Let’s look at a fish named grunt. It got this name because it makes a grunting noise by rubbing its jaws together when lifted out of the water. It makes its home mainly in the warm waters of the West Indies and Florida, as well as Europe and the Orient. It is a popular fish to eat.
Varieties include the common, the white, the yellow, the French and the gray, which is sometimes called the open-mouthed. A mature grunt will weigh about 10 pounds. It grows about a foot long and four or five inches high, from its stomach to the top of its back, plus a big fin.
Its high back gives it a half-circle shape, with a large pointed mouth and big round eyes. Its body, regardless of color, is covered with long, pretty stripes that give a speedy look when zipping through the water. A large tail, like a bird’s outstretched wing, enables good speed and quick turning - all provided by a kind Creator to help it not only catch food, but to escape enemies.
Mandarin fish are one of the most unusually colored fish seen anywhere. Tiny creatures, only about two inches long, they have smooth skins without the scales common to most other fish. Most of them make their homes in the southern Pacific Ocean, all the way from South America to Australia.
The males have the most unusual combination of colors, including an interweaving of gray, blending into pale green and a background of dark green, with patterns of orange scattered all over it. Quite a lot of color for so small a fish, don’t you think? What they lack in size they make up for with an amazing assortment of these colors and a big, widespread, orange tail that moves them along at great speed.
Searching for small shellfish, which is their main food, they spend most of their time on the bottom of the ocean and are considered too small for fishermen to bother catching.
There are many fish of all kinds throughout the world’s oceans, lakes, rivers and streams, and it is not uncommon for new varieties to be discovered frequently. It is impossible for man to count them.
But they are all known to God, their Creator, and we know He took great delight in creating them, as the Bible tells us: “And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life. . . . And God saw that it was good. And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas.” Genesis 1:20-2220And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. 21And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good. 22And God blessed them, saying, Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let fowl multiply in the earth. (Genesis 1:20‑22).
You are of much more value to God than these fish on the floor of the ocean, and He wants you to accept His Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, as your very own Saviour. Have you accepted His loving offer of forgiveness for your sins?
OCTOBER 9, 1994
ML-10/09/1994