Joseph’s Alabaster Box

GENESIS 1:20-23

PHYSICAL LIFE

Let’s read Genesis 1:20-23: “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 ever winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.” 2 “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.”

Man is diving deeper and deeper into the seas, and it is exciting to think what they might find down there. There is a vast fortune in the seas. Great numbers of ships have gone down, all through the ages, taking treasures to the bottom. Man has been to the moon, but there are many places in the seas where man has not been.

In the March ’96 edition of the Reader’s Digest there is an interesting article on modern deep-sea exploration titled “Voyage to the Last Frontier.”1 According to the article, there are riches awaiting the persons who can go into the deepest regions of the oceans. There are vast quantities of minerals and chemicals as well as the notoriety of being a deep sea explorer. Scientists were surprised when they discovered living creatures around hydrothermal vents deep in ocean trenches. They found bacteria; 30-inch long worms; big clams; mussels, and a “strange pink-skinned, blue-eyed fish.”2 They figured

that creatures living without plant life must have been living on chemicals. They are chemosynthetic rather than photosynthetic. Their energy is derived from chemicals rather than sunlight. When something like this is discovered, you can depend on evolutionists jumping on it to claim that that may have been the way the first life on Earth appeared. Evolution is a secular religion, using science as a cloak of deception.

It is amazing that these creatures can live in total darkness, and withstand enormous pressures. Truly, God created some marvelous things. These creatures found at great depths in the sea are strange-looking things, with odd-shaped bodies, and huge jawbones full of needle sharp teeth. God created every animal to live in a particular place for a particular purpose, but many animals had to adapt to new environments in the sea when it became salty and much deeper than when it was first made. Research should be directed at finding out as much about these creatures as we can for the benefit of the creatures as well as for man, but research to discover how life began is silly. True scientific research can produce some beneficial results, because of God’s mercy to man, but it will never reveal how life began on this planet, and such research as that will be only a curse to man. Evolution contributes nothing of value to humankind.

The first thing God did on the fifth day was to command the waters to bring forth many moving creatures that have life. Swarms of swarms it could be said. Not just two of each kind, but multitudes of them. Think of how many creatures can live in 320 million cubic miles of water! Every creature in the oceans was to eat plant life just

as the creatures on the earth. There is no way to know what sorts of plants the creatures would eat, but we know that today there are great numbers of plants in the oceans besides the tiny plankton that are the bottom of the food chain. Great whales live on tiny shrimp exclusively, and other enormous creatures live solely on plankton. Then God made the birds, the fowl spoken of in verse 21.

There are thousands of pictures of thousand of birds. hat a privilege it is to live in a world where we have the technology to bless us with much knowledge. When I see the huge beaks on some birds, every one of which could have been used to eat fruit, I am not impressed as Darwin was, to think about how they evolved. I am impressed to think of what engineering skill was required to design such things. Pelicans, toucans, storks, and other birds have great beaks that would be unwieldy if they were not so perfectly designed and made.

Evolutionists who claim that birds evolved from reptiles are as foolish as one who would say that a junk car could be driven until it became brand new. Feathers don’t even look like scales, let alone give enough evidence to believe that scales turned into feathers over millions of

years of evolution. A feather is so intricate, so perfectly made for flying, that it is preposterous to say such things as feathers evolved from scales, or anything else. What an insult to people’s intelligence. The problem is not that people say such foolish things; the problem is that people believe them. People believe what makes them comfortable. That is why God gives us the faith to believe in Jesus Christ as Savior.

One of the creatures the Creator commanded the waters to bring forth was the Coelacanth (see’ la cant). Evolutionists declared this creature to be a transitional form, and it was pronounced as being extinct for 50 million years. Then in l938 a live one was taken in a

fisherman’s net off the coast of Madagascar. More have been taken since then. There is no explanation from evolution philosophers as to how this creature could remain completely unchanged for 50 million years while all around it creatures were evolving. The diversity of creatures in the oceans defies the imagination. The particular manner of life of these different creatures makes the evolutionist appear silly when his claims are examined objectively. Only an omniscient Creator with unlimited imagination could produce such a vast array of creatures.

These water creatures are the first things the Bible mentions as living things. In verse 20 he says, “ … that hath life … .” Here is the second thing God created – physical life. The material for the bodies of these creatures existed from day

one when God created all the matter in the universe, and He brings part of it together to form the bodies of these creatures, and creates physical life to make them live. Christ, the great Giver of life, Christ, the Lover of life – He created life. How do you, explain life, evolution philosopher? A lightning bolt? You can’t be serious. How silly can you get? God is the Source and Giver of life. Isn’t it marvelous that the writer of the book of Genesis knew that whales breathe air like land dwelling creatures? Whales have the breath of life. The breath of life is the soul. Some folks just can’t seem to bring themselves to believe that animals have a soul, but it is so. How can we know what animals have or don’t have, or what they think or don’t think, except their

Creator tells us? Animals have “…the breath of life…”

according to Genesis 6:17.

Fish and other sea creatures are not said to have the breath of life, and may or may not have a soul. Christ Jesus gave us an idea of the value of a soul when He said that a human soul is worth more than the world, and that evidently included the animal kingdom. Listen to Him carefully: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

If only the sinner could understand what his soul is. A man’s soul is the breath of life that Christ breathed into him, and it will never die. What a horrible thing to think of the breath of God going to hell! Do you understand how precious the breath of God is? You may think you are not worth much because you are not handsome or pretty. You may think you are not worth much because you sweep floors for a living, or cook hamburgers. You may think you are not worth much because you are not young or healthy. You may think you are not much because you are the only member of your family who didn’t make it big in life. There are millions of reasons why you may notthink you are not worth much. But hear this: if you never hear anything else, you are precious to Jesus Christ. To Jesus Christ, you are worth as much as His own blood. You are worth as much to Him as His own life. You are worth as much to Him as this world.

All of our sins: past, present, and future, are all forgiven and forgotten by the Judge of all the earth. There are sins that man cannot forgive, but not so with God. Man’s prejudices are such that he canno bring himself to forgive certain sins that he feels are beyond restoration, but not so with God.

1 Michael D. Lemonick, “Voyage to the Last Frontier,” The Readers Digest, March 1996, p.83.

2. Ibid, pg. 84