I could hardly believe my ears. Pat Robertson*, probably the best known Christian in America, popped up on my phone doing a question and answer session and someone had asked about dinosaurs. He smiled and said of course there was no mention of them in the Bible. Whhaat? He doesn't even know that? Dear reader, please open to the two chapters describing dinosaurs in great detail, the book of Job chapters 40 and 41.
Dinosaurs were the subject of one of my favourite Sunday School lessons – and the fact that two of those fearsome creatures were so carefully described in those two chapters tells me a lot. For a start it proves that man and dinosaur were around at the same time. Job is the oldest book in the Bible, indeed it may well be the first book ever written down.
No one knows quite when it was written, possibly more than 4,000 years ago, but it was in the time when people were living much longer than now.
It deals with the subject we all struggle with: why do bad things happen to good people? A lot of bad things happened to Job, and he was a very good person. He lost everything – his children, his entire wealth and then even his health.
When three friends came to visit, they made things even worse. They were like the hyper faith types today who tell you that if you’re sick, it’s your own fault – that you must have done something wrong, or else you don’t have enough faith to be healed. Job’s comforters brought no comfort at all.
Job himself couldn’t understand what had happened, and he desperately wanted to know why God had allowed all the bad stuff in his life, when he knew he was a righteous man. Why, Lord? Why is this happening to me, when you know I love You? How often do we come to the point of asking God that?
After many chapters, God does speak to Job. He does not answer the question ‘why’. Instead, He points Job to creation, God’s incredible creation which shows His mighty power.
He points to the stars, and we did one Sunday School lesson on that (Job 38), and then God particularly points to two types of dinosaur – a land one and a marine one, which sounds like the most frightening creature ever to have lived. Personally, I am glad that both animals are extinct!
God describes them in detail and tells Job to ‘behold’ them, to think about how huge and strong they were. So they were actually here on earth when Job was. Job ‘beheld’ them – he had seen them.
Was this before or after the Flood of Noah, which was about 4,500 years ago? After. We know there must have been some young dinosaur pairs taken on to the Ark, along with all the other animals. After the Flood they were still around and they were called ‘dragons’ and sea monsters.
Outside of the Bible, there is evidence for them. There are ancient carvings and primitive paintings, a brass engraving on a bishop’s tomb, and some mentions in ancient writings of immense and scary creatures. But they gradually died out, probably killed by men because they were a menace.
In many of the old churches in southeast England that I have visited there are statues or stained glass windows showing a saint with a sword standing over a dead or dying 'dragon'
So they were disposed of, and since generations living later had never seen a dinosaur, they thought that dragons like the man-killer ‘Grendel’ in Beowulf were just mythical creatures which had never existed.
Then in 1824 the first dinosaur fossil was discovered! People were amazed! Dragons were not mythical creatures; they were real, huge, fearsome animals. Fossils are real. You cannot argue with a fossil. You would think that every scientist on earth would today bow his head and acknowledge God and the truth of the Bible, thoroughly verified by these huge fossil finds. But no. How tragic that men will not acknowledge God even when confronted with such clear and such stupendous evidence.
Before 1824 when people read the Book of Job and saw the descriptions of huge, fearsome creatures on land and in the sea, they couldn’t figure it out! They thought the land monster must have been a hippo or elephant, and the sea monster must have been a crocodile. Once dinosaur fossils were discovered, they should have connected the dots, but they didn’t, and they still don’t, despite massive amounts of evidence.
How wrong they were about the monsters described in such detail in the Book of Job , and how silly it looks now to read an old Bible commentary on Job and find such ridiculous comments. Take, for example, our old King James Bible, a hard back edition which was given to every child in the county of Surrey, England, as they left secondary school in the 1960s. It shows drawings of a hippo and a crocodile alongside Job’s chilling descriptions of monstrous animals.
They should have taken Job literally! If something is flatly stated in the Bible as a fact, and is obviously not a poetic allusion of some sort, take it at face value. God put these things in the Bible for our information, not to trick us. He described real animals, dinosaurs, and they were alive when Job was on earth. They should have commissioned drawings of dinosaurs for that Bible edition – a land dino and a monstrous sea creature.
Man and dinosaurs were on the earth together. It is very plain, just from the book of Job.
There is a lot more evidence that dinos and man shared the same era. Look on the creation.com website for a ton of articles and books which tell the truth.
The largest may have been 30 ft tall and 190ft long, according to Wikipedia, but other sources say the largest was 80 ft tall – taller than any building in this whole area! 80ft is as high as an 8 storey building, and we don’t have anything that high in our part of southeast England.
But modern science says that dinosaurs have not become extinct at all – they have evolved into birds. Uh, did I hear that right? Yep, dinos into birds.
There is ‘almost universal consensus among palaeontologists that birds are the descendants of theropod (T-Rex) dinosaurs’, according to Wikipedia. Oh, really? From a ferocious T-Rex as high as my house, evolving down to the cheery little robin in my garden? You really want us to believe that?
You call that science? I call it nuttiness!
Truly, as the Bible says, ‘thinking themselves wise, they become fools.’
* I was surprised when Pat Robertson popped up on my phone, because he is not someone I would listen to. I regret listening to him when I was first saved in the 1980s, and would like a refund on all the money I sent his organisation.
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