we’ve reviewed, mainly that the work of God in the creation is an archetype of a model of all creative work; whenever you build something, I build something, or anyone does anything in any field it’s basically due to the fact that somebody’s planned it, we’ve generated raw materials, we’ve put those materials together and finally there’s that ascetic enjoyment of the handiwork that we’ve done and this is what we wanted to get across when we see in the Genesis narrative so often the phrase, God looked, He saw what He had done, and it was good.

Now today we are going to start with Genesis 1:20 and in looking at Genesis 1:20 we are beginning the fifth day. We are going to look at the fifth and sixth days and finish Genesis 1 this morning. We’re going to it this way; we’re going to look at the two days, we’re going to observe the text carefully, we’re going to look particularly for areas where the text disagrees with contemporary cosmogony, because if I am the pastor I do not do my job if I don’t train you as believers to understand the Word of God and in particular understand where the Word of God in our own generation is being attacked. That’s part of my job as pastor and I would not be doing that job if, in fact, this were not done.

So first day five; Genesis 1:20, “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that has life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. [21] And God created great whales [sea monsters], and every living creature that moves, and the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after 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 fowl multiply in the earth. [23] And the evening and the morning were the fifth day.”

Now in verse 20 we’ve got a remarkable statement made here and one which collides at two points with modern cosmogony. The first one says, and in the Hebrew it’s written as poetry, in fact this whole text is not really poetry so much as it’s poetic in its form. So we have God saying, “Let the waters swarm with swarms,” that’s just the way the Hebrew reads if you translated it literally. And the picture there is not God slowly and agonizingly constructing an advanced protein molecule. There’s no coalition and coalescence of the complicated protein molecules into replicating cells. There’s not that process in mind at all; the process is that God addresses the waters and He says, “Let them swarm with swarms,” let them be filled with life. And there’s not a single pair creation as with man, just one man, Adam and Eve, there’s not that case with these swarms. There’s probably dozens and hundred of pairs created instantly at this point. It’s a picture once again of God’s sovereign omnipotent Word over natural law.

Then the other problem that we want to remember in verse 20 is that in evolutionary thinking life originated in the seas slowly, and then after it originated in the primeval seas, then and only then did it spread to dry land. Whereas in the biblical account in Genesis, way back in Genesis 1:11-12 you saw the origin or replicating cells in the dry land first, before anything was mentioned about animals in the sea. So again we have a sequential difference between creation and evolution.

But more important even than those, is that verse 20 forms the first place in our Bible where we encounter the word for “life.” The word is sometimes translated “soul.” Transliterated it sounds like this: nephesh. And it’s the first time this noun occurs and as we tried to point out in studying your Bible you always want to be careful the first time a word occurs in the Bible because that’s where that word is most often clarified and expounded. So we want to make seven statements about nephesh life; life that is first characteristic of animals. We want to get in our head what the author wants us to… what Moses has in his head, and then we can get with Moses and understand what he’s trying to teach us in the rest of the narrative.

Some statements about nephesh life that will hopefully give you some idea of content, what is nephesh life in the Bible? The first thing about nephesh life is that nephesh is always looked upon as the result of the combination of a spirit and a body; always the case, nephesh has a material side and is has an immaterial side. Don’t be snowed by what you might have read in a Greek philosopher somewhere about soul, s-o-u-l meaning just the immaterial. That is not true of biblical usage. Biblical usage implies both the body and the soul, and the spirit are lumped together and called soul. Good evidence of this is Genesis 2:7 with the creation of man.

The second thing we want to say about nephesh is that animals have nephesh of sorts; animals have nephesh and the fact that they do is shown in Genesis 7:22 in the Hebrew, though it doesn’t come across very clearly in the King James. In Genesis 7:22 it says about the animals and the ark, “in them they have the breath of the spirit of lives,” …“breath of the spirit of lives,” just exactly the Hebrew phrase used of man is also used of animals there. So animals have some sort of nephesh. However, this is not the same kind as man and that’s shown in another biblical passage where man and animal are contrasted, Ecclesiastes 3:21, and in Ecclesiastes 3:21 it talks about the spirit of man goes up at death and the spirit of animals goes down to the ground at death. So I’m sorry to disappoint you if when Rover dies that he goes to be present with the Lord or something. We have no biblical justification for that, so whether Charlie Brown will see Snoopy or not we don’t know.

The fourth thing about nephesh is that the possession of soul life qualifies the animals to be stand-ins for Jesus Christ under the Old Testament economy. They are Christ’s substitutes by design, because they have soul they can lose their soul and therefore the process of the loss of their soul is an adumbration or a forecast of the Lord Jesus Christ losing His soul for your sin and mine on the cross.

A fifth thing about animals and a peculiar one is that the animals, because they have soul, are also liable to demon possession; Matthew 8:31:32; in Matthew 8:31-32 Jesus Christ drives up the price of ham by destroying one of the great stocks on the east side of the Sea of Galilee by simply putting demons into them and the guy loses the whole herd into the sea. Apparently the reason for this is that demonic powers require a central nervous system of some sort in order to activate.

Sixth, the exact type of animals that have nephesh apparently, according to Arthur Jones, are vertebrates. Now this we have a question mark after because this is not taken from the text; this is an inference by a creationist British biologist who’s done a lot of work, has done quite a bit of research and has reported it out in several papers in which he believes that only vertebrates, because only vertebrates have blood corresponding to what we call blood.

Seventh, and this will be more of an application for our own generation; if man ever does create replicating cells in the test tube, if that ever comes to pass, then that is not the creation of biblical life; what is the creation of replicating cells as in verses 10, 11 and 12, but it is not necessarily creation of life. To have life you’ve got to have an indwelling spirit in a prepared body. So understand, then, that the word l-i-f-e, life, is used a little bit differently in the Bible than what you’re used to, what I’m used to in our every day language. There’s just a little bit of a difference there and we want to be careful because it spells profound results.

Now in Genesis 1:21, the two environments are filled, and they are filled, it says, with the living creatures that move and so forth, and among those living creatures that move are said to be the great whales, or in the Hebrew the tannim; now tannim are unknown, tannim is a noun used as a plural form here, it is used of what we would call sea monsters. I believe that what they are, are antediluvian, we’re talking about antediluvian (quote) “prehistoric” (end quote) sea creatures, the large creatures of the sea that once lived, and that these are mentioned because throughout other portions of the Scripture the exact noun in plural form occurs and they are apparently frightening to the crewmen on the sea vessels in the ocean, and they’re always afraid of the tannim. And so you’ll have passage after passage, at least a half a dozen of them in the Old Testament, that talk about the tannim and say relax, don’t be afraid of them, Jehovah God has created them too as well as the little fish. And so it’s the thrust of assurance, don’t be afraid of nature forces; God is sovereign and omnipotent over even them. And so of all the creatures in the ocean verse 21 picks out one class of them for particular mention, the tannim, who were the most feared of all sea creatures. Later on the Bible uses them to typify Pharaoh in a satanic way. So we find the tannim mentioned.

And then in verse 21 we find something else mentioned and with this we are face to face with the crux of the difference in biology between the creationist and the evolutionist. Now we may agree on many things but here’s one where we can’t agree on and it involves the concept of kinds, or in the Hebrew the min, m-i-n. Notice in verse 21, “God created great whales [sea monsters], and every living creature that moves, the waters brought forth abundantly, according to their kind, and every winged fowl according to its kind; and God saw that it was good.” And if you let your eye skim down to Genesis 1:24-25, on the sixth day, it says, “Let the earth bring froth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing” [and the beast of the earth] after its kind.” Verse 25, “And God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and cattle after their kind, and everything that creeps upon the earth after its kind.”

Now when you see something repeated and repeated and repeated in the text, obviously the author wants us to read it and say hey, look, I’m telling you something here and I want you to listen. What is “kind?” Well, in creationism or that philosophy of biology that starts with the Bible instead of with man, we have the idea that the creation has certain enviable kinds, that is there may be say a fish kind of a certain area, there may be a reptile kind, there may be mammal kind, actually the kinds are lot smaller than this, there would be subcategories here, but let’s just for simplicity purpose look at this, just to get the idea and then we’ll talk about details. The idea is that when you have a pair these pair can mate and produce offspring and those offspring can adapt to the environment but within limits. And so we can have reptiles would adapt, maybe get bigger, maybe get smaller, maybe develop different ecological niches and so forth, different breeding characteristics or something. But there’ll always be the room for diversification; that is permitted; the Bible doesn’t say anything about that. But it does put outer boundaries on this diversification.

Said another way, many of you were raised in a classroom where you heard the evidences for evolution presented about the famous chimney moths in industrial England, why those white moths couldn’t survive in the soot covered chimneys and so they changed gradually, the environment favored the darker moths and the black moths and so forth, the darker ones, and then these predominated in the moth population, and so the moth population shifted and that’s often given as an evidence for evolution. No it isn’t; it doesn’t refute the creation model because if you have a moth kind, whether it’s dark or white it’s still a moth; that’s the point. A moth doesn’t transmute to something else, he adapts to his environment but he doesn’t transmute. And the same thing could be said for penicillin resistant bacteria; here is bacteria and it’s always said they put it in an environment of penicillin and its stresses the situation and so it prefers certain mutant forms and so forth, and therefore the population shifts statistically in favor of the penicillin resistant type. But after all is said and done, don’t we still have bacteria? We haven’t got mice. So you see, there’s a diversification but there’s no transmutation. That’s the big point and there’s the difference between creationism and evolution. Creationists permit for diversification and micro evolution but we do not permit large scale transfers across the kinds; that is out by the text of Scripture.

So that being the case, what modern taxonomic category would correspond to the min? For a biologist that’s the sixty-four thousand dollar question. Can we identify what the boundaries of the min are? The closest that I know of doing work in this field has been Dr. Arthur Jones whose book I cited earlier, who has done a number of papers and if you are interested in biology I’d recommend you get the series of papers, there’s three of them, in which he did this work in England. He developed a simple idea of how to find where the min were, and here’s his argument. He said look, can we find another place in the Old Testament that gives us lists that can be biologically identified and specify the min. And he said of course, there are two major passages in the Old Testament; one is Deuteronomy 14 and the other is Leviticus 11 because in both of those passages you have the clean and the unclean animals specified. So reasoned Dr. Jones, if I, as a biologist can get enough out of the Hebrew text to pin down exactly what these animals are that are being spoken of here and I can pin down from the same passage what the min is, then I can conclude by comparison with taxonomic classification, I can find where those boundaries are.

Here’s his conclusion: “It is immediately clear that invertebrates, the min of the Mosaic food lists generally lie at the family level in current classification systems. The use of the min in these Mosaic food lists certainly precludes the possibility of reading theistic evolution into the biblical account. Many min are mentioned, not just one or two as evolutionists have to have. Thus, creation after their kind must have involved the rapid appearance of numerous discreet and unrelated groups of animals. I would suggest that the min contain several created stocks, and therefore the unity of the min is not one of descent.” So he would say that within the fish kind God created certain pairs and so on that led to variations within this.

Then he says, “There is a wide open,” and here’s a challenge for Christians thinking of going into this field, don’t think of your intellectual field as distinct from (quote) “your religious spiritual life,” we’ve got too much of that today; compartmentalization has rendered impotent Christians in the thought world today because we keep our Bible out here and then our professional life is over here and never shall the twain meet. Well, Dr. Jones challenges those who might be interested in this field. He says, “There is a wide open field for creationist research. Questions: what is the basis of the unity of the min; what criteria can be used to distinguish min, can all members of the same min interbreed? If not, how is reproductive isolation developed? What variation can occur?” And so on and so on and so on. And those of you with the professional skills in this area I think you owe it to the body of Christ, just as men who in language studies have given their lives to give us a good accurate text and we may be blessed, so I say Christian scholars you owe something to the body of Christ to use your scholarship to edify the body.

Now Genesis 1:22, God says after He makes them three things, and this is the first time in the Genesis text we encounter the word “blessing.” “God blessed them,” what does it mean to say God “blesses” something? Well, as always, if you read carefully the context you will see what blessing means. It’s defined by the following three verbs. It says, “Be fruitful, multiply, and fill the waters,” so three verbs are listed describing actions of blessing: being fruitful, multiply, and filling. These are mentioned because the purpose of the animals and the plants is to fill up their ecological niches—God’s command. And He says the sign of blessing is productivity.

Now going on to the sixth day, God describes certain days, He describes the animals again, He says that these animals are to saturate their ecological niche, notice verse 24, [“And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after its kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after its kind: and it was so.”] Verse 25, [“And God made the beast of the earth after its kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after its kind,”] and then he says at the end of verse 25, He looked, and He “saw that it was good.” God enjoyed His own handiwork.

All right, now we come to man. This is still on day 6; day 6 began in verse 24. Now after creating the animals, now He gets to man and something shifts. Again notice in Genesis 1:26, “And God said, Let us make man in our image,” now we’ve got something new to watch for because now instead of commanding, like He did the darkness, “Let there be light,” and He looks to the ground, “Let the earth sprout sprouts,” and He looks to the water, “Let the water swarm with swarms,” all the commands are directed to the environment itself, except when we come man, and now He says, not let the earth sprout a man, but He says, “Let us make man in our image,” and so man is pictured as coming forth not from the earth and not from the sea, and not from the environment; man is pictured as coming forth direct from the fingertips of the Trinity, “Let us make man,” and when he says “Let us” we have an adumbration of the Trinity. True, it’s not defined here, but it leaves room in the Old Testament text for what is later developed as a doctrine of the Trinity, the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Together in the divine counsels they talk and they say this is a joint project of the Father, Son and Spirit. Man will reflect “our image.”

What does it mean for man to reflect “our image?” It means that God, if He was projected from infinity down onto a finite plain, would show up as man. Man is the finite replica of God. For example, if we take a sphere and we hold it up, suppose it’s a translucent sphere made of semi translucent plastic of some sort, and we take a powerful light and we project it down against a flat screen. That sphere in three dimensions shows up in two dimensions as a circle, so we say that the two dimensional circle is a two dimensional replica of the three dimensional sphere; just so we say that man is a finite replica of God.

This is why in history, in Israel, God never shows up as a crocodile, as a falcon, as a hippopotamus, as a winged lion, like he did in Assyria and Egypt. God in those countries would show up in animal form because in their minds God was not that different from nature forces. However, in Israel and in Israel alone God always showed up anthropomorphically; that is, after the form of man. And this is crucial to see the difference between the way God shows up, a Theophany in Israel and a theophany in non-Israelite culture. This is why today we can walk proudly with our heads high and say that we can talk about our God in anthropomorphic terms and not feel at all ashamed. We don’t have to be like the liberal theologians who say that it’s wrong to think of God anthropomorphically, after all God doesn’t have hands, God doesn’t have eyes and so on. And so therefore they say all this is stupid to talk about God, God, you can’t talk about, He’s just an infinite blob. Well, you can’t talk about abstractions; you can’t talk about abstractions!

Every time you use an abstract word or I use an abstract word we are borrowing on concrete pictures we’ve stored up here. And Dr. C. S. Lewis was once talking to a woman who said that she always thought of God in Aristotelian terms as the perfect substance. Well, C. S. Lewis was an author and he knew something about the way people think, and he said well, madam, I know you say you think in terms of God as perfect substance, but also as an author I know why words, and I know my ideas well enough to know that you can’t think of terms of perfect substance; you’ve got to think in terms of something concrete, some picture up here that you use to describe perfect substance; what is it madam. And she thought for a while and she said tapioca pudding. And Lewis said, well then madam, I prefer my anthropomorphic God to tapioca pudding.

So with pride we refer to our God in anthropomorphic terms. If He were projected on a finite plain, as He was at the point of the incarnation, He projects as a man. So this is what it means to say we are made in His image.

Now we are said also, not only to be made in His image but we are said to “have dominion.” That sets us off in a special way from everything else in the creation. So now it’s time to pause for a minute and compare everything we’ve seen in this Genesis 1 narrative as to characteristics. Let’s compare animals, plants, man and angels; four categories of creatures. Let’s compare them point by point to see what is unique about us.

Reproduction: plants reproduce, animals reproduce, man reproduces. Instinct: plants have instinct, they are programmed to do certain things; animals have instinct, man has apparently very little instinct, I guess the biologists can debate this. And then the angels we don’t know enough about in the text to say anything. What about learning: well, plants can’t learn anything, try teaching your rose bush to climb a trellis, you can’t, you’ve got to tie the thing on there, snip it prune it, and force it, but the rose bush, no matter how many times its pruned and twisted and bent isn’t really going to learn something. Animals however will, you can teach Rover to fetch a ball and so on. Man can learn and angels can learn, Ephesians 3:10. So that’s the common characteristic to animal, men and angels.

Conscience: do animals have a conscience? Technically no, they are not judged, they are not saved. Now yes, your dog can look like it has a violated conscience when it’s done something in your living room and you know exactly that it never should have done that and you look at it with that look and the dog goes into a panic. Well, that’s not conscience, that’s just learned response to the fact that when he sees that look on your face in that situation he anticipates something. But we’ve got to distinguish that from conscience itself. So we have man and angels having conscience or judge-ability morally before God. The Bible ascribes that trait to both man and angels.

Then we have the phenomenon of nephesh, nephesh is said to exist for both animals and man but not for angels, the reason being, by definition nephesh is a spirit in a body and angels don’t have bodies, so therefore they don’t have nephesh and the result is that when God chose to incarnate Himself He incarnated Himself as a man, not as an angel because the key axiom, John 3:16, a verse we all have known, “For God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son,” He could not give life if He were an angel because life, by definition, angel doesn’t have any life to give. So the man, then, has all of these characteristics, some are shared with animals, some are shared with angels; man is halfway between and has all of them.

Man is a perfect creation, in other words, for the incarnation. And hence the dignity of man on a Bible base, and that is what is being lost, I don’t care how many evolutionists argue, yell, scream and fight against this, I still say, and the men who have studied the issue, like Frances Schaeffer and many of the creationists have said this time and again, the stronger evolutionism permeates our culture, the demeaning man will be; man will be demeaned. And they lay it all…I’m not a Nazi, what do you think, nevertheless, evolutionism was the official dogma of the Nazi party and was used in official documents to justify the cremation of the Jews. The idea was to build a master race and Hitler saw himself as just helping the process of evolution out a little bit; after all, survival of the fittest. And there is no way you are going to get around that, you can stand on your head from now until hell freezes over and you will still not be able to avoid that conclusion. Once you buy evolution you must destroy the valuableness of man; it always will work this way; men are to be used, to be manipulated to get something better out of it, superman, Nietzsche, that idea. So this, then, spells the dignity of man on the basis of creation. Man has a purpose and it goes all the way back to this point.

Now in Genesis 1:28 man is said to have to do something. The key in understanding verse 28 is to compare it with verse 22 because in verse 22 you have God making similar commands to the animals, and in verse 28 you have God making the commands to man. Now notice what is the same and notice what is different. First, “be fruitful, multiply and fill the earth.” Verse 28 has “be fruitful, multiply and replenish the earth,” same verb in the Hebrew, it doesn’t make any difference. So man is to fill, he’s to multiply. So in that he is given the same kind of thing as animal; the reason being that man cannot fulfill his function on earth as an isolated pair, we must have bodies and many bodies. There must be, for example, specialization of work; a musician must be free to just do his music so somebody else can do science, so somebody else can do engineering, so somebody else can do something else or we’re never going to get anywhere with everybody trying to do everything. The specification of work or the specialization of work is necessary for the progress of the human race.

So there must be population growth. We don’t have any trouble here but in some parts of the country they appear to be having trouble. It’s aided and abetted by what we call ZPG propaganda, Zero Population Growth, and again, I would be remiss in my job as pastor if I didn’t tell you that with verse 28 you are going to be thrown into conflict at two points with your environment today. At two points verse 28 clashes in a profound way with the prevailing public opinion, and as a Bible-believing Christian you ought to intellectually prepare yourself for the battle. The first point of conflict in verse 28 is with the ZPG people who argue that we are in danger of over population. The Bible insists the human race has never been in danger of over population and will never be in danger of over population. You day that’s a harsh statement. You must not know statistics. I know the statistics of India, I have the ZPG material sitting on my desk; I have read it and having read it I still say verse 28 says there shall be no such thing as over population.

Now why? Over population is not man’s problem. You ask somebody what’s the problem? Over population. No, you’re not talking about bodies stacked on top of bodies, what are you talking about when you talk about over population? Starvation, that’s what you’re talking about, lowered standard of living. Okay, well then let’s identify the problem; right now it’s not over population, it is food problem. Now let’s see, is the food problem due to over population or is the food problem due to something else. And we creationists have to argue that the food problem is due to something else. It is due, number one, to heathen religions that will not permit people to step on an ant and so the ants walk away with half their harvest. It is due to socialized agriculture that destroyed the greatest bread basket Europe ever had which was the Russian Ukraine. Remembering your history 50 to 60 to 100 years ago, what was the bread basket that was exporting grain to France, to Belgium, to Holland, to Germany, to what is now Czechoslovakia, where did those people get their grain from? They got it from the Ukraine. What happened? Why can’t the Ukraine feed all of Europe today? Because the glorious communists took it over and in the name of progress wiped out all the farmers, by the millions, and then after they wiped them out they suddenly discovered oh-oh, we made a boo-boo, we killed all the farmers and only those people know how to grow grain. So we have socialism, Marxism and communism systematically across the face of the earth destroying agriculture. The United States is rapidly doing it with controls to the farmer. So where the farmers are not free to practice the free enterprise profit motive you will have food problems.

Then there is the climate problem, true, but the counter to this is look at Israel. Why is Israel able to grow so much in an adverse climate? When I was there and went through the Negev, why in the Negev, of all places, no rain, maybe three inches a year or something like that, no rain to speak of and yet in the time of Jesus Christ there was a large civilization called the Nabiteans living in the middle of the Negev. How do you suppose they did it? We’re not sure exactly how they did it but the Israeli scientists are down in the Negev right now, figuring out, digging down, why do these Nabiteans, how could they live in the Negev, they had some way of surviving, some way of growing food and slowly the Israelis are discovering these ways and growing food in the Negev; people said it couldn’t be done. That’s because they think like pagans. Always 156 reasons why something can’t be done instead of the fact, now look, let’s just take some simple facts; God gave us dominion over the earth, God said to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth, and that includes bad areas. So there must be some way to live in these bad areas and we’ve just simply got to find the way.

I’m very pleased to note that in one of the great evangelical relief organizations, Food for the Hungry by Dr. Larry Ward has just come out with a new kit that they’re going to move into these areas where people are starving, they’ve got a whole kit that’s so the women can boil their water. In some of these places 40-50% of the income of the family goes to just buying firewood so they can cook their food with it, and so this guy has developed a solar oven and with this complete, no reliance upon nearby energy, it’s all an arid area so you have no problem with sunshine. And then they discovered hydroponics systems for growing crops in soil less areas. This is a kit that’s now being developed. They have another kit which after the food is harvested they wrap it up in this container to keep it from the rats and the bugs. And then they use the same container to purify water; it’s an ingenious thing. It just shows you all somebody has to do is have some creativity instead of moaning and groaning and wringing their hands, oh, we’re over populated. That’s not the point. As we have said before and you can check this out in Dr. Rushdoony’s book, The Myth of Over Population, the high plains, right here, where we’re living, was over populated 200 years ago by the Indians. Why? Because they didn’t do anything, they shot all the buffalo and then they were starving to death, because they didn’t know how to use the environment. And so the white man came and he was more successful at using the environment and he sustained a population of 15, 20, 100 times more than the high plains Indians. Why? Food production. Technology. That spells the answer why. So don’t be enamored with the hippie that’s going back to nature, he’s going backwards. The Genesis narrative says go forward, there is no such thing as over population. There’s another book that’s recently come out with the same thesis called Grow or Die.

That’s one point of controversy of verse 28. A second point of controversy of verse 28 has with our modern scene is in the area of ecology. Ecology is the concern for the environment. And people have said that it is the Christians, and this verse in particular, that has caused pollution, strip mining and all the lumbering without replacing the timber and so on, all this is due to a mental attitude created by verse 28. It starts in a paper by Dr. Lynn White wrote in a Science Magazine in 1967, a very famous paper by now, and this is what his conclusion was: “I seriously doubt that disastrous psychological backlash can be avoided simply by applying to our problems more science and more technology. Our science and technology,” and listen to this, a very interesting observation, “Our science and technology have grown out of Christian attitudes towards man’s relation to nature.” Now isn’t that interesting. It shows you what we’ve been saying all along, why is it science didn’t develop in any other places except where the Bible was? Because of the attitude the Bible has toward nature. “We shall continue to have a worsening ecological crisis until we reject the Christian axiom that nature has no reason for existence, save to serve man.” (End quote)

Now he’s right in one sense, wrong in another. He’s right in the attitude of verse 28, man is king; we’re not to worship nature, nature is under our feet, and it’s to be used. But what Dr. White doesn’t see is that the Bible gives us instructions on how to properly use nature. And the Bible has its own built in correction device if it were followed, so it’s not strictly true what Professor White says.

All right, the Genesis 1 narrative ends in verse 31 with the pronouncement, “every thing that God had made,” He looked, “and, behold, it was very good,” tob m^eod the Hebrew, it was very good, and this is God’s deep appreciation for the things that He has done; no evil, no suffering. When you look out and you see the evil and the suffering and the storms and the discord in nature, that physical discord is attributed in the Bible to man’s sin. We are all sons of Adam and daughters of Eve, and we bear in our environment the marks of judgment upon our parents, and therefore we see this that has come into nature, but after creation, not during creation.

Well, this chapter has given us certain observations, a radical difference of order of events. We’ve seen various categories in nature, and today we want to also, before we finish observing, we want to turn to the New Testament because I have made it my policy in the Genesis series to show you that at each point the Genesis 1 text is used intimately in the logical structure of the New Testament. You can’t throw out Genesis 1 without throwing out the New Testament, so take your pick, it’s all or nothing.

Matthew 7:15, here right in the middle of the Sermon on the Mount the Lord Jesus Christ makes use of the Genesis narrative about the kinds. He has this central truth in His mind and he uses it the Sermon on the Mount. Says Jesus in Matthew 7:15, “Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves, [16] Ye do know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thorns, or figs from thistles? [17] Even so, every good tree brings forth good fruit, but a corrupt tree brings forth evil fruit. [18] A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. [19] Every tree that bringeth not good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. [20] Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them.” And Jesus point here is that there are built in categories in nature; these are inviolate, you don’t have figs off of thistles and grapes off of thorns.

And so the very “kinds” is a concept that carries over into the spiritual realm so that those who are the regenerate children of God produce their own fruit and those who are the children of Satan produce theirs and theirs and there’s no transmutation across the boundaries. There has to be a new creation in order to get a new “kind,” and this cuts off the salvation by works. You don’t start out as a child of Satan and gradually evolve into a child of God. It requires going from one kind to another and that kind of transmutation can only occur by a new creation, hence the Bible talks about a new creation. If you want to track that theme further in the pages of the New Testament I refer you to 1 Corinthians 15:35 and following, and I refer you to Galatians 6:7-8.

Now those are the observations of the Genesis text and we said we always want to look at some evidences. We want to look at evidences because of two reasons: if God’s Word is true, then all the evidences around us in nature ought to show us that, in fact, God’s Word shows up in the details. The God, in other words, who wrote the book, is the God who builds nature outside the window and the two ought to fit together.

A second reason for doing this is to show the fact that if man is depraved the way the Bible says it’s part of our intellectual perversity to try and bury the evidence or at least pretend we don’t know of it when in fact we do know of it. So we’re going to look at two evidences this morning. First we’re going to hear a tape recording, continuing part of the debate that we’ve been studying on previous Sunday mornings between Dr. Gish and Dr. Kirkwood of the University of Minnesota on evolution and creation. In particular we’re going to look at the problem of the Genesis kinds. Now we’ve studied the text; now we’re prepared to appreciate the point made in the debate. The debate is this: if there were fishes and there were amphibians, evolution would argue that there was transition between the two, that under the process of evolution you slowly move from fish over to amphibians, and therefore there ought to be somewhere in the fossil record evidence of this slow gradual transition. Are there evidences of this slow gradual transition? If we can have the tape, please.

Finally, ladies and Gentlemen, evolutionists say well, in spite of all this, after all, don’t we know from the fossil record that evolution has taken place? Don’t we have the record inscribed in the rocks that demonstrate the fact of evolution? Well, as a matter of fact, ladies and gentleman, the fossil record is an embarrassment to evolution. Darwin recognized this; he recognized the problem but he ascribed it to the poverty of the fossil record. He hoped that some day with further searching that what is lacking, what they need to demonstrate evolution would be found. Well, ladies and gentlemen, the past 100 years has not produced the evidence sought for by evolutionists, but the searchings has merely emphasized the nature of the gap and the nature of the evidence.

Now if evolution is true, then the oldest rocks, which contain fossils, must contain fossils of the simplest forms of life capable of leaving a fossil record. Then as we search out what evolutionists believe to be younger and younger rocks, younger and younger strata, we must find a slow gradual change of these simple forms of life into more and more complex forms of life. And if millions of species of very, very slowly and gradually evolved through millions of years of time, hundreds of million years of time, then the fossil record must contain a vast number of transitional forms. Just think thirty million years for a fish to evolve into an amphibian, during which time, supposedly, the fin of the fish slowly and gradually changed to the feet and the legs of the amphibian. One hundred million years is assumed for some invertebrates to evolve into the backboned animals, slowly and gradually. Think of the enormous number of transitional forms that must have existed, lived and died during those many, many, millions of years. Why, the number of intermediate form between a fish and an amphibian would be literally millions times millions, and perhaps times millions again.

Now if you’re going to find fossils at all we must find some transitional forms; here’s thirty million years, how can you miss; one hundred million years of evolution of an invertebrate to a vertebrate, how can you miss. Now you may dig down in a particular rock, which evolution believe represents some time zone, and perhaps by that time the fish is completed it’s evolution to the amphibian and you’d find complete amphibian, but remember at that same time supposedly hundreds and thousands of other species were in the process of evolution. Ladies and gentlemen, if you find fossils at all you’ve got to find transitional ones, and tremendous numbers of transitional ones. Our museums should be full of transitional forms; there should be no question, no dispute, no discussion whatsoever on this point; there should be vast numbers of evident transitional forms if evolution is true.

Well if creation is true we’d expect to see an explosive appearance of highly complex plants and animals for which we could find no evolutionary ancestors. We’d expect to find fossils of the various kinds, the phyla, classes, orders, families and so forth, but no transitional forms. We’d expect to find fossils of fishes and fossils of these invertebrates, soft-bodied or shelled animals, but no transitional forms. We’d expect to find fossils of apes, monkeys and men but no transitional form. This is what we’d expect on the basis of creation. Now you see the contrast is very sharp. Its difference is night and day. It should be an easy thing to dig up the fossils, study them and decide, which is more credible, creation or evolution? When that is done, I am convinced that the evidence is solidly in support of creation.

Now may I have that first slide; I want to show a few slides to demonstrate the nature of the fossil records, then I want to quote from some of the leading evolutionary scientists as to the general nature of the fossil record. Let me quote now from a few of the evolutionary scientists of the general nature of the fossil record. In the book, Contemporary Botanical Thought, published in 1961 by Quadrangle books, we find a chapter by E. J. H. Corner, an evolutionary botanist of Cambridge University. He’s an evolutionist; he does believe that plants have evolved. But he says in that chapter, (quote) ‘Much evidence can be induced in favor of the theory of evolution from biology, biogeography and paleontology but I still think that to the unprejudiced the fossil record of plants is in favor special creation,’ (end of quote). So Dr. Corner says the fossil record of plants does not favor evolution but creation. Major kinds of plants appear abruptly without ancestors and without transitional form, just as we’d expect on the basis of creation.

Now as to the general nature of the fossil record, and ladies and gentlemen, if I had time I could quote many other sources, but let me quote Dr. David B. Kitts, Professor of Geology at the University of Oklahoma, a man who received his training in vertebrate paleontology under George Gaylord Simpson, the world’s most famous evolutionist. Dr. Kitts is an evolutionist, he published his article in Evolution, Volume 28, 1974, it’s entitled Paleontology and Evolutionary Theory, that is, the fossil record on evolutionary theory. On page 467 Dr. Kitts says, (quote), ‘Despite the bright promise that paleontology provides the means of seeing evolution, it has presented some nasty difficulties for evolutionists, the most notorious of which is the presence of gaps in the fossil record. Evolution requires intermediate forms between species and paleontology does not provide them.’ (End of quote). This evolutionist says evolution require intermediate forms and the fossil record dose not provide them.”

Clough: So there are some evidences for creation and we want to take a minute to look at another one; this one was prepared by a school teacher who has been on some tapes of our and decided as a school teacher, particular in teaching biology in the classroom that as a Christian he owed it to his students of his classroom to provide information to them in a strict way that would respect their intellectual freedom and provide, on the other hand some stimulation to think over these problems. So he sent me this series, a few slides and a presentation, and I’m going to show you this to you for two reasons. Number one, it’s very interesting in and of itself, and will give you a further evidence of why the Genesis 1 narrative is correct. But then two, many of you teach school and I’d like to challenge you to think about ingenious ways of doing this in your classroom. As you can see it doesn’t take that much work once you’ve got the library research done, just slides taken from books that you get the ideas from and so on. So now we are going to look at his presentation:

“The yucca plant and its companion moss, show a mutualism easily interpreted by creationism but difficult by evolution. The yucca plant grows wild in the southwest United States and Mexico. Flowers appear in April and last through June. These flowers tell an interesting story. In most flowers the pollen is transferred from stamen to stigma by wind, bees or moths in a straightforward way. In the yucca plant, however, the flower has a sticky agglutinating pollen which cannot get from stamen to stigma without help of a very special king. The [sounds like: pen you bah] moth alone can pollinate the yucca plant. When the yucca flower opens, the female penuba [sp?] moth penetrates the flower and mounts the stamen. She picks off the sticky pollen rolling it up in a little ball under her chin, by a very special tentacle, together with very specially designed front legs and mouth parts. No other moth has such features. When the ball of sticky pollen is several times larger than her head she flies to another flower; she never pollinates the same flower from which she has gathered the pollen, thus assuring cross pollination of the yucca flower. She lands on the pistil of another flower and then climbs to its base; she has a special ovipositor which she uses to cut into the ovary wall, and very carefully lays only one egg. Moving to the other end of the pistil she carefully rubs pollen down the inner side of the cup of the right pistil, thus pollinating the yucca flower with its sticky pollen. After repeating this process many times her life is over and she dies. It is believed that she never eats, her only function being to pollinate the yucca flower and assuring continuance of her own species.

Like other moths, the penuba moth begins its cycle from eggs. Unlike other moths, however, the penuba moth eggs hatch into larvae exactly when the yucca flower seeds are fully developed from the pollination. From the one action of the female moth the seeds of the flower and her eggs simultaneously develop for each other. The larvae feed on the flower seeds but they do not eat all of the seeds; they eat less than one half of the seeds. Thus the yucca plant has plenty of seeds for its own growth and the penuba larvae have plenty of food for their growth. When the larvae are ready for the pupa or cocoon stage it bores a hole through the seed pod, spins a thread and lowers itself to the ground. It buries itself in the ground, completes the metamorphosis and hibernation for the winter. Next summer at the time the yucca plant flowers it comes out as a mature moth and starts the cycle all over again. In the whole field of pollination this is the only case in which pollination of a plant is carried on by an insect not to gather food for itself, but to insure food for offspring it will never see.

Some thought questions: how could this phenomena, mutualism of plant and moth, have originated by natural selection? Which came first in this complete unbreakable, unshakeable tie-in between plant and pollinating insect? The evolutionist has to say that chance coordinated the evolution both of the plant and the animal in two entirely separate kingdoms simultaneously to bring this together. Creationists say it is a deliberate interdependency of the plant and the animal because of one overall master plan during creation week. Second question: why does the penuba moth just happen to have specially fitted organs which alone can pollinate the yucca flower? And three, why is the mother careful to pollinate properly and lay only one egg, when she never knows the results of her acts?”

Clough: So we have evidences that you can, if you look for and look carefully to the fact that the Genesis 1 narrative that we’ve studied, is in fact true. We’d expect that if it is truly the word of our God; our God cannot lie and we should be able to trust His Word in every area. So the appeal of Genesis 1 is to us to stop kidding ourselves; either god means what He says or he is a liar; there’s no in between. In our depravity we can twist and we can turn and we can try to avoid an authoritative Word of God. But God’s Word stands still and it will not be undermined by the works and thoughts of men.

We’re going to sing together….