Our family has a pet bird.
His name is Dude (see his picture at the right). He’s a twenty-year-old cockatiel. For a cockatiel, he’s very old.
Bird owners are like cat owners: a bit off sometimes. We tolerate getting nipped and scratched by our pets—something dog owners won’t tolerate, and fish owners don’t even have to worry about.
Birds are so different from us. They use their beaks like a combination of a hand, knife, and hammer because they don’t have hands. They stand on their feet just about 100% of the time.
Have you ever stopped and wondered why the Lord created birds? We’ve seen the first four days of God’s creation. We continue on Day Five from Genesis 1:20-23.
And God said, “Let the water teem with living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the vault of the sky.” So God created the great creatures of the sea and every living thing with which the water teems and that moves about in it, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number and fill the water in the seas, and let the birds increase on the earth.” And there was evening, and there was morning—the fifth day.
Genesis 1:20-23 New International Version
We find something that wasn’t present before in creation: living creatures. While we consider plants “alive,” we do not consider them alive in the sense of animals. Here, we see the Lord creating living creatures.
The living creatures are something special at this point in creation. For the water, the Lord created fish and animals living in the water. For the air, the Lord created birds.
Genesis 1 wasn’t written to combat modern humanistic evolution. Yet, there is a key phrase here that does combat modern humanistic evolution. It’s in the Lord’s creation of animals in the water and sky according to their kind(s) (verse 21).
Evolution teaches us that one kind of creature (fish, for example) evolved into another kind of creature (frog, for example). When the environment caused hardship, evolution created a divide between creatures that eventually produced all the biodiversity we see today. But for that biodiversity to have occurred, one kind was to have become another kind. Scripture tells us each kind of animal was created at once in its current form.
For example, we’ve always had birds. There is a lot of diversity in birds, but they’re still birds. Short beaks, long beaks, tall, short, colorful, muted, migratory—but they’re all still birds. This is precisely what Genesis 1:20-23 is telling us.
Regarding Genesis 1 and 2, we have two choices: accept what Scripture is teaching us or bend it to conform to whatever modern science says today, knowing we’ll change it tomorrow. Scripture was written as the Lord inspired it, and it doesn’t change. Evolutionary belief is rewritten and rewritten and means something today it didn’t mean 100 years ago.
Moreover, we see the blessing and command to “be fruitful and increase” (verse 22). This isn’t a statement implying they are a problem for us. Soon, we’ll see humanity’s function towards these creatures. What the text is saying is these animals were blessed with the ability to reproduce and fill all the Earth.
When we see the overwhelming variety in the oceans and skies, we see how the Lord’s creation obeyed Him.
Watch a documentary about the animals in the oceans. The variety in color, shape, size, and function declares the endless creativity of our Lord.
When we see the overwhelming variety of birds, we realize how much our Lord loves colors and blessed us with the ability to see them. It declares something about Him.
Watch some birds in the sky today and marvel at our Lord’s creation from the fifth day.
Life Meets Theology 