My friend Ron handed me a little article out of the Los Angeles Times from Friday, June 25...just a couple of weeks ago.  It says, "A Delta II rocket carried a NASA telescope off Cape Canaveral Thursday on a three-year, 204 million dollar mission to try to discover the origin of the universe."  Now that's 204 of your million dollars, and mine, to try to find out what's in the first chapter of Genesis.  Amazing.
 
     Satan is the archenemy of God.  Satan is an incurable liar and a deceiver and the Bible says he's the father of lies.  Satan hates the truth of God.  And he dominates the world that he rules with falsehood.  In fact, Romans 1 says that civilization in general has exchanged the truth of God for the lie.  In other words, the world lives under pervasive deception and falsehood.  And Satan's lies literally pervade all human thought, governing all intellectual work, all science, all philosophy, all sociology, all psychology and everything else.
 
     But there are two lies in particular that provide the basic paradigm for modern culture, two lies.  Lie number one is that life is random.  That is that the way things are is just the way they kind of happened with nobody planning and nobody carrying it off, it just sort of evolved that way.  Life is random.  There is no purpose to it.  There is no reason for it.  There is no sovereign unfolding plan being carried out by a designing and powerful creator.  Life is just random.
 
     To put it another way, the universe as it exists was not created by God, nor is God the authority over this creation.  It's just a matter of chance, random chance.
 
     Second lie...first one, life is random...second lie, truth is relative...truth is relative.  The Bible is not the Word of God.  The Bible does not give us the truth about right and wrong, life and death, morality and immorality in the past and the future.  There is no authority beyond yourself.  Life is random, truth is relative.
 
     Now those two lies are so established in our society that people hate the Christian world view which opposes those lies.  We don't believe life is random.  We believe the universe as it is right now was created by God and is sustained by God and ruled by God.  We do not believe the truth is relative, we believe truth is absolute and it is absolutely revealed on the pages of Scripture, which is the revelation of God.
 
     To say that life as we know it, the universe as we know it, is the work of the creator God who is its sovereign and its sustainer and who as He began it will bring it to its end is to go against the grain of our culture.  To say the truth is absolute and the truth is as revealed in the Bible is to generate the hostility of the society around us.
 
     Two great ideologies rule.  No creator and no moral law.  And that dispossesses man of any accountability. 
 
     Now in this series we are looking really at both of these lies because the lie that life is random flies in the face of Genesis chapter 1.  Genesis chapter 1 does away with all evolution, establishing the fact that God is the creator of everything as it is.  And we also by accepting at face value the teaching of Genesis chapter 1 are countering the attack on the Bible as the Word of God.  We believe the Bible is the Word of God no matter what it says, whether it's talking about history, morality or creation. 
 
     These two lies go together.  Evolutionists who reject the idea of a creator God, therefore reject the idea of the Bible as an authoritative document written by that creator God.   But beyond that, evolutionists, both theistic evolutionists--those who say that evolution occurred but there is a God, He sort of launched evolution, and those who are atheistic or humanistic evolutionists, in any case any evolutionist at all whether he believes there's a God or not in order to espouse evolution has to deny Genesis chapter 1.  He has to deny then that God created the universe as it is and that the record of that creation as contained in Scripture is infallible, inerrant and true.
 
     So we're really running across the grain of these two great deceptions because Genesis 1 affirms God as the creator and it affirms that the account of that creation in the Bible is in fact infallible, inerrant and true.  The truly Christian view is that the Bible is the Word of God and God exists and has in Scripture revealed Himself.  The truly Christian view then is that God is the creator, God is the moral lawgiver, and the universe around us is the work of His creative hand and the Bible is the revelation of His moral and spiritual law. 
 
     We believe that what Genesis 1 says is as true as any other part of Scripture.  Genesis 1 is just as true as Exodus 20 which gives us the Ten Commandments.  It's just as true as Isaiah 53 which describes the suffering servant who would be the Messiah and bear our iniquities.  It's just as true as Matthew chapter 1 which indicates that Jesus was to be born of Mary and to be the Savior of the world.  It's just as true as John chapter 3 which says you must be born again.  It's just as true as any other and every other part of Scripture.  There is no basis for tampering with, questioning, or denying the veracity of Genesis 1 anymore than any other part of Scripture.  In fact, any disbelief in or tampering with or altering of Genesis 1 is an act of rebellion against God and His Word.  It's a serious thing to do that because like any other such rebellion, one who attacks the veracity of God and the Word of God brings upon himself the threat of divine judgment.
 
     Listen to the words of the last chapter in the Bible.  Revelation 22 verse 18, "I testify to everyone who hears the words of the prophecy of this book, if anyone adds to them God shall add to him the plagues which are written in this book; and if anyone takes away from the words of the book of this prophecy, God shall take away his part from the tree of life and from the holy city which are written in the book."  The bottom line, the Bible ends with a warning that you better not tamper with Scripture.  And anyone who tampers with Scripture, to add to it or take away from it, brings himself under divine judgment.
 
     So we could readily conclude that altering the Scripture, tampering the Scripture or just flatly not believing the Scripture is unthinkable for a faithful, wise believer.  It's unthinkable.  It is only reasonable that an ungodly and foolish unbeliever would attack the testimony of Scripture, and they do that all the time.  That's just a way of life with them.  For a believer to assault the veracity of Scripture is an unimaginable thing.  And yet there are many so-called Christians who do that.  They wouldn't deny the morality of the Ten Commandments in Exodus 20, they wouldn't deny the...they wouldn't deny the prophetic testimony of the coming suffering Messiah in Isaiah 53.  They wouldn't deny the virgin birth of Jesus Christ.  They wouldn't deny the gospel of grace and the need for the new birth.  They wouldn't deny other things in Scripture, but they do deny the clear teaching of Genesis chapter 1. 
 
     Why do they do that?  Why do so-called Christians bring themselves under such jeopardy, under the threat of the closing portion of Scripture which says their names could be taken out of the book of life and from the holy city and the plagues that are written in Scripture could be pronounced upon them as divine curses, why would people jeopardize themselves by tampering with Scripture in the light of such warnings?  Do they do it because they desire to please evolutionary scientists rather than holy God?  Do they love the...do they love the applause of men?  Do they love the reputation of academics more than God?  Do they seek the approval of departmental committees more than the holy God of the universe? 
 
     Fair questions, aren't they?  It's unthinkable to me that so-called Christians would deny Genesis on the basis of what?  This is the Word of God.
 
     But Satan has managed to be extremely successful in getting his evolutionary lie out.  So much so that most professing Christians by far, most professing Christians would deny the simple straightforward testimony of Genesis 1 that God created the entire universe as it is now in six 24-hour days, and that about six or seven thousand years ago.  Far and away most evangelical Christians, professing Christians would deny that.  Why would they deny the clear teaching of Scripture and tamper with the veracity and integrity of the Word of God and bring themselves into such jeopardy?  Satan is very clever, very subtle and has done an immensely successful job in selling the lie of evolution.
 
     Now no part of the evolutionary lie is more loudly proclaimed or more widely believed than the evolution of man.  In fact, when most people think about evolution, they think about man, they think about the picture in National Geographic of the ape-like creature on fours and all of a sudden the sequence of about ten different pictures as this four-legged creature all of a sudden becomes erect and takes the posture of a man, and they tell us that's the progression of human evolution. 
 
     We've all seen those imaginary human evolution lines where we go from ape to man in a series of drawings.  Every school child in public education is constantly taught that man has come like this from apes.  And supposedly, they say, there is fossil evidence for this...and I want to speak of this for a minute because if I don't somebody is going to ask me about it...but there supposedly are fossils.  Every once in a while somebody finds a bone somewhere in Africa or somewhere. And out of that bone they tell us they have identified the missing links in this sequence.  Supposedly there is fossil evidence.
 
     Well, the fact of the matter is there isn't. And most all of those fossils are hoaxes.  The presupposition is that evolution is true.  They're trying to make the bones fit the drawings in National Geographic.  In a book written by John Ankerberg and John Weldon called Darwin's Leap of Faith it says, "Despite widespread belief to the contrary, the fossil record of mankind is woefully inadequate to justify any belief in evolution.  Despite a hundred and thirty years of searching, there are no fossils that have convincingly related man to any other species.  Most have been conclusively proven false."  And as I said, many were outright hoaxes.
 
     Anthropologist Kathleen J. Reichs, editor of Hominoid Origins, cited, "Many authorities who disagree about the interpretations of these many alleged human ancestry discoveries, until accurate dating of the fossils is possible...she writes...reconstruction of hominoid relationships must remain tenuous at best."  Now there's an honest anthropologist, an honest evolutionist who says none of the fossils prove anything.
 
     Duane Gish(?) writes, "There is no evidence, either in the present world or in the world of the past, that man has arisen from some lower creature.  He stands alone as a separate and distinct created type, or basic morphological design, endowed with qualities that sets him far above all other living creatures."
 
     Now I don't want to get too technical, but just to kind of show you that you can do your homework on this and the Bible will stand, the evolution of man has sort of been divided into three sort of Latin parts...ramapithecus, australopithecus, and pithecanthropus.  And those names will be on the quiz, of course.  These have all been...these are the Latin terms given to these supposed fossils and they have been heralded as transitional forms between ape and man.  The average person on the street probably still believes these classifications represent genuine intermediate forms.  But they don't.  Even evolutionists are seriously divided and none of these classifications documents any human evolution at all.
 
     For example, ramapithecus, the first one, is just one of a long series of creatures that have been suggested at one time or another.  In other words, all different kind of bones have been thrown into that ramapithecus title.  They've all been suggested as missing links, but when more complete evidence has become available, we're all relegated to the ape family.
 
     And then there's australopithecus, they said that that was evidence of human evolution.  The view that these fossils represent genuine intermediates has been challenged by the famous British anatomist Solly Lord Zuckerman and Dr. Charles Oxnard, formerly director of The Graduate Studies, professor, by the way, of anatomy at the University of Southern California Medical School.  Zuckerman headed a research team for over fifteen years, studied the anatomical features of apes, man, monkeys and the australopithecan fossils and anatomical specimens from hundreds of apes, humans and monkeys, compared along with almost all available important fossil fragments of this particular category.  Most evolutionists seem to classify australopithecus as a genus of the hominoid or family of man, rather than apes.  But Zuckerman replies to all of them, "I myself remain totally unpersuaded.  Almost always when I've tried to check the anatomical claims on which the status of australopithecus is based, I have ended in failure."  And he concludes that this was nothing but an ape and as such in no way related at all to the ancestry of man.  An honest evolutionary look at these things debunks them.
 
     The work of Zuckerman and Oxnard literally has tended to be so conclusive that many other scientists have had to fall in line behind it.  And that's the way it goes with the final one that I mentioned to you, pithecanthropus, it's the same story.  Pithecanthropus you might know as the Java man or the Peking man, the creation of some kind of transitional form out of some minute skeletal fragment.  They now believe was never a man at all, but some creatures related to the gibbons.  The gibbons not being a family down the street, but an ape, as you know.  Cro-magnon man, Neanderthal man they now know were nothing more than just human skeletons.
 
     There's a fascinating book on this.  If you really want to read...I don't want to talk anymore about it, but there's a fascinating book called Bones of Contention, it's a good title.  It's a creationist's assessment of human fossils by a very outstanding creationist scientist by the name of Marvin Lubenow, it's published by Baker in 1992, Bones of Contention if you want more study, you will find the debunking of all of these supposed transitional fossil forms.
 
     Now here's the simple understanding.  Because man did not evolve, it's impossible to prove he did.  Okay?  Can you handle that one?  They're having a hard time proving man evolved because he didn't.  And so they're in hopeless confusion because they're trying to make this whole deal fit the drawings in National Geographic and it doesn't work.  And I'm going to give you some quotes from some leading evolutionists.
 
     Robert Martin writes, "So one is forced to conclude there is no clear-cut scientific picture of human evolution, period."
 
     Leakey is a very famous name in human evolution, a noted paleoanthropologist says, "It may never be possible to say exactly what evolved into what."  That's pretty comprehensive.  Spend your whole life to come to that conclusion.
 
     Another Leaky, Richard Leaky, in an interview concerning the study of early man said, and I quote, "I think we're still doing a great deal of guessing."
 
     David Pilbeam commented, "There is no clear-cut and inexorable pathway from ape to human being."  As to whether man evolved from chimps, orangutans or gibbons, he said, quote, "The fossil record has been elastic enough, the expectations sufficiently robust to accommodate almost any story."  And in a further telling statement he says, quote, "Perhaps generations of students of human evolution, including myself, have been flailing about in the dark, our data basis too sparse, too slippery for it to be able to mold our theories.  Rather the theories are more statements about us and our ideologies than about the past," end quote.
 
     And another Leaky, Mary Leaky, well-known anthropologist, commenting as to the effort that she had made all her life long to construct an evolutionary family tree, she says, quote, "I do not believe it is possible to fit the known hominoid fossils into a reliable pattern," end quote.  Of course it's not possible cause it's not the way it happened...not at all the way it happened.
 
     In fact, you know, they shoot themselves in the foot. The oldest human fossil is identified as KP271, they believe that's the oldest human fossil...evolutionary anthropologists have found.  They dated at 4.5 million years ago.  Now you and I know that the whole thing was done about six or seven thousand years ago, but they've got their own uniformitarian dating systems, evolutionary dating systems that are invented to accommodate their theory of evolution which they believe can only happen if you have enough time.  And so they stretch everything out millions of years.  The interesting thing about it is they say the oldest human fossil is dated 4.5 million years ago.  And furthermore it seems that this human fossil appears on the scene suddenly without any evolutionary ancestors.  And if indeed this is human, the theory of human evolution is totally discredited...totally discredited because if you have humans 4.5 million years ago, then evolution can't happen because that's when they also date other animals.  In fact other animals that they thought were in the evolutionary scheme are dated after that.  They have a real problem.
 
     And furthermore, the bones that are 4.5 million years old are identical to humans today.  No evolution in 4.5 million years.  I mean the whole thing is just a figment of their imagination because they do not like to retain God in their knowledge, Romans 1.  And they have exchanged the truth of God revealed in Scripture for the lie.  Men don't want God and they don't want the Bible, right?  They don't want God crowding their lives, they don't want the Bible establishing moral standards for them.  Scientists and those who follow their deception and hoaxes about evolution are like the Jews of Jesus' day who said, "We will not have this man to...what?...to reign over us.  We will not come under the sovereignty of God."  And so they fit into the classification of Psalm 14:1 and Psalm 53:1, "The fool has said in his heart there is no God."
 
     I understand the ungodly believing that.  I understand the ungodly not wanting God crowding their lives.  I understand those who love sin and want to commit sin, not wanting a moral judge looking over their shoulder and holding them accountable and sentence...sentencing them to eternal hell, I understand their desire to get rid of God.  I understand why they don't want to accept the first chapter of the Bible, why they don't want to accept a clear record of Genesis.  But I do not understand the ridiculous, intolerable affection for this deception which belongs to professing Christians.  I cannot understand that.  Even the prophet Malachi, Malachi 2:10, put it simply, "Has not one God created us?"  We're all the product of God's creation.  "All things are made by Him and for Him and without Him was not anything made that was made."
 
     The truth about the origin of man is that he was created as he now is.  Adam wasn't any different than you.  In fact, if anything you're not what he was.  You're inferior.  And I'm sure that's true not because of you personally, but because of sin.
 
     Now we find out about the creation of man on day six.  Let's look at the text of Genesis chapter 1 verse 24.  And the pattern of creation is the same as it was on the other days. 
 
     "Then God said, 'Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind,' and it was so.  And God made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind.  And God saw that it was good.  Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.'  And God created man in His own image, in the image of God He created him, male and female, He created them.  And God blessed them and God said to them, 'Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it and rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.'  Then God said, 'Behold, I've given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth, and every tree which has fruit yielding seed, it shall be food for you, and to every beast of the earth, and to every bird of the sky, and to everything that moves on the earth which has life.  I have given every green plant for food,' and it was so.  And God saw all that He had made and behold it was very good.  And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day."
 
     Now we've already been through the first five days of creation.  The first five days really were outfitting the house in which man would live.  Man is king of the earth.  Man is the pinnacle of God's creation, created in God's image.  And all the rest of the creation simply provided his house, preparation for man's arrival on the scene.
 
     And even on day six, as I just read, there was a finishing touch in creation. On day five, you remember, God had created all the animals in the sea and all of the birds in the sky, and so at the beginning of day six it was necessary to create the earth creatures who are identified in verse 24 and 25 in three categories; cattle, creeping things and beasts of the earth.
 
     That was the final touch as God was preparing the house that man would live in.  Man was the object.  Man was the main issue here.  It was the creation of man with his redemptive purpose that God really had in mind.  Everything else in the universe will perish.  Everything else in the universe will go out of existence.  The stars will fall, according to the book of Revelation, the sun will go out, the moon will come to an end.  The whole universe will roll up like a scroll.  The whole creation will melt with fervent heat.  It will be dissolved in a reverse.  It will be uncreated.  All of the atomic energy it took to put it into place will spin in reverse, like running the film backward and it will be uncreated and all of it will go out of existence.  Everything that lives on this earth, every green thing, every plant, every tree, every occupant of the sea, every occupant of the sky and every land animal, every creature anywhere in the universe will die at the end of its life and go back to dust and go out of existence.  But not man.  Man is the main character and the whole unfolding of creation is to create a theater in which the great redemptive saga can be played out as God seeks a bride for His Son, as God seeks to demonstrate His grace and mercy and compassion and saving power to a universe of angels as well as men.
 
     So the creation of man is the main issue.  And we find the text of Scripture spending more time on the creation of man than any other element of the creation.  And also, all of chapter 2 expands that creation of man because it is so critical.
 
     Now let me give you a little bit of a parallel.  The sixth day, the creation of animals and man, corresponds to the third day.  On the third day the earth was created.  On the sixth, the living creatures on the earth were made.  On the third day immediately after the organization of inanimate nature had been completed, the plants whose dominion extends throughout the earth were brought into being, so too on the sixth day when vegetation and animal life had been fully established, man who bears the rule over created life on the earth was formed.  So this corresponds to the sixth day.  And we've seen those parallels all the way through.  Day one corresponds to day four, day two corresponds to day five, and day three corresponds to day six.
 
     Now the pattern is the same.  Verse 24, "Then God said," verse 25, "and God made."  Those are really parallels. God creates literally by speaking things into existence.  In Hebrew fashion, typical Hebrew fashion, this work of creation is repeated in two different ways to seal the unmistakable clarity of the record.  Then God said...is a parallel statement; then God made...which reinforces what then God said accomplished.  And, in general, God said, "Let the earth bring forth living creatures...living creatures."  These are land animals.  The sea animals already created on day five, the air animals, the birds and those that fly created on day five.  Only the land animals remained.
 
     By the way, they didn't evolve. They were created instantaneously.  Created living creatures and He refers to the land animals in three categories.  I think they're quite fascinating, by the way.  And these would not agree with contemporary taxonomy, I guess you could call it, temporary categorization of animals such as amphibians and reptiles and all of that, mammals and so forth and so on.  The Bible just gives you three simple categories; cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth.
 
     Cattle likely, and I think almost all Hebrew scholars agree on this, is a word that speaks of animals which can be tamed and domesticated for man's use.  We think immediately when we think of domesticated we think of a dog, but that's not what the Bible would have in mind since the dog really has no use unless you've trained it to get the paper.  Apart from that it has no use.  It can't pull a plow and I suppose a dog could herd sheep if it's appropriately trained, and maybe there is a use there and that would fit into that category.  But generally these would be the kind of animals, for example, that would provide milk...such as a goat and a cow and an animal that could be ridden such as a beast of burden and things like that.  Animals that can be tamed and domesticated and used by man.



     And then second category is creeping things.  And, of course, immediately comes to mind snakes and lizards and things like that, but it probably stretches beyond that.  Anything that creeps or crawls on the ground, that would include a whole world of insects, as well as...and most Hebrew scholars would say also it refers to small animals with short legs who appear to just be scurrying across, like the rabbits that come all the time into our yard and eat the flowers.  Short legged, and one Hebrew writer says, "Animals with short legs whose bellies are not far from the ground."  Insects, rodents, as well as snakes and amphibians, etc., etc., such animals are referred to, by the way, in Leviticus chapter 11 verse 29, "These are to you the unclean among the swarming things which swarm on the earth, the mole, the mouse, the great lizard, the gecko which is a kind of lizard, the crocodile, the lizard, the sand reptile and the chameleon.  So there you have a combination of those things, the mole, the mouse, along with the reptiles.  And that's probably a pretty general category for creeping things.
 
     And then the third category, the beasts of the earth, would be four-legged animals of some size which are generally not tamed.  You know, we think immediately of lions and giraffe and elephants and rhinos and hippos and tigers and animals like that that are not domesticated for any purposes of man, generally speaking, although it is possible, I suppose, at least to use the Indian elephant, but certainly not the African elephant for some purposes...I myself having ridden an Indian elephant, they can be tamed.  But in general, this would be the large mammals that roam the earth in an untamed or wild form.
 
     And so there you have it.  I mean, there's really nothing more to say.  There are domestic animals and there are non-domestic animals. There are those that are above ground and there are those that are creeping and crawling around on the ground.  That's the categories.
 
     Now this general classification, as I say, has really no relationship to the arbitrary system of manmade taxonomy, it's just a simple, natural system.  Now I want to point out the fact that all three were simultaneously made because look at verse 24, "Cattle, creeping things, beasts of the earth..."  And somebody might say, "Oh, the cattle came first and out of them evolved the creeping things and out of the them evolved the beasts of the earth."  That's a problem because you have a repeat of the very same thing in verse 25, only it's in reverse order.  The beasts of the earth come first, the cattle come second and the creeping things come third.  You see, the mixing of the order is a very good way to indicate to us that these were created simultaneously, they were progressing out of each other.  All simultaneously by the power of God, created.  No evolution, no struggle for existence, no survival of the fittest, no mutations at all, God just created all these animals.
 
     And isn't it astounding and amazing the variety of it all?  I mean, just the variety of a fish in the sea and animals including mammals that swim the seas is staggering and they're even discovering more.  And there are thousands of categories of animals which are extinct already.  The birds that fly in the sky, some people are in to ornithology and they poke around with their little binoculars discovering all the wonders of birds in the sky.  And then you see the animals and the insects and all the reptiles and all the things that crawl all over the earth and it's just mind-boggling that God has such a vast capability intellectually to conceive of and design all these creatures.  But He did.
 
     And verse 24, "Let the earth bring forth...let the earth bring forth."  Now why did He say that?  Why did He say let the earth bring forth?  Well, I think it's just another way of saying let them appear on the earth, but it also is true, and I need to point this out to you, that the bodies of animals are composed of the same elements as the earth.  That's right.  The bodies of animals are composed of the same chemical elements as the earth. And they come out of the earth to be shaped and formed and when they die they go back to the earth, as it were, because they're made of the same elements.  In fact, that is true of man even.  Look at chapter 2 verse 7, "The Lord God formed man of dust from the ground."  He formed man of dust from the ground, and so, with the same components that made the earth, God made the animals...same chemical material.
 
     Now when He brought them forth, they're called "living creatures."  And I just remind you that that's a very important concept.  Plants are never called "living creatures."  Trees are never called "living creatures."  You have the vegetation created back in verse 11 and 12, it is called vegetation there, some translate it herbs, but the best translation is vegetation, but they're never called living creatures.  When you come down to verse 20, the first time you have living creatures is when the creatures of the sea are created, and the creatures of the air, the birds and the fish and others that are in the sea...they're called living creatures.
 
     And what did I tell you was the characteristic of living creatures?  They move.  Plants don't.  They move and they have consciousness.  They move and they have consciousness, different from plants.  You can't train a plant because a plant in the sense that you can train it to do anything.  You can make it grow toward the sun, but that's a matter of its natural tendency to draw its life from the light.  But you cannot train a plant because a plant has no consciousness.  Living creatures have consciousness and mobility, different from plants.  Living creatures have consciousness but not necessarily self-consciousness.  They're conscious of their environment so they can react to it.  A dog can get out of the way of a car.  A dog can learn to obey a command.  Even Shamoo can obey a command and dive out of the water and touch its nose on a ball 20 feet in the air.  And they can train them to do that because they are conscious of their environment and they attach that to getting food.  But that doesn't mean they're self-conscious.  They can react to their environment but they don't know they are.  Self-consciousness means you know who you are and you know you're reacting to your environment.  They have consciousness without self-consciousness. And when they die, they just go back to dust.  They're in the world simply as part of the decor as God displays His wonder to the king of the earth, His creation, man who was made in His own image.
 
     Now notice again in verses 24 and 25, it repeats the phrase "after their kind" a couple of times in verse 24, and a couple of times again, three times actually, in verse 25.  That is becoming very familiar to us.  We have a...we have it ten times in Genesis 1...after their kind...after their kind...after their kind.  Listen, let me say it as simply as I can, this indicates limitation of variation.  This indicates limitation of variation.  You don't want to get technical and say it means species, or genus, or family, or phila, or whatever the scientific terms of categorization might be.  But what we will say is it means there is a limitation on variation.  In each case there is a genetic code.  In each case there is a DNA, a chromosomal strip that is coded in every cell of every living thing that determines that living thing's nature.  And it will be true to its nature.  It can be varied within that DNA, but it cannot become something other than it is.  That is controlled, as we've learned many timed, by the DNA and that's implied by the concept of kind...of kind.
 
     By the way, just as a footnote.  The formation of plants occurred before the creation of any animal life, before the fish and before the birds.  And that contradicts flatly the traditional evolutionary system which says that all animal life started in the sea and crawled out of the sea at some point over hundreds of millions of years, and it crawled out of the sea and coincidentally once it got on land, plants evolved.  But what you see in Genesis is plants being created first, vegetation being created first, and then was the creation of the sea creatures, the air creatures and the land creatures.
 
     So the best we can say about kind is that it possesses limitation of variation.  God created these creatures the way they are. Dogs were dogs, horses were horses, dolphins are dolphins, barracuda are barracuda, ants are ants although there are many different kinds, spiders are spiders, snakes are snakes, frogs are frogs although there are variations, there are limitations on that variation.  One doesn't evolve into the other.  And that's repeated ten times in Genesis chapter 1 as if God knew somebody would come along and try to tell a lie about one kind becoming another kind and no limitation on variation existing.
 
     It says at the end of verse 24, "And it was so."  Now we've heard that before.  When God did it, it was so. That's an important little phrase, it's not just thrown in there to fill space.  It occurred back in verse 9, it was so.  It occurred back in verse 11, it was so.  Back in verse 15, it was so.  And here in verse 24, it was so.  It means it was fixed, it was firm, it was permanent and that's the way it stayed.  When in the very beginning God said "Let there be light," it doesn't say "and it was so," because that light when it was originally created was just light and it wasn't yet attached to the stellar bodies, the luminaries, the moon, the sun and the stars.  When God first created the earth it was just a mass of elements completely engulfed in water.  God doesn't say "it was so" because that wasn't its permanent shape.  But in verse 9 when God began to separate the waters above and the waters below and then the dry land appeared and the earth took its shape with land and water, that was the way it would permanently be...the statement is "it was so."  And so it was in verse 11 when vegetation was created on the earth, that was to be permanent and fixed and it still exists today.  In verse 15 the moon, the sun, the stars were placed in the sky and it was so, it was fixed in that way.  And here in verse 24 the animals were created and they're still that way...they're still that way.  It was so, fixed, firm, permanent and has remained that way even till today.  And they remain within the framework of their kind, their variation being restricted.  There are some variations, there is some...some change, we know that.  Genetics can do that, special breeding, but they still remain essentially the same kind of creature.
 
     Finally the creation of these land creatures gets a comment from God at the end of verse 25.  Basically God saw that it was good.  God has been saying this, by the way, all along.  Verse 4 tells us that God saw the light was good.  In verse 10 God saw that the dry land and the sea was good.  Verse 12, the plants were good.  Verse 18 the stellar bodies, that was good too.  Verse 21, the creatures of the sea and the air, that was good.  Verse 25 the land animals, that was good.  And finally verse 31, after He made man, it was very good.  Everything God made was good.
 
     Now listen to this.  No deformities, no deformities, no mutations, no inferiorities, no natural selection, the survival of the fittest, because there were no unfit animals, it was all good.  There was no imperfection.  There was no natural selection.  There was no inferiority at all.  It was very good.  And we'll say more about what very good means when we get to verse 31.  At this point everything was good...it was good.  There wasn't even death in the world.  There wasn't even death in the world.  Death wouldn't come until man sinned in chapter 3.  At this point the earth was ready for man...man who was to be the king of the earth and have dominion over it.
 
     By the way, the Lord must have created all the animals in just the first part of day six because the rest of the day was for creating man.  And it was somewhat involved.  It doesn't give all the involvement here in this chapter, but in chapter 2 it unfolds it and we'll look at that later on. 
 
     But let's look at verses 26 and 27, at least look at it very briefly.  We come to the epitome of God's creation, "Then God said, 'Let us make man in our image, according to our likeness.  Let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every c