Day 6 starts in Genesis 1:24, 25. “And God said, Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind, livestock, creeping things and wild animals, all after their kinds. And it was so. So God made the wild animals of the earth after their kind, and the livestock after their kind, and everything that crawls along the ground after their kind. And God saw that it suited His purpose.”
The law of first mention or precedence comes into play here. God “made” (asah) the animals, presumably because He “created” (bara) animal life in verse 21. The law of first mention says basically that once something is mentioned or explained in the Scriptures it may or may not be repeated. In this case, God created animal life on the previous day, and then continued to make different forms of that life on the next day. We’ll see this principle again in the creation of a different kind of life when the man and woman are created.
There are three general categories of living creatures that live on land described here. The first is domestic animals (cattle, sheep, etc.) that have to be kept or cared for. The second is reptiles that are cold-blooded (lizards, turtles, snakes). And the third category would be the wild animals, generally the untamed or undomesticated animals. The genetic principle of “after their kind” (miyn) is emphasized again.
Then we come to Genesis 1:26-27. “God said, Let us make mankind in Our image, after Our likeness, and let them exercise dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the livestock, over all the earth and over everything that crawls along the ground. So God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him; male and female He created them.” (Greater detail of the creation of the man and the woman is given in chapter 2 and we will look at that later.)
As in previous verses, God states His intention (to make humankind) in verse 26, and then tells us how He did it in verse 27 (through an act of creation). There are two words in verse 26 that we need to look at. The first is “image” translated from tselem, which means, shadow image or essence (by essence I mean the basic nature or quality of a thing). The best way to describe this is that God’s intent was to make the man in such a way that he was a representation or resemblance of Himself, but not an exact duplicate. An image is never the same as the original. We resemble God in our basic nature. Tselem describes a real part of us that makes us different from all the other forms of life that had been created up to this point – we have a living (eternal) soul.
Therefore, tselem refers to the immaterial part of us that makes us different from all other forms of life – the part of us that is fashioned in the image of God. The human soul is like God in function, but not exactly like Him in this one respect – God has always existed in the eternal past (He had no beginning), man’s soul has a beginning (when it was created), but will always exist in the eternal future.
The function of man’s soul involves many things (we can look at these in a future lesson), basically they are: self-consciousness, thoughts, emotions, memory, volition (free will), norms and standards, viewpoint, frame of reference, conscience, intelligence, vocabulary, sense of humor and the ability to reason. It is the soul that gives mankind the ability to recognize the existence of God. And it is the eternal soul of mankind that is always emphasized when God’s plan of redemption is in view. God created mankind to have a relationship with Him and it is His desire that the relationship be eternal.
The second word in verse 26 is “likeness” from demuth, which means model or pattern. God Himself is the model or pattern that was followed in the creation of mankind. When applied to what we know God actually did in the creation of the man and the woman, demuth could refer to both the immaterial and the material part of mankind. As to the immaterial part, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit all possess the same essence (in character and attributes, they are all three equally God); but they are all three separate and distinctly different individuals.
In the same way, every member of the human race is fashioned with the same essence of soul, but all have distinctly different personalities. And, when you look at the material, physical body of the human race, it has the same general form and characteristics of God’s spirit body (see the article “The Shape of God” that examines several passages of Scripture describing His appearance).
The word “man” in verses 26 and 27 is adam and is a general term for mankind, both the man and the woman. In verse 27 you see “So God created man in His image, in the image of God created He them, both the male and the female.” This verse refers only to the creation of the eternal souls of mankind created in the shadow image of God. He also then “formed” and “made” the physical bodies of the man and woman (the explanation of how He did this is given later in chapter 2 and will be discussed in the next lesson).
There are then 5 commands given to mankind in verse 28: 1) “be fruitful” is para, meaning, “to bear”, a command to have children; 2) “multiply” is ruwr, a word that means, “to emit fluids”, a command to enjoy sex in the proper context (one man and one woman, as I will explain in the next lesson); 3) “replenish is male, meaning, to fill what is empty, this is a command to populate the earth; 4) “subdue” is dhavar, “to take control”, literally, “to use the earth’s resources” that God has given us (environmentalists don’t understand that God created a world that mankind cannot destroy with resources that cannot be depleted until His plan for the ages has run its course – He is in control, not us); and 5) “have dominion” is radah, and means, “to possess or rule over”, a word used to describe man’s relationship with all other forms of life.
God then explains to the man and woman in verses 29 and 30 that everything they see around them is for food, surveys the situation in verse 31 and concludes that it suites His purpose and the 6 days of restoration are complete.
And in Genesis 2:1-3 we see that He “rested from all His work that God created and made”, at which I can’t resist quoting a parallel verse from the New Testament (this is my corrected paraphrase). “And we who have trusted in God’s promises do enter into that rest (a relationship with Him that is void of religious striving), in accordance with what He has said, that those who did not trust Him would not enter when He said, As I swore in My wrath, they shall not enter My rest (Psalms 95:11); and this He said even though His works (everything He was going to do to make it possible for man to have a relationship with Him) had been completed and were waiting for all who would trust in Him from the overthrow of the previous social order.” (Hebrews 4:3)
And just to be perfectly clear concerning this verse, the phrase “from the foundation of the world” from in the KJV is another unfortunate and misleading translation found in several places in the New Testament. “Foundation” is from katabole, to cast down or overthrow; and “world” is kosmos, order, here a reference to a social order. Katabole is not the word used to describe the founding of a thing; then the word would be themelios (compare Romans 15:20). Here in Hebrews 4:3 we see God resting from all His preparations for those who would trust in Him from the time of the overthrow of Lucifer’s pre-Adamite world as previously explained. Jesus used the same words in Matthew 13:35 in reference to certain aspects of the Gospel message (parables) that were to be taught by Him when He came. Again, the Scriptures are consistent and accurate.