Genesis 1: 24 – 27: And God said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind, cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the earth after his kind: and it was so. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind: and God saw that it was good. And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.
The animal kingdom was made by God on the sixth day of creation along with man, and it plays an important part with man in the story of redemption throughout the Bible. It was Adam who named the animals (Genesis 2: 19 – 20), and when Adam fell, the animal kingdom and all of nature took a tumble. A little later in the Book of Genesis, when God was about to destroy the world by water, He instructed Noah to build an Ark, and when the great ship was complete, the animals gathered with Noah’s family inside its wooden structure, and were protected and spared from the great deluge that followed.
In the middle of the Bible, when Mary was heavily pregnant and Joseph could not find a place for them to stay, they had no choice but to bed down in a stable, and the Saviour was born surrounded by animals. Then when the prophet went beyond the Curtain of Time in 1960, he saw his dog Fritz and his horse Prince, and they nuzzled up to him. Lastly, when Isaiah described the Kingdom Age in the Millennium, he made special mention of the animals and their restored state, back to what existed in Eden (Isaiah 11: 6 – 8). All of this reveals to us that God has the animal kingdom and all of creation in mind when He is restoring man back to what he fell from in the beginning (Romans 8: 19 – 23).