The Bible, particularly the book of Job, provides evidence for the existence of dinosaurs alongside humans, challenging evolutionary atheism. It posits that terms like "behemoth" and "leviathan" in Job, along with creation accounts in Genesis, describe large reptiles and sea creatures that are best understood as dinosaurs. The message emphasizes that God's Word is the ultimate authority on origins, urging listeners to trust scripture over secular scientific theories and to seek wisdom from God through faith and diligent study.
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Dear friends, we thank you for the privilege of being with you these three Sunday evenings. Norma and I have looked forward to this opportunity, and I might just pause for a moment in case you have not met my wife. Norma, dear, would you please stand back there? She's the one with the beautiful golden curls. Norma was a missionary under China Inland Mission. Norma and her first husband for eleven years and Norma and Robert came to Winona Lake to study theology toward a doctoral degree.
That was in nineteen sixty eight and seven months later out jogging one night he dropped dead of a heart attack and left Norma with two boys. In the meantime, my wife, Edithine, was dying, and the Lord took her in nineteen seventy and left me with three boys and a girl. And guess what happened in nineteen seventy-one? Two tribes merged, at which time the children were aged ten, twelve, thirteen, fourteen, fifteen, and sixteen. We're still recovering. And since then, we've had many opportunities to travel around the world in the Far East, Europe, Africa, Latin America, making known the wonders of our triune God, the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, especially the second person of the triune God, through whom all things were created.
And without him was not anything ever made that was made. John chapter one, verse three. That is one of the Best kept secrets, friends, of this age and even among many Christians. The unique function and special glory of the Son of God whom we must honor if we honor God the Father. And that's why the Holy Spirit wants us to honor him as we read and believe what he says about his work of creation and redemption and coming judgment and rule over the earth and the kingdom age. I might say that about a year and a half ago after I taught Old Testament and theology at Grace Theological Seminary for thirty-nine years from nineteen fifty-one to nineteen ninety, we've been traveling for about seven years around the world in these ministries, and then finally we have settled down in Orange Park, Florida, about thirty-some miles from north of here.
And we have launched already in our home a graduate school of theology. We have a very significant student body meeting every Thursday night for three hours in our home, namely one dedicated student. But I'm learning, as you are, that in God's work, we realize that quality is often more significant than quantity. So we just invite you to pray for us as we launch this program. And hopefully in God's providence in January, as we start another semester, we will see even more students joining us there. Now, friends, I'm going to descend to the lower parts here where you are, and we're going to have a screen come down.
Now, I trust you can all see and hear. If you can't see, please rush forward to the front pews. This is the cover of a famous book that Norma was led of the Lord, we believe, to write several years ago. Everywhere we traveled, my lectures were, of course, more on the adult level or trying to get down to the senior high school level, hopefully. And many mothers said, well, don't you have anything for our children? And through that kind of urgency, She felt led of God to write a book on a subject that she knew children all over the world were absolutely fascinated with, namely the origin, nature, and destiny of dinosaurs.
And she entitled the book, Those Mysterious Dinosaurs. But you'll notice that the subtitle says, a biblical approach for children, yes, but also for their parents and teachers. And we all realize, don't we, friends, that in this age of materialistic, evolutionary atheism, unless mom and dad believe what God says in his precious word, unless the teacher can implement what God has taught to us in the scriptures, it's very difficult, in fact, rare that a child will come to maturity in these precious and wonderful truths.
And so we trust you will take an interest in this. I doubt in an assembly like this if any of the people here have grandchildren. But this would be perhaps of special help to your family circle to think carefully through what God has to say about these amazing creatures he put on this planet. Now, friends, we are planning that tonight will be part one on dinosaurs and men, and next Sunday night, part two. And then the third Sunday night to take an overview of everything God says about how the world began.
I realize, as you do, that this is a very difficult subject, a very controversial subject, even for God's people. We do want to be, of course, in total harmony with the general consensus of contemporary scientific opinion. Those are big words. In other words, we want to be conformed to this world, to be accepted, to be popular. But that's a constant danger, is it not, for God's people in Satan's world. The Lord Jesus wasn't isolating himself from people, but he was never contaminated at all by satanic, demonic, depraved thinking. And may that be our increasing goal for ourselves and for our loved ones and our circle of friends until the Lord Jesus comes to receive us to himself.
And therefore, we introduce to you tonight, dear friends, part one, dinosaurs and men. I invite you to turn. Well, excuse me. You can't see your Bible. Please leave the lights out because I have been told that you people really don't need your Bible. You've all memorized every word in it. So with that assurance, we'll now consider some amazing things in the oldest book of the Bible, which I believe is the book of Job, written probably hundreds of years before God wrote the book of Genesis through Moses.
And in this amazing book, Not long probably after the dispersion from the Tower of Babel. We read of an amazing series of events in the life of a remarkably devoted man who apparently truly loved the Lord. And yet into that life came a series of catastrophes we can hardly even bring ourselves to think about. He had no idea that in the heavens above there was a great controversy about him. Satan is saying the only reason he's worshiping you, God, is for what he can get out of you.
There is no genuine love in his heart at all. And God allowed Satan to do things to him we can hardly imagine possible. That Job later looked back, I'm sure, and thank God for, and all of us can read and study and benefit from, even to this day. He destroyed all of his property, killed off all of his children. By then, his wife was suggesting curse God and die. That was no help. And friends, if that weren't bad enough, God destroyed his health through Satan. And by the way, I want to pause here to say something you all know.
Satan comes across in Job chapter one as absolutely non-sovereign. God is telling him what he can do and can't do, and he's sort of like a puppet pulled here and there by invisible strings from the third heaven, and God says you can do this, but you can't do that to Job. You can do this, but you can't do that. In fact, he fades out of the book entirely. He is utterly insignificant. He's never even mentioned at the end of the book. And as far as we know, Job never knew he had any part in the scenario. How comforting, friends. God tells us in the New Testament, doesn't he? If we humble ourselves beneath the mighty hand of God, we can resist the devil and he will.
Of course he will. He is finite. Before Almighty God, he's helpless. And our problem, friends, is not that Satan is bigger than we are. is that we don't tune into the God who's bigger than he is. Our God is almighty. That's one of the major themes of the book of Job that's so encouraging to us in a world filled with demonic rulers who are threatening to kill thousands or millions of people and some awful depraved emperor of Babylon is arising again and threatening the whole Western world and we're saying, Lord, do you really have control? Do you really know what's going to happen here?
And we read this book of Job and we discover, oh yes, there is somebody in charge. There is somebody in control. But wait, the most awful things that happened to Job were still ahead, namely the appearance of three so-called friends who accused him endlessly, chapter after chapter after chapter after chapter, of being absolutely as wicked as his outward circumstances indicated. And with friends like that, who needs enemies? And that just about did him in. You know what he began to do? Question God's wisdom.
He wasn't blaspheming. He wasn't totally denying God. He was just raising very serious questions about whether God really knew what was going on here and really was in control. of those circumstances. Finally, God mercifully brought the whole discussion to an end, confronted Job with this remarkable statement that we can apply to the godless world of academic materialistic scientism today in all of our major universities and all the media and all the governments. And here it is. Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? You seemed to know so much.
about the world and about right and about wrong. Too bad, Job, I didn't have your help and your counsel in designing the universe. And we hear people today teaching our children and grandchildren totally erroneous things about how the world came into being by pure chance through billions of years, by evolution, and it's just as if they were there when it happened and saw it all in its various stages. And God is saying, is he not today? Oh, where were you? Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? Well, friends, God led him on a personally guided tour then of his universe, of the heavens above and the wind and the rain and the snow and the ice and some of the most beautiful animals of the world, ten of them as a matter of fact.
But now listen. the last two of those ten creatures that God showed to Job we have never ever seen and never will and Bible students for centuries have wondered what was behemoth and what was Leviathan well friends don't don't depend upon footnotes in study Bibles I have news for you they're not inspired Listen to what God says about behemoth. Turn to, in your memory, excuse me, to Job forty. I will read it for you. Job chapter forty verse fifteen, behold now, speaking to Job, behold now behemoth, which I made with thee.
You say, what in the world is a behemoth? Well, that O-T-H ending at the end makes it a feminine plural, which means in Hebrew that is a gigantic beast. But what kind of a gigantic beast? Well, the footnote of many study Bible says, Hippopotamus, elephant. Really? Keep reading. He eats grass like an ox. He's an herbivore, a plant eater. Low now his strength in his loins, in his force, in the navel of his belly. He has a huge abdominal region in his body. Now listen. He moveth his tail like a cedar tree.
Oh, really? You mean this animal had a tail as big as a tree. And cedar trees were among the most spectacular trees of ancient Palestine. And I wonder if any of you have ever seen the tail of a hippopotamus. Or for that matter, an elephant. They do not qualify. But here was an animal, dear friends, with a tail so stupendous that it dragged behind him like that. like a cedar tree keep reading his bones are as strong pieces of brass his bones are like bars of iron he's like some kind of a skyscraper creeping across the earth now listen he is the chief of the ways of god he is number one the greatest animal god ever made to walk the earth now friends paleontologists And I took a course on paleontology when I was an evolutionist at Princeton University in nineteen forty two and forty three, and I believed everything I was taught.
And my father, whom I greatly respected, was a total evolutionist. I was an only child in that home. And his father was a total evolutionist, and my father was an only child too. And that whole line of teaching, you see, traditional indoctrination in the total materialistic, atheistic concept of evolutionism is all I ever knew. So at great cost, off I was sent to Princeton University and I studied things that I thought would help me to know about how the world began and what was really significant about the world.
I really was training to be a diplomat or an ambassador in the U.S. State Department. And I thought that courses like this would help me to have a perspective of the world that would be helpful, in fact, important to me. Well, friends, paleontologists who specialize in excavating skeletons and fossils all over the crust of the earth are absolutely astounded at what they're digging up on practically every continent of the earth. Huge skeletons are coming out. And we wonder, now, now, wait a minute.
What about these things? Where did they come from? What were they really like? And scientists are totally perplexed. Why, the greatest animal that walks the earth today is an African bull elephant that has to eat two hundred pounds of vegetation every day to keep alive and well. But here were animals, friends, fifteen or twenty times as big as the greatest elephant had ever lived. So how could this animal, this is a Diplodocus, see, mean double beam. Here's a beam here, and here's one back here, that giant tail, remember. And we wonder, how could he live and move and exist on this planet if he was that gigantic?
I mean, could he eat fifteen or twenty times two hundred pounds of vegetation a day? A couple thousand? No. Look how small his mouth was. And look how long that neck was. How could he do that? Well, the fact is, friends, paleontologists now agree, he could not. Impossible. Because you see, he wasn't even a mammal like an elephant or like human beings. He didn't depend upon the intake of vegetation to keep alive, to fuel that body system. He was an ectotherm.
He was a cold-blooded reptile. And reptiles are so different in their design and function than mammals. Oh, the magnificent wisdom of God to design all these amazing things. You know, we have one million of them now in Florida called what? Right. Oh, you know what they do? They can bask motionless for hours absorbing solar radiation so that for brief periods of time they can move at fantastic speed. Why? Friends, we warn our northern visitors, don't we? Don't take your dog on a walk near a swamp, a river, a lake. Because something in there has been basking for hours, accumulating solar radiation energy, and for ten seconds...
When that gator jumps out of that water, he can outrun any human being or dog in the world. Why, recently in Florida, they killed a fifteen-foot gator, something like that, and found inside of him ten dog chains of collars, one of which had the name of the owner on it. They called the owner and he said, I haven't seen that dog for ten years. Why, friends, these are amazing creatures. Cold-blooded reptiles. And occasionally they can gorge themselves with food, but they don't have to eat for days and days. Very interesting.
Very amazing. But here's another problem. The greatest dinosaurs that ever lived had brains no bigger than the brains of chipmunks and squirrels. Their brains were ten thousand times smaller than yours and mine proportionate to the size of their enormous bodies. The pinheads of Earth history. So how could a pinheaded reptile tell the rest of its body down here a hundred feet away which way to turn? Well, some scientists think he had two brains. Right there in the spine, they have found a vertebrae twenty times as big as the skull in his head, which may have served as a fast reaction nerve ganglion information center that could tell the rear section what to do so the head could move forward, not even caring what's going on back there.
And with two brains, maybe every time he had a thought up here, he had an afterthought back here. But you know what his biggest problem was? He never stopped growing. When a baby alligator pops out of mommy's egg, perfectly shaped like mommy and daddy, he hits the ground running and snapping, goodbye folks, and gets bigger and longer and heavier as long as he lives. And those eyes get farther apart as the head gets bigger, as he sits in that swamp. And friends, you can tell how old he is by how big he is. Well, when these reptiles who dominated the world before the Genesis flood had the tremendous additional atmospheric pressure available to that global terrarium, that vapor canopy, they could function for hundreds of years.
and got so enormous we can hardly imagine how they could even walk and probably they didn't do much more walking. Maybe they just sort of sat in the swamps and rivers so the water would just buoy up their bodies so with their long neck they could dredge up vegetation and somehow keep alive and well. And you know, friends, that's exactly where God told Job to find him. Listen to this. He lieth under the shady trees in the covert of the reed and sent. He's in a swamp. Job, go look for him. The shady trees cover him with their shadow and the willows of the brook compass him about.
Behold, he drinketh up a river and hasteth not. He trusts us that he can drop the Jordan into his mouth. Oh, thank you, Lord. Now we know exactly what river it was that Job found him in. Why, this is one of the most amazing rivers in all the world, friends. Why, when this river starts its two hundred mile snaky route to the Dead Sea, it's already six hundred feet below sea level at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee. And by the time it hits the Dead Sea down here, it's one thousand three hundred feet below sea level.
The lowest place in the face of planet Earth a permanent pocket of heat and humidity, night and day, summer and winter. And there's Jericho there that Deuteronomy calls the city of what? Palm trees. Yes, permanent tropics. And if you didn't like the snow and the cold of Jerusalem, you know, snow's there in the winter, you just go four thousand feet down to Jericho, just twenty-five short miles away, like maybe not as far as from here to Orange Park, and you're in the tropics. And if you lived there four thousand years ago when Job came from northern Arabia over here in the land of us, guess what you would have enjoyed?
Not just the warm air in the palm trees, but a glimpse of the last of the greatest dinosaurs that ever walked the earth, sitting in the water. Now, friends, The truly amazing thing about this verse, if you watch carefully the Hebrew text from which it's translated, the basic idea is this. Whenever that river rages, which it does, you know, every springtime, it becomes a raging torrent of water, overflowing all its banks.
That's when it was, remember, that Joshua led the Israelites across to Jericho. Thousands of little animals in those thickets on the sides of the Jordan would flee to the hill country, including lions. There were tens of thousands of lions all over the Holy Land back in Old Testament times, you know, a lot of references to them. You know what those lions would do? Why they'd go into the little villages up here in the hill country and attack people. And in the book of Proverbs, it says it a couple of times. The mark of a lazy man is what? He just turns over in his bed in the morning and says, I'm not going out today.
There's a lion in the streets. See? And you know what Jeremiah called the King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon? A lion in the swelling of the Jordan. Coming out of that river valley, desperate for prey, for food, look out. But friends, one animal never even bothered to budge. He just lifted up his neck higher and higher, opened his mouth. The vegetation flowed in and he was confident and not alarmed, though the Jordan should reach to his mouth. You say, incredible. You mean, sir, that there was a real, live, giant dinosaur sitting in the Jordan River only four thousand years ago.
Yes, but that's nothing compared to what we're going to read in the next chapter of Job, the whole chapter devoted to the greatest Marine reptile the world has ever known. Leviathan. What in the world is Leviathan? Well, he was so stupendous as a air-breathing, cold-blooded, scaly-bodied, amphibious marine carnivorous reptile. that he became proverbial of giant forces of evil in the world. And so Isaiah, you remember, twenty-seven one talks about Satan as Leviathan, that crooked serpent.
And friends, that doesn't mean there never was a Leviathan. You know, Daniel talks about kingdoms as being what? Like a lion and like a bear and like a leopard. Well, that doesn't mean there weren't any lions, bears, or let in fact, that means there were people that people knew what those animals were like, characteristics. And friends, one thousand years after Job went to the Mediterranean and looked out in that ocean, Leviathans were still there. You remember the Great Nature Psalm, one hundred and four? Listen to this statement. There is the great and wide sea in which are things creeping innumerable.
And there go the ships. And there goes Leviathan, whom you have made to play within it. Well, people say, well, that's nothing but a crocodile. Well, don't underestimate crocodiles. But friends, wait a minute. You don't go down to the ocean and see ships go by and crocodiles. In fact, when you read that account in Job forty-one about Leviathan, you get a very clear impression that something far greater than a crocodile is being described. Listen to this, he makes the deep, the ocean to boil like a pot. He makes the sea like a pot of ointment.
He maketh a path to shine after him. One would think the deep to be hoary upon earth. There is not his like who is made without fear. He beholdeth all high things and is a king over all the children of pride. He can look down on everything. But a crocodile can't lift his head more than six inches from the ground. So friends, as recently as three thousand years ago, if you were standing on the shore of the Mediterranean in the Holy Land, you could indeed see ships going around, you know, ships of Tarshish, etc. You could also see Leviathans.
questions are there any of them left where are they now well my opinion is they're long gone now some Japanese fishermen dredged up an enormous thing in the South Pacific a dozen years ago and dumped it back in the ocean people still don't know what it was in the in the warm southern ocean of the Pacific But if you really want to see him, of course, all you have to do is go to Scotland and visit what? Loch Ness. And we were there twice, and you know what? If you say anything against the Loch Ness monster, which is the dynamic of a stupendous multi-million dollar tourist business, you are in trouble.
But I have a hard time imagining a cold-blooded reptile sitting in ice water in a lake in Scotland, but don't tell anyone. Now friends, you know, we say now just a moment here. Wait a minute. Are you telling us, sir, that the book of Job teaches that giant reptiles once existed on this planet at the same time human beings were here? Now friends, let's face it, this is very controversial even among God's people. Of course, I have no idea what your background was. Mine was total evolutionism.
But let me just say this. This is one of the most difficult problems Christian parents and grandparents have to face today as a new generation of young people are coming up in public schools, state-supported schools, and are taught everything except what God says. And as more and more dinosaurs are being excavated, in fact, you know, just last year they excavated a totally perfect skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus rex, which went up for auction, and I think some museum bought him for eight million dollars.
They're popping up everywhere. And you don't tell children, may I warn you, there never were any such things. I don't recommend that. A better answer is, let's search the scriptures daily to see if these things are so. You know what? God has answers for every major issue that any child will face or any adult in God's world. And that's what the book of James says. If any man lack wisdom, let him what? Ask of God. Don't ask the professor. Don't look at the textbook. I mean, when all else fails, read instructions and ask God.
Say, all right, Lord, tell me everything. No, wait a minute. Listen to the conditions. This makes it hard. But let him ask him faith-believing, nothing wavering, for he who wavers is like of the waves of the sea, driven of the wind and tossed. Let not that man think he shall receive anything from the Lord for a double-minded man is unstable in all his ways. You can't say, I believe the Bible on Sundays, but don't check me out Monday to Friday in the classroom. That's double-mindedness. If our God isn't our God all week long, forget it. So you see, friends, God says, if you just ask me, see, in faith believing, nothing wavering.
Now that eliminates most of us, I guess. I'm not sure if I qualify for that. Nothing wavering. Lord. That's right. God says, you have to trust me. I was really, I'm really trustworthy. I don't lie to people. I'm very intelligent. I was here when the world began. Please listen to me. May I have a word here? Say, no, Lord, we're too busy with hundreds of textbooks and hundreds of professors and hundreds of universities. You know what the wisdom of this world is to God? Foolishness. We're not despising intelligence and textbooks and universities. We're just saying anyone who claims to know more than God does and who has the audacity to contradict what God said is an infinite, if not eternal trouble.
A problem so enormous, friends, that only the blood of the Lord Jesus Christ can solve the problem. That's his answer to depravity and blasphemy. You say, Lord, I'm ready. I think I got the message. Tell me more. Where did all the dinosaurs come from? Okay, here's more bad news. You have to search the scriptures daily to see if these things are so. You don't just get a flash of light from heaven. Here are the answers. Or a dream at night. I'm not sure about you folks, of course, but I don't believe in charismatic sign miracles today, whereas God flashes all the answers directly from heaven.
I don't have to study the Bible anymore. No. The Bereans were more noble, you see, than even the Thessalonians who were noble. Why? They wouldn't take what Paul said unless they had, first of all, what? Search the Scriptures daily. to see if these things were so and therefore they believed. Therefore they were established. Well, you know what the late twentieth century typical Christian says? I'm too busy to bother with searching the scriptures. Let the pastor do it. That's exactly where we're at. Too busy for God, too busy for His word, too busy for prayer, and thus we sink deeper and deeper into a state that is terrifying and here it is.
toss to and fro by every wind of doctrine. We're just vulnerable to anything that comes along as professor so-and-so or doctor so-and-so, and that includes me, friends. Don't listen to anything Dr. Whitcomb says either until you have done what? Search the scriptures daily to see if these things are so. That's been my plea for years to students in seminary classrooms. Do not believe your professors. Well, wait a minute. We're paying big money to be here. No, a professor in a theological seminary is spiritually and theologically credible only to the extent that he can convince students day after day, month after month.
You have to search the scriptures for yourself and you're accountable to God for what you have found in his word, not what somebody else told you. Otherwise, you're a cult, cultist. For you just take what the cult leader says as from God and that's it. This is very, very serious today, friends. Very serious. Now, you say, well, okay, we want to search the scriptures daily, but where does the scripture say anything about dinosaurs? That's a valid question. So let's try the first chapter of the eleven hundred and eighty-five chapters God wrote, which I have called the creation time block of Genesis one.
Now, friends, everything that we need to know, you see, about ultimate origins is in this precious, infallible, inerrant, sufficient, written revelation called the Bible. So let's take a look now, first of all, at something very interesting God tells us happened on day five of the creation time block. I wonder if you've ever noticed this before. Here we are, Genesis chapter one. in verse twenty one and 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 now wait a minute God created great what whales you know what friends the Hebrew word there tanninim means a lot more than whales.
Now, whales are the greatest sea monsters God ever created. Some of them over three hundred thousand pounds. The blue whales. But look, there are more sea monsters than that that God created in the primeval oceans of the world. He also created gigantic fishes. In Tananim, sea monsters includes giant fishes. that are totally different from whales. Whales are air breeders. They give birth to their babies alive and suckle them on milk. They're mammals. But fishes are totally different design and function.
But that's not all. He also created gigantic crustaceans. Like we heard of, remember in Psalm one oh four, there's a great and wide sea in which are things creeping innumerable. across the bottoms of the oceans and the shores of the world. But wait, there are other sea monsters God created. They don't even have skeletons at all. The great mollusks like the giant octopus and especially the giant squid. And I have seen hanging from the ceiling of Yale University Museum an exact replica of a giant squid fifty-seven feet long that could wrap those tentacles around the body of a whale and gash him to death.
Tanim. But wait, there's another group of sea monsters. The great marine reptiles, skeletons of which have been excavated that are enormous in size. like Ixiosaurus and plasiosaurus that could swallow other giant marine creatures whole. They found skeletons inside of the skeletons. But the deadliest of them all was Leviathan, as far as human beings were concerned. Cold-blooded, scaly-bodied, air-breathing, flesh-eating, and amphibious.
He could crawl right up on the shore. And Job tells us in chapter forty-one, no human being ever conquered a Leviathan. Well, thank you, Lord. That kind of narrows the possibilities here for where Leviathan came from, doesn't it? Would you agree Genesis one excludes the possibility that he got here by just floating in from another planet? Or that he's been here for millions of years? or that he evolved from something else. Remember that same verse says, everything after it's what? Right. Well, then where did he come from? He was created by Almighty God through the word of the Lord Jesus Christ, the pre-incarnate Son of God, instantly full-grown and perfect.
My. Well, where did the great land dinosaurs come from? Have you ever noticed something in chapter one, verse twenty-four, on day six, the same day Adam and Eve were created? Listen to what else God created that day. Genesis one, twenty-four. And God said, let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind. Cattle, now listen, and creeping things. Ramesh in Hebrew. That means every reptile, every lizard, every dinosaur, and maybe various types of other creeping things that we won't mention that Florida is notorious for.
Yes. Don't limit God's creative power in wisdom. In fact, he wants to tell you more about those creeping things now in the next verse. And God made the beast of the earth after his kind and the cattle after their kind. Now listen, in every thing that creepeth upon the earth after his kind, you say, well, I don't like these icky, poisonous creepy crawlers. Now God says, don't you say that about my creatures? What's the next statement? And God saw, now wait a minute here, let me see if it's, does this really say this now?
And God saw that it was... Oh, no. God likes those reptiles. Those creeping things. Well, Adam and Eve liked them. Guess why? They were perfect and harmless when they were first created. You know, God's reputation is involved here. You know why we despise and fear these kinds of creatures in many cases because we wrecked the world when we rebelled against God in the person of the king of the earth, Adam. God brought an enormous transformation in the animal kingdom, friends. Romans eight says it, the whole creation was made subject to vanity, not by reason of itself because of some inherited defects, but by reason of him, God, who subjected the same.
in hope that the creation itself shall be released from its bondage of corruption into the liberty of the children of God. The whole creation, Paul said, we know, we're not guessing, groans and travails in pain. You know, the cycle of death, animals devouring each other, the cycle of life, the balance of nature, it's endless. Ecologists can never solve it. Environmentalists can never change it. Only Jesus Christ, when he comes back to this earth, according to Isaiah eleven, will transform lions back to their precursed condition where they will eat straw like oxen and bears and cows will feed together harmlessly and a child shall play with poisonous snakes and will not be hurt.
The Jesus who created these animals, perfect, and then cursed them because of Adam's defections. can uncurse them at the beginning of the kingdom age this is a very significant theme in scripture the origin nature and destiny and purpose of the animal kingdom under god and under man's dominion now friends god still has more to tell us about these reptiles listen to the next verse twenty six 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.
Now wait. And over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth. Three times in three verses in the brief creation account of the whole universe, God says, watch the reptiles. Watch those creeping things. Because today, may I dare say it, Satan is using dinosaurs to destroy the faith of millions of young people with regard to the authenticity and truthfulness of God's word. They're saying, look, the Bible doesn't know anything about dinosaurs. The Bible is wrong.
Now, wait a minute, friends. Of course, the Bible doesn't mention dinosaurs. By name, you know why? The word dinosaur wasn't invented till eighteen thirty AD in England. You're not going to find it in Genesis or Job. But you're going to find God's description of Bohemot and Leviathan and Taninim and Ramesh. And you're going to say, in creeping things, you say, now, wait a minute. I wonder what all those were. I wonder if dinosaurs, which of course we know are lizards, reptiles, fit into those categories. Let's search those Hebrew words. Let's check out the parallel passages.
Let's think through this issue. And may God help us to come to a conclusion here, namely that He expects us to take Genesis one literally. I mean, those are six literal twenty-four-hour days in which God did stupendous, magnificent, spectacular, miraculous works of creation. And God says in effect, my opening chapter, dear reader, will introduce to you how great I am. And I want you to believe me. I want you to search this out. I want you to take it seriously. Because if we start distorting Holy Scripture in Genesis one, no wonder the rest of the superstructure of the Bible will collapse.
You know what the Lord Jesus said about this chapter? He said, if you don't believe what Moses wrote, how do you believe what I say? He wrote of me, John five. We're in this truth business together, Moses and I. Guess why? Not that Moses was all that brilliant. In fact, he wasn't here when the world began. But God told him what to write. God appeared to him at the burning bush. The Malak Yahweh, the pre-incarnate Christ, talked to him, showed him, confronted him, and told him of the coming Exodus, and later told him how to write of the previous genesis of the world. And we say, Lord, help me to stand in awe and reverence and respect of every word that proceeds from your mouth.
See, heaven and earth will pass away, but what? My word will not. Not one jot, one yoth, one small radical in the Hebrew alphabet will pass away, or even a part of one, a tittle, till it's all fulfilled. The scriptures cannot be broken. See, friends, before we even start searching the scripture, we better be sure that God is telling us something about the authority of His word. so that we'll come like the psalmist says, O Lord, open mine eyes that I may behold wondrous things out of thy law. Let's pray.
Now, Father, tonight, these are difficult things, not just for children, but even for us, to think through, to come to a perspective that is harmonious, consistent, God-honoring. and week by week as we explore more and more of these things together. Dear Father, please be our teacher. Help us not to be double-minded. Help us to be a help to the next generation coming after us rapidly. That we can somehow reflect something of your light into this deepening darkness and into the hearts of young people that are yet teachable.
Father, I thank you for these dear people. Bless their testimony, their life of prayer and witness.