The Image of God: According to their Kinds -- By: Douglas P. Baker

Journal: Reformation and Revival
Volume: RAR 12:2 (Spring 2003)
Article: The Image of God: According to their Kinds
Author: Douglas P. Baker


The Image of God: According to their Kinds

Douglas P. Baker

When God created the plants, animals, fish, and birds we are told that he created them each “according to their kinds” (Genesis 1:11–12, 21, 24–25). This phrase is repeated nine times in the first few paragraphs of the creation account with little apparent significance until we find that there is a creature which is created not according to its own kind, but after another kind. Before we consider this other creature, let’s think about what being created “according to their kinds” signifies about these first creatures.

A creationist will be quick to let us know that if the animals were created “according to their kinds,” then they were not evolved from other animals, and this is quite correct. If a dog was created “according to its kind,” then it was not created as an amoeba which evolved. But this is only one conclusion drawn from a fuller concept in these words.

The idea of being created after their kinds implies that the type or design of each species created had existed previously in the mind of God. We cannot draw the timeline only in the direction of the future, from creation onward, simply as an antidote to evolutionary theory. God had delineated and distinguished each of the species beforehand, and that is why there was a “kind” according to which each species could be created.

Let us take a simple example of what we mean here. Say that a man has a tulip farm and one of his workers is going to bag the bulbs for sale. The owner tells the worker, “Label the packages according to their prices.” Now if the owner had never set criteria for pricing the bulbs and there was no plan for how to price them, then the worker would be at a loss as to how to proceed. He could not label them according to their prices if there were no preordained prices. In the same way, God could not make the animals and plants “according to their kinds” if there were no preordained kinds.

At creation he was calling forth the manifestations of the kinds which he had earlier designed. In this sense the creation was similar to what God later told Moses, “See that you make them after the pattern for them, which is being shown you on the mountain” (Exodus 25:40). The pattern preceded its manifestation.

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