Be Fruitful and Multiply

We have seen that Scripture defines love toward God as keeping His commandments, and that He loved us before we ever loved Him. Now we go back to the beginning, to the first picture of love and union that God set in the world, the union of a man and a woman, because the Bible itself keeps returning to that picture when it speaks of God and His people.

That picture runs from the first page of Genesis to the prayer Yeshua prayed on the night before the cross. It begins with a blessing, and that blessing was first spoken to creatures other than man.

The Fifth Day

We usually think of “be fruitful and multiply” as words spoken only to human beings. But the first time they are spoken in Scripture, they are given to the fish and the birds, on the fifth day of creation.

Genesis 1:22 And God blessed them, saying, "Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let the birds multiply in the earth."

The blessing is spoken in three Hebrew verbs: parah (פָּרָה), “be fruitful,” which shares its root with peri, the Hebrew word for fruit; ravah (רָבָה), “multiply,” to become many; and male (מָלֵא), “fill,” to make full. God wanted the seas and the skies full, and He chose to fill them with creatures that bring forth life. Fruitfulness, the bringing forth of life, is His first blessing on the living world.

The chapter has already told us how they would do it. Each was made “after its kind,” a phrase that runs through the whole account of creation.

Genesis 1:20-21 And God said, "Let the waters swarm with swarms, a living soul (nephesh נֶפֶשׁ neh'-fesh); and let birds fly above the earth upon the face of the firmament of the heavens." And God created the great sea-creatures (tannin), and every living soul (nephesh) that creeps, with which the waters swarmed, after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.

God did not fill the waters by making every fish Himself, one at a time, in every generation. He made creatures that would bring forth more of their own kind, and then He blessed them so that they would. The filling of the world was His purpose, and the bringing forth of life was the way He chose to accomplish it.

The Sixth Day

On the sixth day the same three verbs are spoken again, and this time they are spoken to the man and the woman.

Genesis 1:26-28 And God said, "Let us make man (adam אָדָם aw-dawm') in our image, after our likeness; and let them rule over the fish of the sea, and over the birds of the heavens, and over the beast, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creeps upon the earth." And God created the man (adam) in his image; in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them. And God blessed them, 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 heavens, and over every living thing (chai חַי khah'-ee) that creeps upon the earth."

In verse 27 the image of God and the words “male and female” stand in one verse. The Hebrew words are zakhar (זָכָר), male, and neqevah (נְקֵבָה), female. They are plain words. Scripture uses the same pair for the animals that went into the ark, and here it uses them for the first man and woman.

Then comes the blessing: “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it.” Parah, ravah, male, the same three verbs that were spoken over the fish and the birds, but now with “male and female” written into the sentence just before them. God’s design from the beginning was that the earth would be filled with life through the union of a male and a female. That was not an accident of nature. It was the way He built His creation.

Yet the charge that follows the blessing is not the same. To the creatures of the sea God said, “fill the waters in the seas.” To the man and the woman He said, “fill the earth and subdue it; and rule.” The man and the woman receive the blessing of fruitfulness and also the charge to rule over everything else that God had blessed.

In both Genesis 1:22 and Genesis 1:28 the command to be fruitful comes right after “And God blessed them,” so fruitfulness is first of all a gift from God. Children are not something God merely puts up with. Before there was any sin in the world, God blessed the man and the woman and told them to fill the earth.

At the end of that day, Scripture looks back over all of it.

Genesis 1:31 And God saw all that he had made, and behold, it was very good. And there was evening and there was morning, the sixth day.

All that He had made, the man and the woman included, and the blessing that He had spoken over them, was “very good.”

One Name for Two

A few chapters later, Genesis repeats the account of the sixth day in a single short summary.

Genesis 5:1-2 This is the book of the generations of Adam. In the day God created man (adam), in the likeness of God he made him. Male and female he created them, and he blessed them, and he called their name Man (adam) in the day they were created.

The word adam, which is the name of the first man, is also the name God gave to the two of them together. The man and the woman were made two, male and female, and God called them by one name. That one sentence already points toward what the next chapters of Genesis will say openly: that the two are made to become one.

Spoken Again After the Flood

The blessing did not end in the garden. After the flood, when the earth had been emptied of almost all its life, God spoke the same words again, this time to Noah and his sons.

Genesis 9:1 And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said to them, "Be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth.

It is the same blessing in the same three verbs, and a few verses later God says it once more, with “swarm” beside “multiply.”

Genesis 9:7 And you, be fruitful and multiply; swarm in the earth and multiply in it."

The world had been judged. Only eight people came through the water. Yet God did not change His purpose for the earth. He wanted it full, and He blessed the families who came out of the ark so that it would be filled again.

What the Text Shows

Together these verses show a simple picture. The Creator wanted the seas, the skies and the land full of life. He chose to fill them through pairs that bring forth after their kind. For humanity He chose the union of a man and a woman, whom He made in His own image, male and female, and blessed. Fruitfulness is His blessing, spoken before the fall and spoken again after the flood.

God blessed so that life would multiply. He did not create the man and the woman to be alone, and He did not create the earth to stay empty. He made the man and the woman so that through them the earth would be filled with people who bear His image.

This matters for everything that follows, because Scripture uses the language of marriage and of bringing forth children to describe what God wants with His people, and the end of that line is a household of sons and daughters who know Him. The Bible does not start with that picture in the prophets or in the letters of the apostles. It starts here, on the sixth day, with a man and a woman and a blessing.

Genesis 1 says that the two were made, male and female, and blessed; Genesis 2 shows how they were made, the man formed from one thing and the woman from something quite different.