Genesis 1:20-23
Then God said, “Let the waters abound with an abundance of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth across the face of the firmament of the heavens.” So God created great sea creatures and every living thing that moves, with which the waters abounded, according to their kind, and every winged bird according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
As with the prior days, we will start with our list:
- God commands the waters to abound with living creatures
- God commands that birds should fly above the earth in the heavens
- God creates the great sea monster
- God blesses them to be fruitful and multiply and to fill the earth
Just When You Thought It Was Safe To Go Back In the Water
The story of Day 5 is one of the creation of fish, birds and sea monsters, or at least that is how it appears at first glance. Much like in Day 4, the scriptures never actually provide specific names. Instead, care is taken to describe the behavior of the living creatures. We may believe that God created fish on the 5th day, but in actuality he created sherets, which is Hebrew for swarming creatures. Likewise, though the english translations say birds, the Hebrew word is oph which means flying creatures. Finally, the word great sea creatures comes from the Hebrew word tannin, which means sea monster, serpent, or dragon. So instead of fish we have swarming creatures, instead of birds we have flying creatures and instead of whales, we have dragons.
The only symbols we can start with are sea and heaven. Now we know from Day 3 that the sea symbolizes the Gentile nations, or all of us who are non-Jews. We may not fully understand what is meant by swarming creatures at this point, but one thing we can be sure of is that God is bringing life to the seas and blessing them. Since Millennial Day 5 covers 1 to 1000 AD we need to look for something that corresponds to the Gentiles in God’s plan.
In fact, something significant happened during Jesus’ ministry which would foreshadow his good news going out to the Gentiles. In Matthew 13:1-2 we read on “that day Jesus went out of the house and was sitting by the sea. And large crowds gathered to Him, so He got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd was standing on the beach.”
The reason this verse is so important is because Jesus left “the house” and was sitting “by the sea” when “large crowds gathered to Him.” God is the creator of the universe, and a creator is a type of authorship. Authors use symbols in their stories, the fabric of the universe are the pages God works with, making everything in it the symbols of his story. So the sea does very much symbolize the Gentiles that the Gospel of Jesus Christ would one day reach. The house he left represents the House of Israel that the Gospel departed from, and the large crowds gathering is a picture of swarming, living souls.
But why did Jesus leave the House of Israel in the first place?
By connecting Matthew chapters 12-13 with Mark 3 we know that something significant happened to Jesus on this day prior to him going out by the sea. First, in Matthew 12:1-7, the religious leaders challenged Jesus’ righteous leadership because his followers were picking heads of grain during the Sabbath; an act of work that was considered unlawful on the Sabbath. Then in Matthew 12:8-21 they challenged his grace and they “conspired against Him, as to how they might destroy him,” because he showed grace to a man by healing his withered hand on the Sabbath; another act they considered unlawful work on the Sabbath. Finally, in Matthew 12:22-29 the religious leaders attributed Jesus’ authority as coming from, “Beelzebul the ruler of the demons.”
The Jewish religious leaders rejected Jesus three times by challenging his righteousness, his grace and his authority. As a result, we read in the first two verses of Matthew 13 that on that same day, Jesus 1) went out of the house and 2) was sitting by the sea.
One Fish, Two Fish
Now we know that fish do swarm in the seas. We also know that when Jesus called his disciples, he told them in Matthew 4:19, “Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of men.” In Luke 5:4, when Jesus first calls Simon, who will be Peter, to be his disciple, he tells Simon to, “Put out into the deep water and let down your nets for a catch.” Then in verse 10 he tells Simon, after they have caught a boatload of fish, “from now on you will be catching men.”
Jesus took great care to correlate spreading the Gospel with catching fish; and we know that in order for Simon to catch so many fish that it required another boat to haul them in, these fish would have had to swarm into his nets. We have all the same symbols, but this event is not what God is prophesying about in Genesis 1. In fact, these stories in the New Testament are echoes repeating what God described in Genesis 1.
As a result of these New Testament stories, the fish has often been associated with Christians and Christianity. There are many different reasons given as to why Christians adopted the fish. Even today you can find the double-arc fish bumper sticker on cars across America as if the owner is saying I am one of the fish. But the Bible makes no claim that Christians are the fish, fisherman, yes, but not fish.
Instead, the Bible appears to portray unbelievers as fish to be caught. We all know that a fish out of water eventually dies, so the act of catching fish in nets and pulling them out of the sea is an act that brings death upon fish. A more appropriate symbol for spirit-filled believers is the one spoken about by Jesus on at least two occasions.
New Creation
Interestingly enough, Jesus visited his cousin John prior to beginning his ministry. At the time, John the Baptist was performing baptisms, as his name implies. Jesus came to John, in Matthew 3:16, to be baptized and “after being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on him.”
Well isn’t that interesting. The moment that Jesus is drawn out of the waters, much like a fish caught and drawn out of water: 1) the heavens opened and 2) the Spirit of God came in the form of a dove and landed upon him. Suddenly we have the other symbols we were lacking. We have an open heaven, and flying creatures tied directly to the act of baptism. Baptism involves placing men who were dead in their sins under the water, which symbolized their dead state, much like the waters of the deep in Genesis 1 on Day 1, and then bringing them up out of the water by those charged to be “fishers of men.” Then to top it off, we have an open heaven and a flying creature connecting with the man who had just been brought up out of the waters like a caught fish. It is also interesting, that before God brought life to the land in Genesis 1, He first drew the land out of the waters of the deep described on Day 1. Only after that, did life spring up on the earth.
Here’s the thing, Jesus did not require baptism for himself, but was baptized to connect all these details of Genesis Day 5 together for us to fully understand. However, we cannot understand the message until we hear what both the Bible and Jesus have to say about birds.
In Matthew 6:26, Jesus says, “Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?”
Isaiah claims in 40:31 “but they who wait for the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings like eagles; they shall run and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.”
Jesus says in Matthew 10:20 “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? And not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.”
In Psalms 55:6 the psalmist hopes, “oh, that I had wings like a dove! I would fly away and be at rest.”
These pictures paint a life of freedom, peace and rest. These birds do not worry; they are taken care of by their heavenly Father. Unlike fish, that swarm in fear of the dangers lying in the waters of the deep, birds have wings with which to fly away and be at rest–not one of them will fall to the ground apart from your Father.
Decoding Day 5
It was the Spirit of God that came to Jesus in the form of a dove. Likewise, on the day of Pentecost, the Holy Spirit came to the disciples in the upper room after Jesus’ resurrection. What the picture of Jesus’ baptism says and what Day 5 is speaking of is this:
Then God said, “Let the gentile nations(waters) swarm(abound) with swarms(abundance) of living souls(creatures), and let spirit-filled believers(birds) fly above the people of the covenant law(earth) across the face of the open(firmament of the) heavens.” So God created the great dragon(sea creatures) and every living soul(living thing) that swarms(moves), with which the gentile nations(waters) swarmed(abounded), according to their kind, and every enabled(winged) spirit-filled believer(bird) according to its kind. And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the gentile nations of the world(waters in the seas), and let the spirit-filled believers(birds) multiply on the earth.” So the evening and the morning were the fifth day.
Take careful note that this is the first time God has spoken a blessing over anything in his creation since he started his work. That these symbols in Genesis 1 could speak of the transformation that Paul describes in 2 Corinthians 5:17 “if anyone is in Christ, he is a new creature; the old things passed away; behold, new things have come,” is no coincidence. When the Bible interprets the Bible, the Gospel pops out of every passage, nothing is left to chance. Since the beginning of Creation, God had a plan in place for the redemption of man. What this should tell us is not that God arranged for man to fall, but that God knew man’s adversary and from the very beginning had a redemption plan in place to thwart Satan. That no matter what the Devil accomplished in the Garden, or thereafter, his efforts would only work together for good towards blessing man. To go from being a fish that swarms with other scared and anxious fish over terrors that wait in the waters of the deep, pulled out by fisherman in an act that would otherwise kill natural fish, to then be transformed into a flying creature that can fly away and rest is a message of good news for us. It is the message of the Gospel of Jesus Christ.
But do not take my word for it. Let history be your judge. Recall that part regarding those fish and birds being fruitful and multiplying? It should come as no surprise, then, that by the year 300 AD Christianity had exploded from 1000 followers in Jerusalem to between 5-8 million followers and had become the dominant religion of the Roman Empire. From there it went throughout the world to every nation and as of 2010 the number of Christians in the world today is estimated at around 2.2 billion. So the question for the skeptic is, how did Moses know, or how did Jesus anticipate that when Moses wrote Genesis 1:22 where God told the living souls(Hebrew word nephesh) of the waters and the flying creatures of the heavens to “be fruitful and multiply” that the receivers of Jesus’ Gospel would, in fact, “bear fruit” and “multiply” and “fill” the nations throughout the Gentile world?
Without divine knowledge there is no way the man leading the Israelites out of Egypt could have foreseen the explosion of Christianity. He had enough problems just with leading his people through the wilderness. Nor was it possible for Jesus, as simply a man preoccupied with upsetting the religious status quo of his day, to take advantage of a thousand-four-hundred year old prophecy he just happened to fall within, nor have the foresight that his efforts would produce a great following after his death unless he truly was the beloved Son of God.
But even if you can conceive of some means by which Christianity could have concocted this arrangement over thousands of years, we are not done; for on Day 6 God shows us an image of ourselves through the crosshairs of Genesis 1 Day 6 almost 4000 years before our time.