Dinosaurs:
Nonbelievers would like us all to think that the existence of dinosaurs debunks Christianity and proves the theory of evolution but they are mistaken. Believers don’t deny that dinosaurs once roamed the earth; it’s just a matter of when they did. Most believers just don’t think the dinosaurs became extinct sixty million years ago and well before man arrived on the earth. Those of us with a literal interpretation of the Bible understand that God created the universe, man and the dinosaurs 6000 years ago. As Christian believers we also agree that the original Hebrew Bible (the Old Testament) does mention dinosaurs, though it never actually uses the word “dinosaur.” Instead, it uses the Hebrew word “tanniyn”, which is translated a few different ways in our English Bibles. Sometimes it’s “sea monster,” and sometimes it’s “serpent.” Today tanniyn is most commonly translated as “dragon.” The Bible describes a couple of creatures is such a way that some scholars believe the writers may have been describing dinosaurs.
Job 40:15-16 – Look now at the behemoth, which I made along with you; he eats grass like an ox. See now, his strength is in his hips, and his power is in his stomach muscles.
Job 40:17-18 – He moves his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his thighs are tightly knit. His bones are like beams of bronze, his ribs are like bars of iron.
The tanniyn appears to have been some sort of giant reptile and the mightiest of all God’s creatures; a giant whose tail is likened to a cedar tree. Some scholars have tried to identify the behemoth as either an elephant or a hippopotamus. Others point out that elephants and hippos have very thin tails, nothing comparable to a cedar tree. Dinosaurs like the brachiosaurus and diplodocus, on the other hand, had huge tails which could easily be compared to a cedar tree. The word “Leviathan” appears five times in the Old Testament, referring to a large sea creature we know to be a dinosaur. These tanniyn are mentioned nearly thirty times in the Old Testament and were found both on land and in the water. We know them all today, collectively, as dinosaurs.
Job 41:1 – Can you draw out Leviathan with a hook, or snare his tongue with a line which you lower?
Isaiah 27:1 – In that day the Lord with His severe sword, great and strong, will punish Leviathan the fleeing serpent, Leviathan that twisted serpent; and He will slay the reptile that is in the sea.
The Leviathan was a large aquatic creature of some kind. The Bible refers to it as a fearsome beast having monstrous ferocity and great power. The Hebrew word for “Leviathan” has the root meaning of “coiled” or “twisted.” In Job chapter 41, God goes to great length to describe the size, strength and viciousness of Leviathan. God’s description of the leviathan concludes with a statement that it is the true king of beasts: “Nothing on earth is its equal-a creature without fear.” Based on the biblical description, it seems likely the leviathan is a large sea reptile, possibly a species of dinosaur such as the plesiosaurus. If God said he made leviathan and behemoth then, by extension, God must have made all the species of dinosaurs; and at the same time that he made the universe and us. Job’s acquaintance with a dinosaur is not far-fetched at all, given the book of Job is set in a very early time of history.
Psalm 104:25-26 – This great and wide sea, in which are innumerable teeming things, living things both small and great. There the ships sail about; there is that Leviathan which you have made to play there.
Job 41:11 – Who has preceded Me, that I should pay him? everything under heaven is Mine.
Nearly every ancient civilization has some sort of art depicting giant reptilian creatures. Petroglyphs, artifacts, and even little clay figurines found in North America resemble modern depictions of dinosaurs. Rock carvings in South America depict men riding diplodocus-like creatures and, amazingly, bear the familiar images of triceratops-like, and tyrannosaurus rex-like creatures. Roman, Mayan and Babylonian history makes reference to dinosaur-like creatures. This can’t be all a coincidence. There are fossilized footprints of humans and dinosaurs found together at places in North America and West-Central Asia. Humanists would have us believe a giant meteor struck the earth 60 million years ago and wiped out all the dinosaurs. They also claim that a small cat-sized mammal survived the meteor strike and that man evolved from that small creature. Give me a break! That is total speculation without a shred of evidence!
Colossians 1:16-17 – For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on the earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist.
Romans 11:36 – For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.
Job 9:8 – He (God) alone spreads out the heavens, and treads on the waves of the sea.
If you’re a believer who interprets the Bible literally then you will have a young earth interpretation because God says he made the universe and man 6000 years ago over a span of six 24 hour days before resting on the seventh day. God always speaks the truth plainly. If you accept this truth of God then you must also believe man and dinosaurs coexisted at the same time in history past; which adequately explains the presence of dinosaur fossils. The question then becomes, what happened to the dinosaurs and when did it happen? Dinosaurs may or may not have been on Noah’s Ark but most scholars now believe God did save the dinosaurs from the flood. It doesn’t really matter.
What is important is accepting the fact that dinosaurs were created by God 6000 years ago. Dinosaurs could have easily fitted on the ark because the average dinosaur was about the size of a horse and for the larger dinosaurs only small juveniles would have been taken on the ark; similar to what we said happened with elephants, rhinos and hippos. While the Bible doesn’t discuss the issue, it’s likely the dinosaurs died out sometime after the flood due to a combination of the dramatic environmental shifts that occurred after the flood and the fact that they were relentlessly hunted to extinction by man.
Psalm 8:3-4 – When I consider your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars, which you have ordained, what is man that you are mindful of him, and the son of man that you visit him?
Job 26:7 – He (the Lord) stretches out the north over empty space, He hangs the earth on nothing.
Proverbs 16:4 – The Lord has made all for Himself, yes, even the wicked for the day of doom.
The theory of dinosaurs is like the theory of evolution; they both sound good but they have no evidence to back them up. If the humanists had hard evidence to prove their theories we’d have heard about it by now. Humanists would like nothing better than to disprove the Bible story of creation and debunk Christianity as a religion altogether; but that’s simply not the case. They’ve been trying for 2000 years to find errors in the Bible and haven’t succeeded yet. The Bible is still the inerrant word of God. Praise the Lord! Humanists vehemently deny the existence of a supernatural God that is above man. They see man himself as a god. These humanist point to all these dinosaur fossils buried in the ground as proof that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. They deny the great flood ever happened and disregard any potential aftermath but the truth is self-evident.
During the great flood of Noah’s time many millions of tons of sediment would have been stirred up all over the earth. All the dead plants and animals of the earth would have slowly settled to the bottom of the seas first, and then all the sediment would have slowly settled on top of them. We’re talking millions of tons of dirt and organic debris eventually compacting to create a soft stratum (or layers of rock) on the surface of the earth. The organic debris decayed to form oil deposits. Think about this. All life, both plant and animal, are carbon-based life forms. When living tissue dies it decays back into its basic carbon compounds. Oil deposits prove that a whole lot of living things, both plant and animal, died all at one time and was deposited together in one place and was sealed off by a layer of sediment. The only plausible explanation for these occurrences is the great flood of Noah’s time.
Of course you’re going to find fossils buried in the ground because they don’t easily decay. The presence of fossils do not disprove the Bible. On the contrary, Fossil remains confirm the Bible account of Noah and the great flood. Sometimes these fossils were found deep in the ground and sometimes near the surface of the earth but that has no correlation to the age of the fossils. Digging through these so called “geologic zones” is the number one way paleontologists date dinosaur fossils and the deeper they are found the older they claim the fossils to be. It’s not accurate.
Zechariah 12:1 – The Lord, who stretches out the heavens, lays the foundation of the earth, and forms the spirit of man within him.
Genesis 2:7 – And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living being.
Ecclesiastes 3:11 – He has made everything beautiful in its time. He has also set eternity in the hearts of men; yet they cannot fathom what God has done from beginning to end.
Paleontologists are of course all atheists that accept the theory of evolution and that dinosaurs lived millions of years ago. If they didn’t they wouldn’t be in their line of work. They interpret the age of fossil records based on that worldview. They make their data fit their menta; paradigm. The other major fossil dating method frequently used is through potassium-argon radiometric dating (K-Ar). This is a tricky method of determining how much of these two elements remain in the samples tested. The problem is this test has proven unreliable in the past. For example, living animals have been tested and the test said they were 300,000 plus years old. A ten year old lava flow from Mount St. Helens was dated 340,000 years old. The list goes on. There is no accurate way to date dinosaur fossils.
Psalm 19:1 – The heavens declare the glory of God; and the firmament shows His handiwork.
Isaiah 44:24 – Thus says the Lord, your Redeemer, and He who formed you in the womb: I am the Lord who makes all things, who stretches out the heavens all alone, who spreads abroad the earth by Myself.
Ephesians 2:10 – For we are His workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand that we should walk in them.
God is the author of all truth, knowledge and true science. It was God who established all the physical laws of the universe. When fallible science does not correspond to fallible theology, we cannot blame the Bible. The scientific assumptions may be wrong, or the biblical interpretations may be wrong, or both-but the Scriptures never are. Scripture may be misinterpreted, but it will never be wrong. Another unfortunate tendency in modern atheism is to compare science to a single interpretation in the Bible, then declare that science has “proved” the Bible incorrect. This of course is illogical. At the most, all that might be disproved is that particular interpretation of Scripture. God usually states important spiritual truths multiple times throughout the Bible so it’s a good practice to always use Scripture to interpret Scripture if you can. Never base a Bible interpretation on a single vague Scripture taken out of context as nonbelievers are prone to do.
Psalm 53:1 – The fool has said in his heart, there is no God. They are corrupt, and have done abominable iniquity; there is none who does good.
Proverbs 12:15 – The way of a fool is right in his own eyes, but he who heeds counsel is wise.
The fields of paleontology and fossilology are highly prone to error when dating fossil records. In the last century, we have witnessed countless examples of “groundbreaking” discoveries that have ultimately been proven to be misleading. One famous example is the coelacanth. Declared to have been extinct for about 70 million years, this fish was thought by scientists to have been among the first to walk out of the ocean on its way to becoming the ascendant of modern man. There was great excitement and surprise in the scientific community when a fisherman caught a living coelacanth off the island of Madagascar in 1938. Many evolutionists believed the reason this fish disappeared from the fossil record is that it had evolved into land-dwelling tetrapods.
Hebrews 12:28-29 – Therefore, since we are receiving a kingdom which cannot be shaken, let us have grace, by which we may serve God acceptably with reverence and godly fear.
Luke 1:37 – For with God nothing will be impossible.
The reason this is important is that many fossils have been dated to be roughly 70 million years old mostly because their remains were found in the same geological stratum as remains of the coelacanth. And yet there are coelacanths alive today that look exactly like those fossils-so use of coelacanth fossils to date other fossils, as it turns out, isn’t all that accurate. A fossil record is simply a catalog of when the death of a living plant or animal occurred. Fossil records don’t confirm the theory of evolution as the humanists claim. They prove just the opposite. The deposition of fossil records corresponds with the biblical account of the great flood and prove that a young earth is 6000 years old. The fact that there are vast sedimentary deposits all over the world confirms the great flood destroyed all plants and animals at the same and caused them to be deposited on the sea beds and then were covered over with sediment. It’s just common sense that the fossilization process must have occurred at the same time in our past. It must have begun after Adam’s sin introduced death and decay into our world. No other explanation fits the data.
Micah 6:8 – He has shown you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justly, to love mercy, and to walk humbly with your God?
2 Corinthians 5:7 – For we walk by faith, not by sight.
Know that nonbelievers will confront us and attack Christianity. God calls them fools. They believe in their baseless theories on evolution and the age of dinosaurs without any supporting facts. Nonbelievers and some weak-minded believers tend to home in on the areas they consider the weak points of our faith, namely Noah’s Ark, Jonah and dinosaurs. Humanists took over the world’s education system in the world long ago so they could indoctrinate us with their lies and baseless theories of evolution and dinosaurs to the point where most people believe the lies. Humanists have brainwashed the masses and would have us believe that man evolved from one cell organisms in the primordial ooze of the distant past into modern man consisting of thirty trillion cells that arranged into specialized tissues, organs and body systems all by themselves, complete with a brain that is the greatest super computer in the universe. Their conclusion cannot be supported by the facts.
1 Peter 3:15 – But sanctify the Lord God in your hearts, and always be ready to give a defense to everyone who asks you a reason for the hope that is in you, with meekness and fear.
Proverbs 23:12 – Apply your heart to instruction, and your ears to words of knowledge.
Are you gullible enough to believe such a tall tale? I’m certainly not. Humanists must also convince us the earth is millions of years old to allow the necessary time for evolution to take place. The theory of the dinosaurs is just another lie backing up the first lie. Some lukewarm believers who are weak-minded and not strong in their faith have also fallen for these lies and started to doubt the absolute truth of the Bible, which is Satan’s plan. Once you start doubting the Bible you’re on the slippery slope that leads to doubting God and eventually losing your faith altogether. To prevent that we need to study God’s word so we know the truth of God. In this blog series I have tried to provide a defense for the three most common attacks against Christianity that you will hear from nonbelievers, which is Noah’s Ark, Jonah and dinosaurs.
Gird yourself for the battle that will surely come! Nonbelievers and doubters have no original thoughts of their own. They are just repeating what they’ve heard or what they’ve been told. They don’t know any better because they haven’t actually studied God’s word to find out the truth of God. If they did they would be resolute believers. They are just too lazy to search out the truth of God for themselves. God calls them fools. Try your best to educate the nonbelievers and lukewarm Christians. We owe it to Jesus to fulfill the “Great Commission” as best we can, with firmness and gentleness. It’s our reasonable service to the God who made us.