vs. 24 God said, ":Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds: ccattle, creeping things, and wild animals each to its own kind. It was so.
vs. 25 God made the wild animals according to their kinds, and all the creatures that creep along the
grounds according to its own kinds. It was so.
vs. 26 Then God said, "Let us make humankind in our image, after our likeness, so they may rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over all the
creatures that move on the ground.
vs. 27 God created humankind in His own image, in the image of God, He created them, male and female He created them.
vs. 28 God blessed them, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply! Fill the earth and subdue it! Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, and every creature that moves on the ground.
vs. 29 Then God said, "Now I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the entire earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.
vs. 30 And to all the animals of the earth, and to every bird of the air, and all the creatures that move on the ground-everything that has the breath of life in it- I give every green plant for food. It was so.
vs. 31 God saw all that He had made, and it was very good! There was evening and there was
morning, the sixth day.
Day 7
2: vvs. 1-6 This is a summary of the activity recorded in the previous chapter.
vs. 2 By the seventh day, God finished the work He had been doing, and He ceased on the seventh day all the work that He had been doing.
A couple of observations are necessary here. 1) the word in the first pericope (part) of this verse, translated here as 'finished' simply means that He had already made something, past tense, completed; 2) in the second pericope, some people understand this passage to mean that God had to rest since He was tired from His previous creative activity. Not so. While the Hebrew word used here, 'Shabbat', can be translated as 'rested', it basically means simply that 'He ceased'. This is not rest as from exaustion, but simply a cessation from activity. In this way, the process of creation, regardless of one's interpretation of 'Yom' ('Day'), can be seen in four steps: 1) Proclamation and thought ('Let us make...'); 2) creation ('and God made...'); 3) separation, gathering, expanse; and 4) approval, blessed.
Though the six day 24-hour early earth model evolved as a reaction against the growing naturalistic tendencies within secular philosophy, science and then society (which coincides with the direction of progression as detailed in Schaeffer's 'Line of Despair') even as early as its popularizer, Bishop Ussher, its intent was to stop the move toward supplanting anything open to supernaturalism with a strictly naturalistic default. Any topic of debate in which an opponent resorts to the common use of logical fallacies such as the ad hominem, or appeal to the club, or appeal to authority, is often because that person no longer has any 'ammunition' with which to keep up in the debate. Such logical fallacies are normally a crase sign that the opponent is desperate and has all but surrendered. In the early church, orthodox church fathers such as Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria and Augustine of Hippo did not limit the earth as the early earth proponents do, to an age of 6,000- 10,000 years, but then such things were not even issues (also certain interpretative styles were more popular at certain times and thus looking for a literal chronology was not even considered. During the Protestant Reformation, the reformers leaned more toward a more literal historical-grammatical style of exegesis than the Roman Catholic practice of withholding the Bible from the populace and instead interpretating it to them because it was thought that various sorts of baseless and bizarre interpretations would result since they did not consider the populace to be capable of reading and interpreting the Bible themselves. Thus, the Roman Catholic church kept their power base intact by keeping their populace under the sway of their 'authorized' interpretation (you can see the wiggle room for eisogesis and papal power plays). Many modern non-theists, even atheists, hate to admit that Christendom during the Rennaissance such giants as Robert Grosseteste and Roger Bacon, William of Occam and that the Enlightenment era saw such Christians as Da Vinci, Andreas Vesalius, Copernicus, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Johannes Kepler, Pascal, Paracelsius, Joseph Priestley, and Roberty Boyle contribute greatly to society and science as we now know it. Also during the Enlightenment era, a reaction against the down-hill movement toward a strict naturalism was offered by Bishop Ussher in 1650 when he published his Chronology which had differed greatly from other speculations of the beginning of the universe such as those offered by Bede (3952 B.C.), Joseph Scaliger (3949 B.C.), John Lightfoot (3929 B.C.), Johannes Kepler (3992 B.C.) and Isaac Newton (4000 B.C.). Yes, two of the 'giants' of modern science were Young Earth Creationists!
Many critics of the Bible biasedly, try to 'create' a 'second' story of creation in Genesis 2 (specifically, vvs. 2:4-2:25) in opposition to Genesis 1. In short (as this baseless and lame objection, frankly, deserves little attention), Genesis can be considered creation as seen through a telescope while creation in Genesis can be characterized as a microscopic look at the 'fifth day', specifically creation of humankind. The difference and possible harmonization between Genesis one and Genesis two will be the topic of another article.