Genesis 1:24–31

In verse 20 God spoke of the sea creatures that have life — and the Hebrew word behind "creature" there is "nephesh," soul. Verse 21 uses the same word again: every living creature that moves is a living soul. Verse 24 says it once more of the land: "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds." So by His word God made them living souls on the earth.

It is not out of place to name "cattle" first in verse 24. These are the animals that can be tamed, even if they were not tamed yet, and they suit the use of man. "Creeping thing" comes next, in its more literal sense. "Moving," used earlier, described more fully how the creatures of the waters act, so it took in not only serpents and the like but insect life. "Animal of earth" means the wild beast.

We notice too that both verse 24 and verse 25 keep the "beast of the earth" separate from the "cattle." We gather from this that at the first, before sin came in, God designed certain animals for the upkeep and benefit of the man He was about to create. After sin came in, the beasts developed their wild and savage nature, while the cattle stayed fairly tame and useful to man.

Notice that each creature is "after his kind." God made the plants and the sea animals the same way on the earlier days. This establishes that species are fixed... One thing is certain: "after his kind" stamps each class of plant and animal life with its own identity. So this Scripture gives evolution no support. Yet we must be careful. In turning away from that extreme theory of unbelief, we must not fall into the opposite error of making endless classes.

The lion does not mate with the tigress. The eagle does not pair with the goose. The wasp does not breed with the bee. The only hybrids in creation are of man's arrangement and they are sterile, and come to nothing.

The creation of man was not a mass movement, as the creation of the lower creatures was. Verse 24 describes a mass movement. It takes in the whole of living things on earth, yet there is one great exception — MAN... "And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul." There is no mass movement here. A single individual was in view.

The animals came out of the earth at His will. He had said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds," and it was so. It was not like that with man. God takes solemn counsel about creating him, and decides to make man in His image, after His likeness.

We can compare God's work up to this point to an architect who designs and builds a palace for a royal person to live in. So God prepared all the beautiful world around: sun, moon, stars, clouds, non-living matter, plant life, animal life, with their countless astounding wonders. All of it was ready for this moment of supreme importance, when God created man — a creature He could have fellowship with.

In the early part of the sixth day God filled the earth with living souls — beast and cattle and also creeping things. Notice that God made them. It does not say that He created them. They looked very different from the creatures of the waters and the air, yet they were still only "living souls." So the word created appears only when God first created "soul" as something distinct from matter.

Bringing in the herbivores, the reptiles, and the carnivores here is straining after a scientific gloss… Naming "cattle" first in verse 24 is no anachronism. These are the animals that can be tamed, even if not yet tamed, and they suit the use of man. "Creeping thing" follows in its more literal sense… "Animal of earth" means the wild beast. All of them are terms in constant use where man lives and reigns.

Notice too that both verse 24 and verse 25 keep the "beast of the earth" separate from the "cattle." We gather from this that at the first, before sin came in, God designed certain animals to support and benefit the man He was about to create. After sin came in, the beasts developed their wild and savage nature, while the cattle stayed tame and useful to man.

Notice that each creature is "after his kind." This establishes the fixity of species. Scripture does not say what those species were, or how far variety might later develop inside them. In many animal species that variety is so great it is scarcely believable. One thing is certain: "after his kind" stamps its own mark on each class of plant and animal life. So evolution finds no encouragement from this Scripture. Yet in reacting against the extreme of unbelieving theory, we must be careful not to fall into the opposite extreme of making endless classes. A common unity underlies all animal creation. Each class is specially fitted for the work it has to do. Just as plainly, though, barriers that cannot be crossed separate the classes from one another.

Why "after his kind"? That clearly leaves room for each species. The lion does not mate with the tigress. The eagle does not consort with the goose. The wasp does not breed with the bee. The only hybrids in creation are of man's arrangement, and they are sterile, and come to nothing.

As to the life we have by nature, God's word formed the beasts out of the ground. There the ordinary creation ended, and God pronounced the beasts good (Gen. 1:25). And then God proceeds in solemn consultation to form man as His image, as lord of all He had created, and in His likeness.

Acts 10:1-15 and verse 28 show that all these animals are typical of mankind. Domesticated animals would speak of the cultured and refined classes of men. Creeping things speak of the more despised classes, in places of lowly humiliation. The beasts of the earth remind us of men in their wild, rebellious state — a third class even more common than the other two. But this work of God on the sixth day was only a preparation for a more important work the same day.

God has finished creation as creation. Now He begins to take counsel, in the most solemn way, saying that He will make man in His image and give him rule. So the creation is complete as the setting and the scene. Then God makes man in His own image and sets him over it all. Man stands entirely alone. Everything is finished, and then he is given rule over it.

One thing set man apart from every other creature. God took counsel about him before He made him. What was coming was not a new animal. It was a moral being with wonderful gifts and possibilities.

That God should say, "Let US," is worthy of note. Elohim is, as we have said, a plural Name. The Old Testament does not reveal the three Persons in the Godhead. But now that God has revealed Them, we can see that the language of our chapter, given by God, fits that truth. In verse 26 it is "Our image". In verse 27 it is "His image". There is no clash here, because the eternal "Three in One" is the One speaking.

Think of the plural form of the word and how it goes with singular verbs. Would it not be close to the truth to say this? We cannot treat it as a revelation of the Trinity. Yet it is a way of speaking that shows the Spirit had that truth in mind. He is the third Person there, and He used words whose full force we could only grasp once that teaching had been revealed.

"Image" represents. "Likeness" resembles. An image does not have to look like the thing or person it stands for. The coin they showed the Lord Jesus in Matthew 22:20 may not have carried a "likeness" of Caesar, but it did carry an "image" of him. Man is made in the "image" of God. So God places him in this world to represent Him to the lower creatures, in rule and in blessing. That word is about man's position. "Likeness" points to his moral being. He can enter into relationships and carry responsibilities.

Scripture never says the Son is in the likeness of the invisible God. He is God. To call Him like God might suggest He is not truly God. Still, the Son is "the image of the invisible God". In His own Person He represents God in His character and moral attributes, before the whole universe.

This is man as the head of creation… He was to represent God here below. Besides that, he was to be like God. He was to have a mind, a spirit able to know God, with no evil in him at all.

God creates the man and the woman. Then He gives them rule "over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth". Move on to Genesis 3, and there Satan has come in. He has gained this headship for himself through the man who had fallen.

Man is in the image of God, now as always, fallen or not. But sin cost him the likeness of God. When the question is the guilt of taking a man's life, the reason given is that God made him in His own image. This, it is plain, was never lost; it abides, whatever man's state.

God created Adam in His own image and set him to rule over the works of His hands. Adam stood at the centre of a vast system placed under him. He was, the apostle says, a picture of the One who was to come. The rule of the Second Adam reaches much further than the rule of the first. He created all things Himself, so He is to inherit all He has created.

To be true to the image, there must be moral likeness. For us that means a new creation. So Colossians 3:10 says we "have put on the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its creator".

God did not create man as He had done in every previous case, by a simple order from His lips. The creation of man was the subject of divine counsel. "Let us make man," etc. Notice here that man was to be, and was, made in the image and likeness of God. This is his first great difference from everything God had created before. The second is that he was to rule over all of it.

How the Bible uses the word, in both the Old and New Testaments, seems to show that "image" represents, while "likeness" resembles… In the New Testament, the coin our Lord asked for had the image and inscription of Caesar on its face. It might have been a poor likeness, but it was an unmistakable image of the Roman emperor. It expressed his authority and represented his claim.

God made man, then, to represent Him to the lower creation that He put under him. But he was also made after the likeness of God; that is, he was really like God in certain important respects. Not in all respects of course, for God is infinitely holy and man was merely innocent. Still, man was God's "offspring" (Acts 17:28-29). He is a spirit being, though dressed in a body of flesh and blood. So he has intelligence and a moral sense, and these reflect what exists on an infinite scale in God Himself.

How far this is from the brute finally evolving into man, a theory suggested by Satan to brutalise the race! Here is the simple yet wonderful truth. No one brought God down to the human level; God created man, and man alone, after a divine pattern.

Man is no longer in the likeness of God, but he is always in the image of God. For man, now as ever, fallen or not, is in the image of God; but the likeness of God was lost through sin. Seth therefore was born in Adam's own likeness, not in God's. He was like Adam fallen, not only his representative.

The fall has not cost man either the image or the likeness of God (Gen. 9:6; James 3:9).

The murderer does more than meddle with man and injure him to the worst degree. By killing a man he also defaces God's image, and God sentences him to die. Murder seizes what belongs to God, and no man has that right.

Verse 27 says that man is twofold… the few words here show us how closely Scripture ties male and female together. The word "man" covers both, and jointly they were to have the dominion.

Christ brings out God's glory in these things, and He shows how it was at the beginning. God did not make one man and two women, but "male and female he created them." So from the very forming of man, God's mind was clear.

God created man in His own image and likeness. But no one could call Christ, "who is God over all, blessed forever," the likeness of God, since He is God. But He can be the image of God, for "image" is what represents another, and Christ did this for God perfectly.

To be true to the image, there must be moral likeness. For us that means a new creation. So Col. 3:10 says the new self "is being renewed in knowledge after the image of its Creator."

"To every beast of the earth I have given every green plant for food." This would imply that animals were not carnivorous. There is a difference between cattle and beasts; but in that statement the cattle are left out; the "beasts" are what we call wild beasts. It is perfectly within God's power to have restricted them for the time, or to have changed them.

Man still has his distinctive place in God's commission and plan; but it is in the state of innocence. After the fall came corruption and violence. Animal food was not permitted to man till after the flood. Herbs and fruit were given at first to man, and to the subject creation every green plant. Death was not in the Adamic earth till sin. True, Romans 5:12-21 goes no further than the human race, fallen under death through sin. But Romans 8:19-22 looks at "all the creation" as ruined through the fall of its head.

So I conclude that death was not in the creation of which man was the head until his fall. But scripture says nothing about what may have happened between the creation of the heavens and the earth and the forming of the present world out of chaos... So geologists may find as many fossil giants and sea reptiles as they please. They do not touch the statements of scripture one way or another, because scripture makes none about it. Death entered only into the creation connected with man, and by man's sin. Scripture states that, though it does not deal with what it meant for the beasts. Genesis 1:30 confirms it, for it gives the green grass to the beasts of the earth.

Scripture states plainly that herbs were given for food to the beasts of the field. This was not written out of ignorance, for lions were eating men in Moses' time. Moses wrote it with the deliberate intention of claiming a revelation, and so he contradicts the whole existing order of facts about animals... He declares that at first they were given the green plant for food. Scripture gives us to understand they ate that in the ark... It is a direct contradiction of universal experience, and claims to be a revelation. To say that it cannot be true is absurd.

The beast also is, and has, a living soul. Genesis 1:30 describes every beast of the earth, every bird of the air and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth as "everything in which there is a living soul." "Likeness" to God cannot be said of such a one as this, for God is not "soul," but "spirit," and the "Father of spirits." So man stands alone in relationship to God, because he has not only soul but also spirit.

God now first gave every moving thing that lives to be food for man (Genesis 9:3), as freely as He had first given green plants to beast and bird and reptile (Genesis 1:30). But He put a marked restriction on the blood... It was the life, and this God reserved for Himself.

Creation at large will be restored. No longer will the strong prey upon the weak. Even the wolf will dwell with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the kid, and the lion will eat straw like the ox (Isaiah 11:6-7)... When the sons of God are revealed, that will be the signal for the complete deliverance of all from the bondage of corruption (Romans 8:19-21).

With the creation of man, God's work had reached its high point. Up to now we have read the same words four times over: "And God saw that it was good." That covered all the rebuilding and creating, apart from the creation of man. But on the sixth day God surveys the whole scene, including man and woman in their ordered place with dominion over it all. Then we read, "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was VERY good."

Take note of this, for it destroys at one blow the whole system of error wrongly called "Christian Science." One of its most basic teachings is the idea that matter is evil and only spirit is good. The truth is the exact opposite, for when evil entered it came in by way of spirit, not matter.

Here experience must fail us. Only the Bible could give us the truth about the first condition of man and the creatures around him. But once it is revealed, it proves itself at once. It is the only state we can imagine in which the Creator could have placed creation and its head in a way that fits His own goodness. That is the force and moral beauty of His final survey in the last verse. With the one exception of the second day, He had called each thing "good"; now, as a whole, it was good in the highest degree in His eyes.

It is illogical, and unbelieving too, to assume that the present state is the normal one, or that God made men sinful, vain, proud and selfish… Clearly the state of the world is offensive to God, and it has been so as far back as man's records reach. This is a fact, Bible or no Bible.

This led to creation rest, with its two marks. First, God was satisfied with all that He had made, as we read, "And God saw everything that He had made, and behold, it was very good." Second, He stopped all His creation work completely, as it is written, "he rested on the seventh day from all his work that he had done." (Gen. 1:31; Gen. 2:2).

Sin broke God's Sabbath, His rest in creation. From then on the verdict He had just pronounced had to change from "very good" to very bad. Man, the masterpiece, fell, and dragged down with him the creation God had placed him over. The beautiful work of God's hand was spoiled, as it were, in a moment.

It pleased God to make that first creation dependent on its head, the first Adam. He listened to a voice which he ought not to have listened to; sin came in by him, and by sin death, and now the whole creation groans in bondage. (Rom. 5 and Rom. 8)

Sin has marred the fair creation, so that now the whole creation groans and suffers pain. But the saints in heaven share the mind of the Lord, and they can see that all the evil will be dealt with in judgment. Then God can take pleasure in His creation once again, just as He did long ago, when the creation work was finished: "And God saw everything that he had made, and behold, it was very good" (Gen. 1:31).

He declared the work of His hand to be very good, but in the anguish of His soul He will find satisfaction. The first creation, for all its beauty, was quickly marred by sin.