Before the genesis of conceived origins,
Three persons round a table communed
In the dark, deliberating in their own light,
Hovering over chaos and a formless void;
The lover loving the beloved for eternity
In a perfect covenant of love.
Poised in the presence of self-existence,
Balanced on the point of a singular entity,
Bound by a force more massive than gravity,
Blazing glory from out the effulgence of being,
The Creator decreed His creation’s inception:
“In the beginning
God created
The heavens and the earth.”
I, wisdom, was brought forth first to frame foundations,
To set boundaries, conceive spaces, manufacture time;
To compose mathematical music to sing God’s praises;
To differentiate unity, marshal order, ascribe authority, channel power;
To separate constants from variables and release energy from entropy;
To distill essences, prepare ingredients, mix elements, bake substances,
To design systems, craft concepts, fix laws, and code the helices of life;
I, wisdom, was there beside Him as master craftsman to the architect.
For six days we labored to create the heavens and the earth
From nothing, from darkness, from emptiness, from inertness;
Fashioning the universe from a primeval foam and a primordial blur,
We brought order out of chaos and led meaninglessness into purpose.
God ordained light, time, space, and all life’s myriad forms by holy fiat;
Ordering life according to chronology, habitat, range, and complexities;
In conformity with His sovereign plan and will, whatever comes to pass
God foresaw and preordained, appointing the actual from the possible,
The visible and invisible, all matter and energy, all heaven and earth,
All thrones, powers, rulers, authorities, and hosts in heavenly realms.
He made all things that were made, nothing that was not made;
Every atom of every sand grain and every star of every galaxy,
Every joule of kinetic energy striving to return to potential rest,
Every breath of dust-stirring breeze, every leaf-shaking stir,
Every flame blazing on the holy head of an attending angel,
Every follicle of fur on a wooly yak, every whisker on a cat
He made for His good pleasure, to His glory and praise.
And having willed what was good to make,
He saw that what was made was good;
All that God created was good
Because God is all good.
As a hen nestles her eggs
Warming under her wings,
So the Spirit of God was brooding
Over the darkness of deep waters.
“Then God said,
‘Let there be light;’
And there was light.
God saw that the light was good.”
It was so simple, so immediate, so definitive;
Answering creation’s who, how, what, and why,
Authoring volumes of complexity in a declarative,
Empowering a simple imperative with consequence,
Affirming value and worth across many dimensions,
Affording reliable testimony from a credible witness,
And revealing the Word of power in words of truth:
“In the beginning was the Word,
And the Word was with God,
And the Word was God.
He was with God in the beginning.”
So the sovereign Lord of the Word
Spoke
The wisdom power of God’s Word
To create light and to spark life.
He lifted the cover of the Book
And unfolded His revelation:
“This is the account
Of the heavens and the earth
When they were created
In the day that the Lord God
Made earth and heaven.”
On the first day
When God said,
“Let there be light,”
And there was light,
The light He called “day”
And the darkness He called “night.”
Creating His covenant with the day,
Sealing His covenant with the night,
And establishing His universal laws,
God separated light from darkness;
Morning broke free from evening.
From the first cosmic singularity
Triggered by God’s firm decree
To birth creation with His being
Bursting photonic shock waves
Lighting an expanding space
Exploded back the darkness
At a constant speed of light
Unfolding the multiverse
In multiple dimensions
Visible and invisible
As an all embracing
Coincident light cone
Radiating spectral rays
Across a racing universe
Causing particles to pulse
In discrete quantum states
Of excited coordinate fields
In synchronous oscillations
Scintillating electromagnetic
Waves of harmonic amplitude
Resonating integral coherence
Of prismatic beams refracting
White light splitting into colors
Scaled into gauge symmetries
That skip across the spectrum
Of ever widening wavelengths
Flowing energetic frequencies
That transform light squared
Into packets of matter bright
With beauty, truth, and love.
A light and dark binary clock
Began ticking absolute time,
Entangling with time eternal
As a function of far and fast,
Duration and direction further
Enabling light to speed across
Space in the flash of God’s eye,
Enfolding past, present, and future
In a seamless period of conformal time,
Energizing the free lattice of temporal parity
To endure and persist through tenseless time,
While comoving distance paces quintessence
In one continuum to the cosmological horizon,
Enveloping the universe with a cosmic purring
Pervasive in praise and perduring in presence,
Sustaining the cosmos with a matrix of order;
So light pellucid penetrated opaque space,
Declaring God’s eternal and abiding glory;
And God saw that the light was good.
And there was evening
And there was morning,
The first day.
On the fourth day
When God said,
“Let there be lights
In the vault of the sky
To separate the day from the night,”
God made the sun, moon, and stars in the sky above
As lamps to carry light and brighten the dark of night;
By day to give earth splendor, radiance, and warmth
By summoning the sun to fill the heavens with light,
By night to beckon the sun to a bridegroom’s tryst
And sow the heavens with diamonds, a spray flung
Across space, across an infinitely expansive space
Swarming with galaxies glittering in fixed constellations.
Wandering planets, comets, meteors, and shooting stars,
Etching with fiery fingers the signature of His steady love,
Emblazoned a recurring reminder of an abiding covenant
With day and night, with the Creator of heaven and earth
Who filled the heavens with harmonies, ethereal spheres
Resonating strains of praise across the flumes of space;
Who bade the sun shine his beam on a mercurial moon
Waxing and waning in phases that plate the stars pale;
Who ascribed to each star its own splendor and glory,
Crystal bright and brilliant across a dark, velvet night.
A greater light and a lesser light, and the stars above
He made parade along predictable parabolic paths
As signs to govern the seasons, days, and years,
To regulate circadian rhythms of night and day,
To shadow time’s passage and light lost ways,
To stabilize the whirling spin of revolving orbs,
To measure months in crescents and quarters,
And to mark sacred times that punctuate time;
And as a prime testament of general revelation
To declare God’s glory and majesty,
To proclaim the work of His hands,
To manifest His invisible attributes —
His eternal power and divine nature —
Speaking wordlessly to the ends of the world.
And it was so,
And God saw that it was good.
There was evening
And there was morning,
A fourth day.
On the second day
God said,
“Let there be a vault
Between the waters
To separate water from water.”
So God engineered space
And called it “sky.”
Enveloped with an embryonic sac of life-nurturing air,
Born from a cloud by the accretion of spinning dust,
A planet like a blue pearl coalesced from chaos,
An expansive, elastic vault formed from nebula,
Layered in vaporous spheres with fluid flow.
Floating gases of nitrogen, oxygen, argon,
Exhalations with neon, helium, methane,
Stirred by the sun’s rays, excitedly skip
In an alembic filled with light and heat.
Pollen and wind-borne dust particles
Mixed with water vapors suspended
Like insulating humid air cushions
Of cloud cover tempering days,
Thermal winds warming nights,
Azure skies lifting spirits high,
Paint the dawn vivid with fire,
Scattering a quiet explosion
Of slow volcanic sunsets,
Of pyrotechnics blazing
With epiphanies of awe
To declare God’s glory.
A thin blue, fragile skin
Of atmosphere shields
A fruited, fruitful earth
From the flaming sun;
A porous ozone sieve
Filtering corrosive rays,
And a grey magnetic net
Crackling with charged fields,
Cresting bow waves to the wind,
Rooted and anchored at the poles,
Wrapped around earth like a gauze,
Guarding eyes from the blinding gaze,
Weave veils against the blazing glare;
While auroras of pleated fire dancing
With cosmic sparks and solar flares
Shimmer curtains of colored light.
Then heaven’s infinite firmament
Calved the finite waters below
To form the vault of the sky
And the seas beneath,
And it was so.
And there was evening
And there was morning,
A second day.
On the fifth day
God said,
“Let the water teem with living creatures,
And let birds fly above the earth
Across the vault of the sky.”
God created species to fill empty spaces; He created life
Out of sweet carbon building blocks bonded in polymers,
Cradled in clay, welded with wind, and sparked by stars.
He predestined life to emerge from a spiritual necessity
To manifest the inventive innovations of a creative mind;
A spiritual imperative to display an infinite array of being
In a dependent relationship with a covenant loving God.
God modulated fundamental constants as physical laws,
Creating perfect conditions for life to thrive; temperature
Tweaked just right, radiation throttled to a hum and purr,
Bathing a womb with nutrients, a habitable zone with air,
A planet terraformed to fulfill life’s delicate requirement:
Strong and weak forces, gravitation and magnetic fields
Incubating a child of light, a son of life, an image of God.
God threaded atom beads into necklaces of molecules,
Chemicals conjured with matter congealed from energy,
Forming thermal metabolic functions to govern growth,
Engines churning enzymes in churns as milk into butter,
Factories building expansive life’s somatic components,
Cottage industries sewing cells into vessels for breath,
An irreducible and transcendent vitality resting in God.
God made microcosms to mirror macrocosms: conchs
Unfolding as ferns; tendrils unraveling chameleon tails;
Patterns repeated in petals, shells, goat horns, and air;
Reflected in whorls of a fingerprint; whirlpools in a river,
Swirls splashed across marble; burls round a tree trunk;
Galaxies nestled in cells, swirling in spirals round cores;
Intricate trinity of protons, neutrons, and electron fields
Pulsing energy into nucleotides with unconditional love.
Built by divine design, strung by strings, intricately art,
Assembled double helices ascending as ladders to life
Produce proteins from nucleic and amino acid strands,
Combining and recombining in cell organelles. Building
Lipids and carbohydrates bagged in plasm, keystrokes
Coiled into chromosomes, packaged tightly and folded
Into balls of bursting bytes, on a signal, split nuclei into
Collated carbon copies. Winged books like butterflies
Pullulating on flowers, pollinating flora and fauna with
Life, etch words in primitive scripts in a simple alphabet
That spells out God’s ineffable and quintessential glory.
Translated genetic codes transcribing gene expressions
Convey instructions through paired links, priceless pearls
That unlock the mystery and machinery of God’s creatures.
Cascading from simplicity through increasing complexities,
Classes of single cell microorganisms, protozoa, prokaryotic
Archaea, bacteria, eukaryotes, amoeba, or motile microbes
Swimming with flagella through a viscous, salubrious soup,
Were invested by the Creator with a living spark to replicate
And dwell in rocks, volcanic vents, glacial ice, air, and flesh,
Along with plump, indestructible, slow-walking water bears.
When God first exploded life from out the primordial slime,
Trinitarian waters covered the earth’s embryonic expanse,
Hosting reef builders, stromatolites and archaeocyathids,
Hard coral polyps, gorgonians, sea rods, and sea whips.
Sea floors strewn with trilobites, ammonites, and tritons,
Five-finger feather stars, and coned mud and rock snails,
Indeterminate diatoms like diamonds, spun silicon shards,
Neither plant nor animal, neither fungus, but pure protists,
Gave evidence of God’s prolific fingers playing with forms,
Spanning phylogenetic spectra with bilateral brachiopods,
Tentacled bryozoans, spiny crinoids, prickly hallucigenias,
Iridescent marrella, toothy odontogriphus, pikaia lancelets,
Lacy phoronids with beating cilia, and five-eyed opabinias;
While in primeval waters swam coelacanths and arowanas,
Many lobed anomalocaris, arkarua, wiwaxia, and medusas,
And later, other living fossils haunted the deep, dark waters:
Lampreys, hagfish, sawfish, sturgeon, frill sharks, and gars.
God populated the deepest waters with gelatinous blobfish,
With colossal squid, vampire jellyfish, and giant tube worms,
With gastropod and bivalve mollusks, periwinkles and whelks,
With nautilus, cowries, cockles, conchs, scallops, and razors,
With sponges, limpets, mussels, clams, oysters, and abalone,
With barnacles, chitons, lobsters, crabs, shrimps, and isopods,
With sea lilies, sea jellies, sea worms, sea snails and sea slugs,
With sea stars, sea horses, sea anemones, and sea cucumbers,
With sea spiders, sea urchins, sea fans, sea squirts, and skates,
With nudibranchs, horseshoe crabs, dragonfish, and barreleyes,
With snaggletooth, stargazers, sand dollars, cuttlefish, and eels,
With luminous trails of bioluminescent lanternfish in the depths,
With rainbow colors in coral gardens schooling in shallow seas,
While on the surface flocks of flying fish glide in graceful flight.
In the cathedral light of rising and falling columns of currents,
Vertebrates and invertebrates slow dance a majestic sarabande
Of zooplankton, phytoplankton, copepods, corals, salps, and krill,
Swarming the abyssal, benthic, demersal, photic, and pelagic zones.
In the twilight of kelp forests, a world of life plays in the floating fronds,
While fish of all forms with scales, tails, fins and gills teem in the waters,
Chasing after a parade of sea monsters: whales, sharks, octopi, and rays.
A bony mola, massive and monstrous, rises to the sun like a drowned moon;
Sudden a majestic marlin leaps out of the sea and basks his fin in the heat;
Slowly a pod of dolphins follow the shoreline in graceful arching rhythms;
Narwhals emerge out of ice like ghostly unicorns galloping on clouds;
Giant blue whales loudly bugle as they glide through buoyant waters;
While the humpbacks migrating from north to south and breaching
From the deep to feed on shoaling krill, God made to sing praises
That declare with every pitch, tone, and timbre, His eternal glory.
The skies He filled
With feathered winged birds
To soar and hover;
To transcend beyond the bounds of earth and weight of bones;
To fly as high as the eagle, the condor, and the lammergeier,
As far as the wandering albatross and the stormy petrel;
To flock like a dazzling cloud of murmurating starlings,
And roost in dense colonies on cliffs, caves, and trees;
To fill wetlands with pink flamingoes and snowy ibis,
And waterways with ducks, grebes, and geese;
To fill meadows with songs of finch and lark,
And forests with wren and thrush.
The pelagic penguins and puffins
Flying through water He made
To float, porpoise and dive;
The ostrich to prance on sand,
The kiwi to browse the strand,
The cassowary, emu, and rhea
To abstain from flight;
And the seagulls
To mew in the mist
Declarations of God’s glory.
And God saw that it was good.
God blessed the living creatures,
Saying,
“Be fruitful and multiply,
And fill the waters in the seas,
And let birds increase on the earth.”
There was evening
And there was morning,
A fifth day.
On the third day
God said,
“Let the water under the sky
Be gathered to one place,
And let dry ground appear.”
And it was so.
When God bonded three atoms into water’s trinity,
First exhaling vapors in earth’s first breath, steam
Jets trailed into roiling clouds, gathered under skies
Thick and dark with all creation’s pregnant promises.
God condensed the clouds below calling them “seas,”
Restless reservoirs swelling and trembling with tides
Rising and falling, with ebb receding, surging with flow;
Solar and lunar pistons of gravity pulling and pushing
The pulsing floods of ocean undulating under the sun.
Dancing with moonbeams, fizzing surf spraying stars,
Droplets glittering, silver clouds and golden pathways
Gleaming in the gloaming, glistening with bright glints
Mirroring sky’s light, waters kiss waters at the horizon,
Birthing moistures and evaporations in a seminal heat.
Winds furrow waves in corrugated crests and troughs
Rippling out in concentric circles to crash against cliffs,
Wash along sands, bore up rivers, swell high over reefs,
Thunder in ceaseless sets of breakers rushing to beach,
Then calm to a glassy stillness ruffled by a gentle breeze.
So the waters of the seas covered the earth with a girdle,
Circulating currents into circling gyres circled by the sun,
Cycling alternate hemispheres to generate hydraulic force,
Spinning gyroscopic wheels of air and water to nourish life
With salty seawater, a saline broth of nutrient packed brine.
At the earth’s seams steam boiled and liquid land roiled up,
Combining air, sand and iron in a beachhead for solid earth.
Congealing elemental gases, colloids, and mire into a mass
Of periodic elements, of groups, compounds, and mixtures,
God stocked earth with rocks, minerals, and metallic ores,
With stellar hydrogen and helium and the six noble gases,
With the six alkaline earth metals and the six alkali metals,
With precious and transition metals, noble, base, and poor,
With brittle metalloids, with ferrous and non-ferrous alloys,
With feldspar and quartz, colorful crystals capturing light,
With carbon, graphite, diamonds, zirconium, and garnets,
With precious gems of beryl, emerald, ruby, and sapphire,
With jasper, jade, opal, onyx, topaz, tourmaline, turquoise,
With aquamarine, almandine, amethyst, amber, and agate,
With citrine, cinnabar, corundum, carnelian, and malachite,
With chalcedony and mica, rhodochrosite and chrysoprase,
With rhodonite, nephrite, barium, strontium and technetium,
With uranium, neptunium, and plutonium, biotite and perlite,
With astatine and iodine, euxenite, gadolinite, and galaxite,
With pitchblende and hornblende, diopside and chrysotile,
With potash, spinel, and protactinium, hornfels and skarn,
With polonium, francium, indium, scandium, and europium,
With chlorine, fluorine, and bromine, hassium and hafnium,
With caesium and cadmium, selenium, iridium and niobium,
With rhodium and radium, rhenium, osmium, and ruthenium,
With lithium, potassium, beryllium, promethium, and cerium,
With aluminium, titanium, tungsten, germanium and gallium,
With granite, gabbro, galena, gold, coal, chalk, and mercury,
With mudrock, siltstone, claystone, halite, sylvite, and barite,
With basalt, bismuth, boron, bauxite, arsenic, and antimony,
With manganese and magnesium, platinum and palladium,
With molybdenum and chromium, rubidium and vanadium,
With ammonium, andesite, rhyolite, kimberlite, and silicon,
With sunstone and moonstone, tiger’s eye and hawk’s eye,
With bloodstone, soapstone, alabaster, gypsum, and talc,
With lapis lazuli, larimar, lazurite, afghanite, and heliodor,
With coltan and tellurium, thorium, thallium, and tantalum,
With serpentine and travertine, greywacke, chert and wad,
With silver, copper and tin, zinc and cobalt, nickel and lead,
With silt, sand, soil, and dust, loess, loam, clasts, and scree,
With the five salt halogens and trace elements keyed to life,
With lanthanides, actinides, critical minerals and other ores,
With rare earth minerals, metals, and elements like yttrium,
With dull, reactive, lusterless non-metals in all three states,
With porphyry and pumice, marble, obsidian, tuff and flint,
With phosphorus and sulfur, fluorite, pyrite, and hematite,
With pegmatite, diorite, monzonite, and syenite intrusions,
With slate, shale, marl, gneiss, schist, breccia, and scoria,
With conglomerates of pebbles, cobbles, gravel, and clay,
With green and ubiquitous olivine, and delicate chrysolite,
With dolomite and dunite, drusy aggregates and dioptase,
With vugs and geodes, hollowed and fissured rock cavities,
With time-carved limestone towers and sandstone castles,
With boulders on beaches, boulders balancing on boulders,
With bedrocks and outcrops, stray erratics, and sheer cliffs,
With gravity sufficient to hold the skies and seas in motion,
With density enough to be massive, solid, hard, and heavy,
Earth’s temporal rocks root deep in the eternal, living Rock.
Charged up with electro-magnetic, chemical conductivity,
Radioactive, reactive, rusting, combustible and flammable;
With oxides, hydrides, hydroxides, salts, silicates, and tars,
Compounds of chlorides, fluorides, carbides, and nitrides;
With acids, alkalis, and alcohols, toxic and tonic solubles,
Solutions that evaporate and boil, and solids that deposit;
With amphiboles, pyroxenes, mafic, ultramafic, and felsic
Rocks and minerals in monoclinic and orthorhombic cuts;
With properties of fluorescence, iridescence, and streak,
Tensile, ductile, fusible, elastic, plastic, caustic, and soft;
With crystalline structures, color, cleavage, and porosity,
Sensitive to light and dark, hot and cold, and wet and dry;
With vitreous luster, malleable tenacity, and transparency,
God’s geological riches lay hidden, buried in earth’s crust.
Behold earth’s splendor: solid, pliable, molded into majesty,
Where vast, sweeping vistas declare His praises, and where
Water-carved grand canyons, gorges, gulches, and ravines
Reveal the grandeur of God’s artistry, His breath-taking art!
Plutonic and neptunian pressures, firing rock compositions
Into striated scores, thin horizontal sheets of pleated strata
Arranged in igneous, metamorphic, and sedimentary bands,
Conduct earth’s instruments in harmony with heaven’s glory.
Behold God-orchestrated symphonies of light on stone play
Water music: rainbow arpeggios on vermilion cliffs at dusk
Combine sound and light into waterfall and stone sonatas
Bursting sunset ripples of liquid fire to declare God’s glory.
Mixing matter and water into bogs, marshes, swamps, fens
Compressed into peat, bubbling with pitch, oil, or methane
Burning with ghost light and will o’ the wisp, God collected
The waters into deep aquifers, storing reservoirs and wells
Along the water table and seams under the earth’s surface,
Percolating through porous rocks to purify waste impurities,
And slowly carve vast cathedral vaults into petrified forests
Of stalactites and stalagmites, karst caverns and pinnacles.
When God gathered up the waters from under the heavens,
Separating a single continental shield surrounded by seas,
He called it “land,” promontories breaking through waves
To shape shores, islands, peninsulas, plains, hills, valleys,
Plateaus rising above flatlands, buttes along the horizon,
Bluffs prominent over gullies, cliffs climbing to the sky,
Mesas and tepuis ascending above desert and jungle,
Palisades pendant over a precipice, crags in the mist;
Dells dotted by brooks, creeks, streams, rivers, lakes,
Waters pooling, tarns in the heights, ponds in hollows,
Hollows where the fog hangs thick, ridges with a view,
And mountains in communing play with protean clouds
Receiving crystal baptisms of snow, cascading with ice,
Cradling cirques that flow glaciers scouring out valleys,
Sculpting topographic features from dancing elements
Of air, fire, water, and earth.
Then God said,
“Let the earth sprout vegetation,
Plants yielding seed,
And fruit trees on the earth
Bearing fruit after their kind
With seed in them;”
And it was so.
God spoke vegetation
To sprout from the soil
And drink light:
Green life uncoiling with dew, roots springing from springs,
Shoots breathing air, bulbs bursting in dirt, deep in the dark,
Chlorophyll powered engines inhaling rock and exhaling fires,
Exhalations energized with tinctures of sun-kissed sweetness,
Dispensing fragrances perfuming the air with aromatic scents;
All kinds of plants rooting, branching, unraveling green foliage,
Spraying spores, blossoming blooms, cross-pollinating pistils;
Petals painting rainbow hues unfolding numbered sequences
From stamen to stigma, from anther to ovule; sepal and petal
Nestled in the whorl of a calyx and crowned by lily and rose;
Crowned with the sugarbush sun of a king protea honeypot,
Crowned with extravaganzas of orchids, asters, and daisies,
Crowned with royal laurel wreathed in ivies, olives, and oaks,
And crowned again by chrysanthemum and common clover.
Wild joys in exuberant growth furring earth with green grace
Bedeck the bounty of His garden, abundant and flourishing.
Rich in beauty, vast in scale, variegated in color and texture,
All declare God’s glory from root to fruit, to seed and bloom.
God made seeds to germinate plants, plants to yield seed,
And plants and trees of every kind to bear fruit with seed;
Fruit in assorted size from pomes to berries and drupes,
Dripping sweet with nectar, flowing with sap and juice,
Flesh enclosing living seed and fibers wrapping round
Kernels, cones, stones, pods, pits, grains, and nuts.
God planted and made grow according to their kind
A wide assortment of beans of all color and shape;
And a wider variety of vegetation to cover earth
In various biomes, variegated colors, varied forms,
Vascular and non-vascular, annuals and perennials,
Biennials with tubers, rhizomes, runners, and corms,
Succulents and hybrids, epiphytes and cryptophytes;
From fungi to ferns — lichen, liverworts, and hornworts,
From gums to wattles — willows, hollies, and hawthorns,
From fynbos to veld — sedges, grasses, rushes, and reeds,
From scrub to brush — shrubs, bushes, brambles, and briars,
From heathers to heaths — gorse, broom, ericas, and proteas,
From marrows to mallows — gourds, legumes, tubers, and forbs,
From tussocks to hummocks — mangroves, palms, and bamboos,
From pampas to prairies — wheat, corn, barley, oats, and lucerne,
From tundra to taiga — herbs, mosses, pearlworts, and saxifrage,
From chaparral to savanna — grama, sage, buckwheat, and rye,
From forest to jungle — vines, creepers, bromeliads, and lianas,
From alpine to altiplano — sun pitchers and glory-of-the-snow,
From deserts to steppes — agaves, acacias, yuccas, and cacti,
From intertidal to coastal — seaweeds, eel grasses, and kelps,
From oasis to island — euphorbia, welwitschia, and aspidistra,
From hardwoods to softwoods, bearing cones and flowering,
From red and green algae to conifers, cycads, and ginkgoes,
Gymnosperms and angiosperms, deciduous and evergreen,
All leafy trees giving shade, shelter, and sanctuary for nests;
Even the tall kapok, the mighty sequoia, and the fat baobab
He made according to their kind;
And God saw that it was good.
There was evening
And there was morning,
A third day.
Then on the sixth day
God said,
“Let the land produce
Living creatures
According to their kinds:
The livestock, the creatures
That move along the ground,
And the wild animals,
Each according to its kind.”
And it was so.
Out of the ground God made all creatures,
Mixing six elements He molded their mass,
And with other elements He gave them life,
He let the land produce all living creatures.
God made all the animals
Each according to its kind,
Each declaring God’s glory in kind.
And God filled the land with the animal kingdom:
With arthropods, arachnids, annelids, and snails,
Amphibians, reptiles, mammals, and marsupials;
With wild animals, livestock, and all creatures
Creeping on the ground according to its kind;
Or crawling out of the water to creep on land,
As does the strange, air-breathing lungfish,
The climbing perch, walking catfish,
Leaping blennies, mangrove killifish,
Some types of eels, snakehead fish,
And the eye-bulging, gaping mud-skippers
That leap in contortions like goblin dragons;
Or crawling off the land to swim in the water,
As did the large cetaceans once upon a time,
As do newts, kraits, turtles, toads, and frogs,
As do the alligators, crocodiles, and caimans,
As does the hippopotamus and water buffalo,
As does the patchwork, duck-billed platypus,
As do the playful seals, otters, and beavers,
And the basking, bellowing, tusked walruses
That beach on rocks next to pounding seas.
Taxonomic categories classify most animals
Descending from domain, kingdom, phylum,
Into class, order, family, genus, and species.
Is the zoosphere of new species complete?
Closed and locked the turnstile of evolution,
God unleashed open revolutions of variation.
With extant species surviving the extinction
Of creatures doomed by shifting conditions,
God favored the meek to inherit their earth.
Undiscovered the full numbers of dinosaurs,
Of reptilian ancestors and prehistoric beasts,
God preserved fossil records of buried bones.
Unknown the prelapsarian purpose of bugs,
All flying, crawling, and burrowing creatures,
God gave insects to occupy all ecosystems,
To mate, pollinate plants, and clear debris,
To aerate, fertilize, feed, and moisten soil,
To deconstruct decay, pick apart matter,
Reorder life into basic building blocks;
To spin cocoons, tie tents onto twigs,
Weave webs, build walled wax combs
Chewed by bees into hexagonal cells
To store sweet, sticky, golden honey;
And to crawl into the darkest cracks,
There to scavenge, lurk, and breed.
Spawning in the air in nuptial clouds,
Digging in the sand to lay eggs on land,
Crawling to a furry pouch, nursed in a tree,
Triumphant life emerges, victorious sparks
Birthing live from a womb, from a cloned foot;
Larvae wriggling and writhing in feeding feasts,
Nymphs and naiads molting skins without wings,
Caterpillars munching through a forest of leaves,
Metamorphosing into pupae wrapped in silk eggs:
The chrysalis dangling in the wind from a dry limb
Breaks out free a butterfly fluttering colorful wings.
Animals engender and generate species profusion,
Breeding, mating, conceiving, incubating, hatching,
Growing to increase, multiply, reproduce; swarming
To replicate, propagate, proliferate, and procreate
From the wedding of an egg and sperm; embryonic
Cells cascading into genomic molds rise fertilized
From myriad forms to emerge a salient individual;
From a beating heart to blood-nourished tissues,
From tendons to ligaments, to organs and brains,
From chitin to keratin, from collagen to cartilage,
From antennae to abdomen, thorax to spiracles,
From teeth to tusks, fangs, whiskers, and ears,
From bones to horns, antlers, claws, and nails,
From mandibles to jaws, bills, beaks, and lips,
From proboscis to nose, snout, fingers, and toes,
From limbs to fins, flippers, wings, tentacles, and tails,
From gills to lungs, scales, feathers, fur, and hair;
From a nervous system bristling with electricity
To a digestive motor driving esurient locomotion;
From pigments concealing a green chamaeleon
To kaleidoscopic mimicry of peepers and frogs;
From a wisdom of wombats, roos and wallabies,
To stripes on numbats, bandicoots and bilbies;
From veins on a batwing, bees in a hive, a swift
Swooping through a waterfall to nest in a cave,
The fluke of a whale, fingerprints on bonobos,
Wrinkles on the palms of clever chimpanzees,
Markings on the muscular silverback gorillas;
The marvel of an eye, the miracle of a mouse,
The musings of an orangutan, the calm koala;
The slow sloth grinning upside down in a tree,
Black and white patches on foraging pandas,
Black and white stripes on migrating zebras,
Black and white spots on pet dogs and cats;
Life erupting in a vast display of adaptation,
Explodes abundance and wildest variety
In the widest spectrum of God’s palette.
Listen to the orchestra begin to sound:
The crickets tune their sticks and beat
Pulsing rhythms in the night’s still heat;
A dove wakes the morning with a flute,
As lions roar, loons cry, and owls hoot;
An eagle’s fiddle screech claws at air,
As an elephant trumpets out a blare;
And a raucous murder of crows caw,
While wolves at the moon bay in awe.
Erupting in voice, choirs of creatures
Improvise wild-free, jazzy harmonies,
Syncopating symphonic expressions,
Singing in cacophony and crescendo;
Frog and toad the bass and baritone,
Sweet melodies the canary and veery,
Treble time for flitting bats and moths,
Orchestrations of crickets and cicadas
Filling every frequency with affirmation,
Guidance, appeals, claims, seductions,
And glorious, triumphant praise to God.
Evolution, natural selection, mutations
Rolled the God-directed dice of chance,
Steered serendipity with random change,
Shuffled genes with improbable choice, and
Played their part to expand species diversity
Defined by niche, cycle, habitat, and strategy.
Nature or nurture? Whether born blind, blank,
Or conceived with algorithms in a wired matrix,
Reacting to stimuli with conditioned responses,
With a knee-jerk reflex or fixed action patterns;
Or conjured by chemical receptors, hormones
Blazing across synapses, firing limbic systems
To nuzzle an infant with tender, maternal care,
Or prance and pirouette in ritual duels of rivals;
God created the animals to thrive and multiply.
Whether driven by self-preservation or altruism,
Habits shaped by habitats or learned patterns,
Habits innate and acquired, modified behavior,
Voluntary instincts, or guided natural selection,
Animals have minds; elephants impart wisdom
Across generations; problem-solving monkeys
Poke sticks to probe termite towers; all canines
And felines wag their tails, exceptions proving
The rule; cattle, turtles, pigeons, fox, and deer
Align along axes of the earth’s magnetic field;
While in ant colonies workers attend a queen,
Feeding grass blades to fungi farmed for food.
Grasshoppers jumping, singing, lazing in heat,
A plodding tortoise overtaking a hare’s hubris,
A fox with nose to the ground parading his tail,
A beaver felling birches to build a daubed dam,
Swans swaying with their long necks entwined,
Dancing grebes rushing their devotion on water,
Birds of paradise polishing branches, prancing
And dancing, and shaking with hypnotic strobe,
Social weaver birds weaving grasses into nests
With chambered mansions, cockatoos bobbing
To rhythmic beats, gull chicks pecking red spots
On a beak, and geese, flapping in V-formations,
Sailing through the skies with loud, honking calls,
Mapping migratory flyways with internal compass,
Exhibit the instinctive intelligence of created beasts.
Such diversity of expression, such a passion for life!
How empty the world without the animals, how full
And abundant life with all creatures big and small!
Whether equipped with perceptive olfactory sense,
The ability to hear a leaf fall, or see a mouse move
From the perch of a cloud, or gallop without tiring,
Animals range earth with vim and verve, enacting
Rituals both predictable and surprising, recycling
Scripts written and erased on a waxy palimpsest.
God designed all the blueprints and hard wiring,
Writing codes of specified, complex information,
Sequencing genomes into hierarchical patterns,
Integrating inter-dependent functional systems,
Stringing algorithms to process self-replicating life,
Applying the divine mind to rational intelligence,
With consciousness directing sentient creatures,
Colonies joining in cooperation and coordination,
And collectives competing for primacy and prize.
All animals, everything that breathes and grows,
Everything that eats, excretes, sleeps, and rests,
Everything that runs, climbs, canters, and lopes,
Everything that walks, crawls, trots, and swims,
Everything that jumps, leaps, slithers, and sits,
Everything that digs, stirs, moves, and buzzes,
Everything that flies, soars, glides, and dives,
From sessile to motile, on air, land, and water,
God created all creatures according to its kind.
And God saw that it was good.
Then, at the end of the sixth day
God said,
“Let us make humans in our image,
In our likeness,
That they may rule over the animals
In the sea, the sky and the ground.”
So God created man in His image;
In the image of God He created them;
Male and female He created them,
One of a kind in diverse races.
God blessed them,
And gave them dominion
Over His creation,
And God said to them,
“Be fruitful and multiply,
And fill the earth,
And subdue it;
And rule over the fish of the sea
And over the birds of the sky
And over every living thing
That moves on the earth.”
Then God gave provision for life,
“I give you every seed-bearing plant
On the face of the whole earth
And every tree that has fruit
With seed in it.
They will be yours for food.
And to all the beasts of the earth
And all the birds in the sky
And all the creatures
That move along the ground—
Everything that has the breath of life in it—
I give every green plant for food.”
Every green plant and fruit for food God gave
In a wholistic system of symbiotic dependence
That cycles energy and matter through life forms,
And inspires all life to shout in praise of His glory.
And it was so.
And behold, God saw
That all He had made
Was very good.
(Note that God has judged His creation as very good;
God’s first judgment confirming his purpose for good.)
And there was evening,
And there was morning,
A sixth day.
Thus the heavens and the earth
were finished
In all their glorious magnificence.
Like a beacon beckoning celestial visitors, Earth sparkles,
Sparking a cosmic covenant promise of God’s special love;
Orbiting space in refracted light, swirling like a blue marble,
A sapphire sphere of water, air, and rock rotating like a top
Revolves around the sun; this pleasant and peaceful planet
Of rare beauty, a jewel of the universe and the home of life,
Glows brightly with heavenly halos of God’s covenant love,
And the intricate, delicate splendor of my wisdom’s touch.
On the seventh day, God rested
From all His work creating the world,
And set apart that day as sanctified.
Consecrating His labor’s culmination
With worship, a crown of sabbath joy
For a witness of perpetual covenant,
A testament of eternal faithfulness
From creation to the end of the age —
From conception to consummation —
God offered rest as a gift of respite
To the generations of creation.
He called that day of days,
“Today,”
A holy day, a sabbath day;
For in six days the Lord
Made heaven and earth,
But on the seventh day
He rested from His labor
And was refreshed.
Never far, ever near, always here,
God did not abandon His creation
To its own devices and mechanisms.
God cradles the universe in His hands,
He upholds the world in His providence,
He guides all creatures with His wisdom,
And freely endows His creation with grace
Flowing from His everlasting covenant love,
Common and sufficient to sustain all things;
What God made and maintains, he manages.
Hear all living creatures, all visible and invisible,
Join voices in concert; in harmony choirs sing,
Calling out in delight, delighting to see God
Clothed in light and splendor in the clouds,
Rejoicing to see His majesty revealed,
Ascending resplendent on His throne,
Arrayed in justice, robed with stars,
Wrapped in the gravity of His glory,
Surrounded by a crystal glassy sea,
Sovereign over all order and chaos,
Supreme in His power and authority,
Receiving due worship in His temple
Where all creation cries out, “Glory!”
For great are the works of the Lord,
Pondered by all who delight in Him;
Glorious and majestic are His deeds,
And who can not forget His wonders?
When God’s kingdom endures forever,
When His faithfulness endures forever,
When the Word of God endures forever,
When His loving mercy endures forever,
When His righteousness endures forever,
When His truth and justice endure forever,
And His name and renown endure forever,
Who will not rise in excited joy and praise
And applaud Almighty God in loud song?
The Lord is gracious and compassionate,
He provides food for those who fear Him,
He feeds the sparrows and eagles alike,
He clothes the lilies in their splendors,
He remembers His covenant forever.
Surrounded by rows of loving hosts,
Reigning sovereign over His creation,
Tending His dominion of all creatures,
Caring tenderly over every living thing,
God sings songs of loving providence,
God rejoices lovingly over His creation,
God loves the world with all His being;
He is glorified in all that He has made.
Surrounding God’s glorious throne,
A great array of angelic beings
Call out each to one another
In praise and adoration,
“Holy, Holy, Holy,
Is the LORD of hosts,
The whole earth
Is full of His glory;”
Twenty-four elders
Lay down their golden crowns
And sing day and night,
“You are worthy, our Lord and God,
To receive glory and honor and power,
For you created all things,
And by your will they were created
And have their being;”
And six living seraphim
With eyes covering six wings
Shout out without ceasing,
“Holy, holy, holy
Is the Lord God Almighty,
Who was, and is,
And is to come.”
God Almighty surveys His wondrous work
Robed in splendor on mountain heights,
The seas flexing with His strength,
While I sing my lilting song of joy:
“Then I was the artisan at His side,
I was filled with delight day after day,
Rejoicing always in His presence,
Rejoicing in His whole world,
And delighting in mankind,”
My gift to grant wisdom to all who ask,
The wisdom to recognize the Creator God
In the manifold majestic splendor of creation.
Before the birth of the first spinning galaxy,
The Word spoke a wind gust of illumination
And dawn’s first blush brushed my cheek.
Out of the fog a sand spit speared the horizon
Dividing the waters above from the waters below.
A swell passed through the aether, tethered to time,
Luminiferous and undulating in diminishing amplitudes
Until rippling and coalescing and quivering,
Clanged a bell in the mist.
Erupting from a starburst
In a distant nebula,
A light shaft
Struck sea spray
From a wave dashed rock;
A conch shell roared a pearly sunrise
Tinged rose grey with nacreous gold;
A dove, shaking feathers in a fountain,
Sprinkled dew on my face, like a baptism,
And in glee I let grass leaves tickle my feet,
In joy I wove lily garlands through my hair,
In splurge I plunged into a plum
Bursting with sap,
(It was all so good!).
In awe I tracked the wheel of constellations,
Wondering why the sun and moon were orbs
The same size, gold and silver to govern the sky.
Marveling that a constant of infinite propagation
Generates a circle’s diameter and circumference,
And the number of months in any year is sublime,
I traced the golden ratio with compass and rule,
And drew beauty with a commensurate grace.
Following blue whales to roiling red pastures,
And spawning salmon leaping cascades,
I trailed the Arctic terns to the Antarctic,
And soared with the Demoiselle cranes
Across the Himalyas and Hindu Kush;
Avian passerine flocks, geese tribes,
And swan wedges swarmed the sun,
Casting shadows on caribou herds,
Wooly bison, elk, gnus and gazelle.
Two figures emanating from light
Emerged into light, bearing light
That mirrored a double crown
Reflecting heaven
In creation’s pool,
That scattered into stars
Sparkling across a breeze-licked lake.
What bird call pierced the white mist
With clarion bells answering
Antiphonal choirs of angels
Like a dulcet bugle calling to life,
“Awake and rest in God!”?
REFERENCES:
https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0b/Angelsatmamre-trinity-rublev-1410.jpg
Genesis 1-2
Exodus 31:15-17 NASBS [15] For six days work may be done, but on the seventh day there is a sabbath of complete rest, holy to the LORD; whoever does any work on the sabbath day shall surely be put to death. [16] So the sons of Israel shall observe the sabbath, to celebrate the sabbath throughout their generations as a perpetual covenant.’ [17] It is a sign between Me and the sons of Israel forever; for in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, but on the seventh day He ceased from labor, and was refreshed.”
Psalm 19:1
Psalm 24:1-2
Psalm 29:1-5
Psalm 95:3-5
Psalm 104:1-35
Psalm 108:5
Psalm 111:1-5
Psalm 148:1-14
Proverbs 8:22-31
Isaiah 6:3
Zephaniah 3:17
John 1:1-2
Romans 1:20
Revelation 4:8,11
Augustine, On The Trinity, (De Trinitate, Cambridge: 2002), Book 9, Chapter 2, Section 2, p. 26. When I, who conduct this inquiry, love something, then three things are found: I, what I love, and the love itself. … There are, therefore three things: the lover, the beloved and the love.
Augustine’s City of God, 21, Of God’s eternal and unchangeable knowledge and will, whereby all He has made pleased Him in the eternal design as well as in the actual result
https://philarchive.org/archive/INGTPA-3v1
https://www.nature.com/scitable/topicpage/chromosomes-14121320/
http://www.doesgodexist.org/MarApr07/Why_Do_Insects_Exist%3F.html
http://listverse.com/2010/05/14/top-10-prehistoric-fish-alive-today/
http://ocean.si.edu/slideshow/collection-cambrian-fossils
https://dtmag.com/thelibrary/the-reef-builders-corals/
http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Archaeocyatha.html
http://gizmodo.com/tardigrades-are-still-a-complete-evolutionary-mystery-1797336080
https://www.livescience.com/57985-tardigrade-facts.html
http://www.boredpanda.com/strange-animals/
https://thefisheriesblog.com/2014/04/14/fish-out-of-water/
https://www.ndsu.edu/pubweb/chiwonlee/plsc210/topics/chap2-classification/classification.html
https://www.nps.gov/subjects/geology/geology-concepts.htm
http://www.eniscuola.net/en/2016/06/27/the-numbers-of-nature-the-fibonacci-sequence/
https://khouse.org/articles/1997/60
https://www.tomorrowsworld.org/commentary/what-holds-the-universe-together
In another article entitled, “Disturbing Implications of a Cosmological Constant”8 researchers from Stanford and MIT examined some of the “problems” associated with a cosmological constant. In their paper, they stated that the implications of a cosmological constant “lead to very deep paradoxes, which seem to require major revisions of our usual assumptions.” They admit that “there is no universally accepted explanation of how the universe got into such a special state” and that their study, “Far from providing a solution to the problem, we will be led to a disturbing crisis.” They also admit, “Some unknown agent initially started the inflation high up on its potential, and the rest is history.”
http://godandscience.org/apologetics/cosmoconstant.html
“Just six elements—carbon, hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, calcium, and phosphorus—make up almost 99% of the mass of living cells, including those in the human body (see composition of the human body for a complete list). In addition to the six major elements that compose most of the human body, humans require smaller amounts of possibly 18 more.[33]”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biochemistry
“And a mouse is a miracle enough to stagger sextillions of infidels.” Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself.”
Dennis R. Venema and Scot McKnight, Adam and the Genome: Reading Scripture after Genetic Science. Brazos Press, 2017.
Stephen C. Meyer, Signature in the Cell: DNA and the Evidence for Intelligent Design. HarperCollins Publishers. New York, NY, 2009.
Meredith G. Kline. Kingdom Prologue: Genesis Foundations for a Covenantal Worldview. Wipf and Stock Publishers. Eugene, OR, 2006.
Gerard Manley Hopkins, “As Kingfishers Catch Fire.”
The new moon emerges and returns
From an invisible cave, deep in night,
To mark a month of silver light that burns
Crescents, quarters, gibbous, and full bright.
The Covenant of love 
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