What did God create on the fifth day of creation?

Now we return to consider God's work in the waters, which He had named “Seas” (v. 10), and His work too in making life to exist in the firmament. On this fifth day is the first mention of animate life. He gives the command, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures” (v. 20). How true this is! It has been observed that the total weight of all the insect population of earth is many times the weight of all human and animal population — though it would take many mosquitoes to equal the weight of one elephant! But the combined weight of humans, animals and insects is nothing compared to the population of the seas!

For the second time in this chapter the word “created” is used (v. 21). God had created the heavens and the earth before, now He creates animate life, another order of creation entirely. The word is not used therefore when, on the sixth day, animals were introduced, but it is used when we are told, “God created man in His own image” (v. 27), for man is a totally different order of creation. There is a link between sea creatures, birds and animals, but none of these have any such link with mankind. On the fifth day, however, both great sea creatures and birds were created.

The creation of great sea creatures and birds involves a personal spiritual lesson for a believer. When we have known the Lord Jesus as the one great Object of faith, as we learn in the setting of the sun in the heavens, then the waters of turmoil, distress and unrest, that is, our experiences of deep trial, will miraculously bring forth abundant blessing. As Paul says, “Our light affliction, which is but for a moment, is working for us a far more exceeding and eternal weight of glory” (2 Cor. 4:17). Indeed, we shall realize this as true in just the measure that we make the Lord Jesus the Object of our lives. The waters of unceasing disturbance and restlessness may seem to us hopelessly unproductive, but the power and grace of God produces some of the greatest blessing for us through the greatest trouble and sorrow. The birds flying in the heavens teach us that by faith our spirit may rise high above the level of our circumstances in a world that is the 'valley of the shadow of death.” “As birds on the wing we rise and sing, and our troubles seem far away.”

The rule of heaven being thus established, God proceeded on the fifth day to bring into being an order of life much higher than the vegetable kingdom of the third day. Moving creatures that had life now appear, to fill the seas and the air immediately above the earth. The word translated "whales" simply means monsters that inhabit the waters, whether seas or rivers. All these too, like the herb and tree previously, are made after their kind, and are bidden to reproduce themselves and multiply.

In verse 21 we get the word "created" for the second time. It appeared in verse 1, the original creation of the heaven and the earth. The intervening verses have told us what God made out of His original creation. Why does the word occur again here? We believe, because here the waters were commanded to bring forth "the moving creature that has life." We see nutrition growth and reproduction in the vegetable kingdom. Here we see another order of things altogether, creatures with powers of sensation and of voluntary motion. Indeed the word translated "creature" in verses 20 and 21 is really "soul." On this fifth day then there was the introduction of a higher form of life, involving soul, so this was distinctly and properly creation.

As the result then of God's work on the fifth day both the waters and the air were furnished with living souls, that would be fruitful and multiply until both were filled.

There is much more here, but I leave it and pass on. The fifth day brings another change of scene; and here, when we might have thought that we had left them finally behind, we are brought back again to the barren waste of waters. But now even here the power of God is working; She waters swarm with swarms of living creatures, and birds fly in the open firmament of heaven. It is still progress in the great creative plan, and new and higher forms of life are reached than heretofore. It is not now grass and herb, but the "living soul," and God blesses them, and bids them multiply.

The fifth day arrived. There were the vast stretches of ocean and sea. God called into existence the denizens of the deep, the fishes, and all that move in the waters, and also the fowl of the air. We have seen in Revelation 17:15 that the waters, which John saw in his apocalyptic vision, were symbolic of peoples and multitudes and nations and tongues. Does it not seem that the peopling of the seas is symbolic of God’s gracious work among the Gentiles through the Gospel? The Old Testament testimony was confined very largely to the children of Israel. Our Lord was sent unto the lost sheep of the house of Israel. The great feature of the New Testament is, however, the Gospel of God going out world-wide to the veritable ends of the earth. The commission of our risen Lord was:

On the fifth day God called into existence the denizens of the deep. He also created the birds and fowls of the air.

It is very instructive that Moses differentiated between every living creature that moves, which the waters brought forth, and whales. The Hebrew word, translated whale in our Authorised Bibles is also rendered dragon, serpent, sea-monster, sea-calf. There is no doubt that Moses differentiated between fishes, cold-blooded animals, and warm-blooded denizens of the sea, which suckle their young, and are obliged to come to the surface of the sea to breathe. Whales, porpoises, dolphins, seals, etc., come under this category, all of them of large size. Do we not see in this the meticulous care of Divine inspiration? What could Moses know of such things? What opportunities had he, first in Egypt, then forty years in the backside of the desert keeping sheep, then forty years in the desert leading the children of Israel towards Canaan, to study piscatology, that is the scientific study of fishes? And yet Moses made no mistakes in his narrative. How the simple yet profound account of the reconstruction of the world stands in vivid contrast to the fantastic fairy tales of the ancients when they wrote on the origin of the earth.

Fifth Day — The Waters. The waters now teem with life, and birds fly in the air. Here again science adds its confirmation, grudgingly enough, but it could not be withheld. The order is evidently the correct one. How beautifully, too, is seen the action of God's goodness in all this! He first creates an environment in which it is possible for His creatures to exist. For instance, plant life requires the dry land upon which to be established. That, therefore, is first brought up out of the waters. Animals need vegetable food, and this is first supplied in abundance before these creatures are brought into being. God's whole work, as we have already remarked, is thus ever prophetic of the good things to come.

On the fifth day of the creation God said, "Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life . . . . and God created great whales," or sea monsters. To man was given dominion over the fish of the sea. Gen. 1:20-21, 26, 28. Fish has been called God's especial gift to man. Any one may catch it in the sea and appropriate it to his own use. It increases abundantly without any care of man.

On the fifth day, verses 20-23. Here, after saying the things z are, etc., God z 'creates' certain ones, and "which the waters p brought forth," are the expressions used. Then we first get the "imperative mood" used. They being in existence, through creatorial power, He commands them, by procreation, to "be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the seas," and declares that "the fowl z shall multiply" — another future, with z, and not a present.

In ver. 20 then God spoke into being the creatures that people the waters and those that people the air in terms the most general. In ver. 21 the result is stated with more precision, the great whales or sea-monsters being distinguished from every living creature that moves (whether Protozoans, Radiates, Molluscs, Articulates, or Vertebrates), with which the waters swarmed, after their kind. Again we hear of "every bird of wing" after its kind. A correct version here, as the reader may see, explodes the error which commentators, Jewish and Christian, have tried to explain; for the sense is not that the waters produced the birds, but that God made them fly in the open expanse of the heavens. Compare Gen. 2:19, which distinctly teaches that they were formed out of the ground no less than was the beast of the field.

The evident intention was to impress, on all that heed the written word, that the fifth day's work embraced the entire circle of aquatic animals as well as all bird life known to mankind; not at all to acquaint them with a bygone system of animated nature, which sustained at the close of the Cretaceous period one of the most complete exterminations of species confessed by geologists. In fact too it is only in the Quaternary that Teliost Fishes as well as Birds find their culmination; of all allusion to which, though nearly affecting man, the mis-interpretation entirely deprives us. If on the contrary the inspired writer speak of what concerns man practically, with this agrees the expressed blessing of God, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth." It also derives impressive confirmation from vers. 26, 28, where dominion over the fish of the sea is given to man, no less than over birds of the air, and beast and cattle and all that creep on the earth. The only detail in fact is in setting forth the origin of what was actually put under man's rule; which certainly does not apply to Paleozoic, or Mesozoic, or Tertiary times.