The Marvel of Living Creatures: The Sixth Day

[0:00] Yeah, they're hymns. They're great hymns. Well, we are in Genesis chapter 1 together rehearsing the glorious truths of God's creative activity.

[0:24] Before the world knew God as Savior, the world knew God as Creator. So the title of my message for this morning, The Marvel of Living Creatures, The Sixth Day, that's the same title that I used last week.

[0:41] And that's what we're going to focus on today, even though we're taking in a number of verses that deal with God making mankind as well. We'll have to wait for that, Lord willing, until next week, because I want to give you this material on the sixth day that kind of walks us in to what God's going to do in making mankind.

[1:01] So we are in the sixth day, but at the beginning of the sixth day, God is making these land creatures. So what I want to do, just like I did last Sunday, I'll ask you to just turn on your imaginations, put them in hyperdrive with me for a moment.

[1:18] Let's imagine by the text of Scripture guiding us what we're talking about this morning in the way of God's creative activity. This is after now five days of supernatural creative work.

[1:37] Everything is fresh. Everything is fertile. Everything is flowing with pristine perfection. The sun rises and the sun sets must have been breathtaking.

[1:53] There's nothing to obscure, nothing to get in the way. Everything is just so beautifully fresh. The air is fresh.

[2:06] The skies are clear. The waters are pure. And the sounds of the landscape are the harmonious sounds of God's handiwork.

[2:18] Everything is in perfection. That's hard for us because we've never been at any time in our lives experiencing anything near perfection, even in our worship.

[2:35] One day it will be perfect, right? And there'll be nothing of us to obscure us giving God his praise and glory. Imagine with me birds of every kind singing, filling the skies and the trees.

[2:54] Great sea creatures by this time, untold swarms and swarms of fish filling the seas and the other waters of the earth.

[3:08] There is perfect harmony among the creatures. They all live side by side with each other. All is at peace and all is at rest.

[3:22] The sights, the sounds, the smells of a perfect, perfect earth must have been, in my mind, exhilarating. I mean, it's a place that you want to be.

[3:37] The entire scene must have been soul-stirring. But that is precisely what's still missing from what God has in mind.

[3:49] There is no soul to be stirred by this magnificent display of God's wisdom and power and goodness. All is still good.

[4:01] Everything that God's made has received his stamp of it is good by his measure of things. The earth is full of the vegetation and living creatures occupy the skies and the seas.

[4:15] But the earth still has no land creatures. Most importantly, it has no human souls. So all God's handiwork in creation has led to this point and to this moment in God's creative activity.

[4:31] Days one through five culminate and are complete on the sixth day. In other words, what God does next on the sixth day as he creates animals to roam and mankind to rule, that was always the reason for days one through five.

[4:51] It's one more reason that you and I understand that as we read this text of scripture, we read it literally. We receive it literally. There's no reason for us to try and force feed this idea of pseudoscience and millions of years and evolution into the text of the creative account in Genesis one.

[5:15] If we begin to monkey with this thing now, we're going to see it compound as we move through the scriptures and try to understand this God who's revealing himself to us as creator, as sustainer, as the authority of all the universe.

[5:33] If we cannot, please hear me, friends. If we cannot take God at his word in Genesis one, we have rocked the foundation of everything he wants to say to us throughout scripture.

[5:47] It stands or falls on Genesis one. It is a hill to die on for the church. And at Grace Church, Greg and I preach this truth as a hill to die on.

[6:01] 24 hour days is not something that we look at each other and say, well, we can just agree to disagree. We want you to understand the deceptive nature and schemes of Satan wanting to crack that door on your soul.

[6:17] Folks, there are all kinds of doctrines that are going to be difficult for us to put our minds around. One of them, think of this, the Trinity. If you can't believe in a creator God making the world in six literal days, how are you going to believe in a God three in one?

[6:34] What are you going to do with that? How are you going to believe in a God who takes a sinner and turns him into a saint and reconciles him to himself by giving his son on a cross in your place?

[6:49] That doesn't make any sense that God would do that. None. He could have done it any way he wanted, but that's the way he chose. He could have made the world in six minutes.

[7:01] He did it in six days. There's a reason that we stand on these doctrines as they are presented to us in Scripture. There is no good reason on any level of our study why we don't take the Genesis account as it's written, literally, and apply it to our lives and allow it to teach what it teaches about God.

[7:23] So God creates land animals on this beginning of the sixth day. He created those animals to roam the land and he created man on the sixth day to rule all that he made in the land as we read in Psalm 8.

[7:38] So we'll begin in the way that we have as we've made this little outline going along. We're going to begin with God's good way. I'm playing on the idea here that in every single day that God has made, he has in some way or another communicated to us that it's all good.

[7:56] At some level or another, it's all good. Everything that God's done. So this is God's good way, the sixth day, land creatures and mankind.

[8:08] We'll just deal with the land animals. So we'll begin with the good of God said, land creatures in verse 24. Look at that with me if you will.

[8:20] Then God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures. We dealt with the phrase living creatures last Sunday. After their kind.

[8:31] That is a very, very important phrase repeated throughout the creation account. Then God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind.

[8:42] Cattle, creeping things and beasts of the earth. After their kind. And now notice, and it was so.

[8:53] No evolution. God spoke and all of that came into being it was so. Verse 25. God made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind and God saw that it was good.

[9:19] Then God said, let us make man, that is mankind, in our image according to our likeness and let them rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over the cattle and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.

[9:44] God created man in his own image. In the image of God he created him. Male and female he created them. God blessed them and God said to them, this is the first time now God is speaking directly to his creation in terms of them being able to respond.

[10:02] Look at this, God blessed them and God said to them, be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.

[10:19] That's moving on the earth today, that's what we're studying. Then God said in verse 29, Behold, I have given you every plant yielding seed that is on the surface of all the earth.

[10:33] Every tree which has fruit yielding seed, it shall be food for you. To every beast of the earth and to every bird of the sky and to everything that moves on the earth which has life, I have given every green plant for food and it was so.

[10:49] God saw all that he had made and behold, it was very good and there was evening and there was morning the sixth day.

[11:02] Well, right away, friends, in verse 24 as we begin the sixth day in two succinct verses, God tells us that he created all the air-breathing creatures and critters instantaneously.

[11:21] The Lord spoke into existence ants to apes, snakes, I don't know why, to snails, beavers to bears, wombats to wolves, bees to beetles and donkeys to dinosaurs, believe it or not, believe it, along with many, many others.

[11:54] And here's the thing, all fully mature, all ready to respond in obedience to God's command, be fruitful and multiply.

[12:06] not, now I'm going to wait for a while, I'll be patient. In millions of years, you guys will be ready to do these kinds of things. No, God spoke and it was so.

[12:20] And we believe it. And that's very important. The verse that we're looking at, verse 24, then God said, let the earth bring forth these living creatures.

[12:33] That's an interesting phrase. Let the earth bring forth. You'll see it also, look over in verse 12 with me, the earth brought forth vegetation.

[12:44] These are kind of a different twist on the idea of God saying and then God making. Now, commentators were mixed about the meaning of this phrase.

[12:58] Most believe it to mean that the earth acted as a secondary cause in the creation of the animals. In other words, the animals themselves were made from the same elements that God used to make the ground, the actual earth, the stuff of the ground.

[13:20] And this view, which I adopt as well, this view coincides with what is said in, if you'll look, chapter 2, verse 19.

[13:32] Out of the ground, the Lord God formed every beast of the field and every bird of the sky and brought them to the man to see what he would call them.

[13:43] Out of the ground. You also see it said of mankind in chapter 2, verse 7. Then the Lord God formed man of dust from the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.

[14:00] Now here's why this is important. This is important that we see the difference, the difference between God as the author of this work of giving life both to animals and to mankind and how pagans, unbelievers, see Mother Earth itself as the giver of life.

[14:23] Do you see that? In other words, they animate the earth. They animate the ground and then give the ground the credit for animating other life.

[14:35] That is not the truth, is it, friends? The truth is that God made the dirt and the dirt did not make mankind and the dirt did not make the animals.

[14:46] God made them. And anything other than God directly speaking it into existence was a secondary cause that God used to make whatever he made.

[14:58] And this is the point that most commentators are making when they talk about the elements of the earth being the same elements God used to make us. And sometimes I think we feel and sense that kinship with the earth, with the ground itself.

[15:17] Now, just very quickly, I was raised on a farm in and out of my dad's military career. The generational family farm was always in my life and I remember as a young guy, my dad and grandfather out there plowing the fields and I would be out there watching my dad on the tractor and every row he would come back, I would move to that row and stand there looking longingly, please ride me on the tractor.

[15:40] That thing was humongous. I just wanted to ride. And so I would just follow him until he gave me the, okay, one of the reasons that he didn't want to do that is as a young, young, young guy sitting up there on the fender well of that big old tractor.

[15:52] He didn't want me falling off back into that Hera kind of thing, right? But I didn't know all that. I just wanted to go. But I remember the smell of the earth. And I couldn't take my shoes off and go barefoot in it because I didn't like to be barefooted.

[16:04] But I love the smell. I have so many weirdness, man. But I love the smell of the soil. And I would get down on my hands and knees and feel it.

[16:15] And that's in my life, man. It's like in my blood. I can go past a field and smell a fresh plowed field and it takes me right back to those mountains. There's something about the earth.

[16:26] Maybe not for everybody. Well, unbelievers take that kind of thing and exploit it and follow it and turn it into something to worship. And we're making the point here that the earth isn't something we're supposed to worship.

[16:41] It's something that we rule over. That's our mandate. And we don't want to confuse those things, but Satan does. God's word then does not teach us that Mother Earth is the mother of all things.

[16:55] And neither does true science. We want to make another point and let you know true science is a friend of scripture. True science is. The trick is understanding and knowing the difference between pseudoscience and true science as it bears on God's word.

[17:11] This false worship of Mother Earth is reflective of sinful rebellion and satanic deception. And I'll put this up here just so that we can have it on record. The heart being thoroughly corrupted by sin forfeits true spiritual perspective on the issues of life.

[17:30] Depravity makes it impossible for us to have a true perspective on the spiritual issues of life. You'll see that in 1 Corinthians chapter 2 verse 14 and following. The earth did not birth life.

[17:44] The elements of the ground were created created by God. Life did not spring from some random chemical process 4 billion 4 billion years ago or even 4,000 years ago for all of us young creationists, young earth creationists.

[18:04] No. Life did not spring from a random chemical process even 4,000 years ago. It sprang from God's heart and mind. God spoke all of it into existence.

[18:15] This is our God. This is who we're singing about. This is who we've gathered to worship this morning in honor. Friends, listen. This is so important. I'm building. All of this is building towards things that I want to say to you next week.

[18:29] God willing. I've prayed God, please give me life. I've got about a third of that sermon already done. It just had to come out and now I just need to go back and fill in some some things.

[18:40] I am so ready to preach next week already. I hope you'll come. I've said, Lord, please don't take me to heaven before I preach this one. I want them to hear this. Look, no matter how sophisticated, fascinating and even visually stunning the material on evolution might be when we encounter teaching which contradicts the Bible, we don't try to fit the Bible to the so-called science.

[19:07] When the world speaks to the issues the Bible speaks to, those claims must be measured by Scripture, not the other way around. We don't start with the pseudoscience or whatever and then come back and say, well, let's let's see if the Bible can measure up to what science is saying.

[19:25] That's you're wrong footed when you do that. You're on terrible ground when you don't do that with any of the doctrines of Scripture, much less the doctrine of creation. No, we start with what Scripture tells us.

[19:37] There was only one person that was there at the beginning and that was God. It wasn't us. We had to be made by this God. So we should listen to what God says as the only witness to the origins of life.

[19:53] Let me go on and say a few more things about that. For example, if the science contradicts six 24-hour days, it's not science. when science tells us that marine life evolved first, which it does, then the plants, then the birds, etc., it's not true, credible science because it's contradicting the Bible.

[20:23] Billions and millions of years, natural selection, life originating and evolving by struggle and domination and multiple mass extinctions are conjecture based on bad science and unfiltered bias.

[20:42] It's a faith response to what people want to believe contrary to Scripture. Mark it down. And we know where lies come from.

[20:52] It's satanic. Let's call it what it is. From this pulpit, we have to do that. I'm mandated to do that. Any righteous indignation that I feel is the righteous indignation of me working with people for over 30 years and watching this poison their souls.

[21:11] One of the reasons abortion is so rampant around the world is because we've taught people that we're anything but human. And so we can do what we want.

[21:22] And act as we want. There are all kinds of ramifications that we'll try to go into at least some of those. Friends, we are always safe to always measure scientific claims by scriptural clarity.

[21:37] Why? Because true science is God's realm. They're his laws, truths, principles, systems. And he uses all of that to govern his world. True science will never contradict Scripture.

[21:51] And we never need to feel the pressure to take what science is saying and push it into the Bible and make the Bible fit it. Again, we're wrong footed when we're taking that approach.

[22:03] It's very dangerous. But the deceptive nature of Satan's schemes to corrupt our confidence in God as our creator and in Scripture as God's only true revelation of himself as our creator is a powerful force poisoning and driving so much of our society today.

[22:22] I think if you began a study in this and really stuck to it, it might shock you to find out how much evolutionary theory is in the absolute fabric of our society and the psyche of all mankind.

[22:36] We have been thoroughly indoctrinated over decades and we are suffering the effects of it even now. Let me give you some examples of this pseudo-scientific bias and conjecture being taught as scientific fact.

[22:56] This is completely contrary to what we learn about our origins in Genesis chapter 1. It's completely contrary to what God says when he says, let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind.

[23:10] Who was the active agent in that process? God. God. Cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind and it was so.

[23:22] That's the sixth day of creation. God is making all of these land creatures on the sixth day. For more than two decades, friends, archaeologists have been finding soft tissue in dinosaur bones.

[23:37] Did you hear what I said? Now, these are not Christians documenting this. These are unbelievers, scientists and archaeologists documenting their own finds, taking them back to laboratories and studying them and standing there in awe when they cut these bones open and they find soft tissue.

[23:58] That's not all. They've discovered ligaments, blood and bone cells, flexible blood vessels, proteins and collagen, osteocalcin, which is a protein hormone, actin, globular protein, histones, blood proteins, and even DNA.

[24:21] Given the process of decomposition and the length of 165 million years, scientists, evolutionists, and paleontologists are baffled as to how these discoveries can be explained.

[24:38] But they tenaciously hold on to Darwinian evolutionary theory and natural selection. They white knuckle their grip on lies in the face of clear evidence that they themselves are finding.

[24:56] And there it is. Folks, listen. Such is the power of Satan's deceptions and lies against the human soul. This is why we're told in scripture that we suppress the truth in unrighteousness.

[25:11] We push it down. We look at the stars, the sun and the moon and the creative universe and refuse to believe there is a designer. That is all something that happened randomly over four billions of years.

[25:25] And you say that's insane. Well, that is the definition of sin, is it not? It's insanity. And that's where we live. That's where so much of our world lives, not just the United States.

[25:38] Given these laws of decomposition, they still refuse to believe. Listen to this. One of their own prominent scientists, herself, a committed theistic evolutionist, observed this.

[25:55] When you think about it, the laws of chemistry and biology and everything else that we know say that it should be gone. It should be degraded completely.

[26:06] It what? All that list of stuff I just told you. She is leading the charge in these discoveries. And she's saying, we can't explain why we're discovering something that should long, long, long ago have decomposed or mineralized.

[26:26] And it's fresh. We have no explanation. What would be your explanation? Don't answer. What would be your explanation? Just think about that. As you read scripture and measure science against the truth of God's word.

[26:40] And we ask the question, well, does God's word even have anything to say about all of this? Or are Christians left just standing there in the conversation about all this going, yeah, well, you know, I don't know.

[26:51] I mean, I believe God made it, but, you know, I guess. No. We look them right in the eye and we say, Jesus Christ is the creator of all things and he sustains all things and all things are upheld by the power of his might.

[27:08] And we're not embarrassed. And they look at you and say, why do you always bring religion into science? And we respond because God is the author of science, because he's the author of truth.

[27:20] They're his laws, because he made all this. All of this answers to him. Let me give you example after example where God, the creator of this universe, broke his own laws by walking on water.

[27:35] Speaking storms into existence and telling him to hush, be still. Raising people from the dead who were decomposing in graves and he pulled them out of the grave and made them alive.

[27:49] This is the power of our God to take a dead soul and breathe life into it and bring it to heaven for all eternity. Do you see everything stands or falls on this creator God?

[28:00] God. This God that we love and who loves us and gave his son for us that we might know him forever. The doctrines of Darwinian evolution are being taught and embraced as fact in every facet of society.

[28:21] The twin ideas that we involve from randomness and that there is no purpose to life beyond escaping extinction and surviving are poisoning us.

[28:34] We're drinking it. We're eating it. We're taking it in and it's poisoning us. I want you to see this graphic. This was a graphic that was done by a secular institution and research organization.

[28:48] It's evolution as settled science. So they polled middle schools across the country who were teaching different curriculum and this is what they came up with.

[28:59] How many teachers are now using evolutionary teaching? This was from 2019. 51 to 67% are teaching evolution not as theory but as settled science.

[29:13] Science in middle schools across our nation. That's their figure. That's what they came up with. That's indoctrination folks.

[29:25] In another graphic that I saw the colors were different. The colors in the biggest bars were green and they used another color to represent the other categories.

[29:39] And one of the people behind all of this has started a campaign years ago called Grow the Green. Do you understand what he's saying?

[29:50] We want more and more of our elementary schools and middle schools to be teaching evolution as established scientific fact.

[30:00] Grow the Green. They are an active campaigning group trying to get this in our public school system beyond the 51 to 67%.

[30:11] One of the things I don't know which one bothers you most but one of the things that bothers me the most is the green category of avoidance. We just avoid it all together.

[30:23] We just don't want to have a say one way or the other. We're just staying out of the battle. Well then what are they teaching? What are they telling them about biology and world history? I don't know.

[30:34] I don't have an answer for all that. I want to give you another example and this is a little bit of a test. So as you sit there and I run through these what I'd like for you to do is ask yourself can I recognize just in these titles alone can I recognize some of the things that are wrong with what they're calling science and how that's not lining up with what scripture says.

[30:59] That's what I'd like to ask you to do. The program is called Life on Our Planet. Steven Spielberg is the producer. Morgan Freeman is the narrator.

[31:11] There are eight episodes on naturalistic evolutionary theory only they are presented as scientific fact. I've watched two of the programs so far.

[31:22] I've made myself do it. Suzanne made me put all the guns up. She locked them up in the safe. And I've made myself watch them and it is painful but it is fascinating.

[31:32] And let me say this for them. I'll give them this. They have made a visually stunning presentation of what they put forward. They put things on the screen and they make it look like they were there filming it 165 million years ago.

[31:48] It is incredible. And Suzanne watched it with her jaw hanging open and she said, Jeff, this is so dangerous because this is so believable. The way they present it.

[32:01] Life on our planet. Let me offer just the episode descriptions for you. You see what you can spot in the way of it not lining up with scripture. Here's the first one.

[32:13] It's entitled The Rules of Life. I'm quoting. This is total quote. Evolution, competition, mass extinction. Three fundamental rules have driven the rise and fall of life on earth for over 4 billion years.

[32:29] Episode 2. The First Frontier. For billions of years land on earth was uninhabitable. But in the seas, predation allowed species to thrive before and after two mass extinctions.

[32:49] Episode 3. Invaders of the land. Sprawling moss, towering trees, flying insects, limbed amphibians.

[33:00] Early species vied for domination as the land went from hostile to hospitable. I think they got that exactly backwards, didn't they?

[33:13] In Cold Blood. Episode 4. After earth's third mass extinction, mammals' surviving ancestors ruled the supercontinent Pangaea.

[33:26] But lizards soon ushered in the age of reptiles. Thank the Lord for them lizards. Saving the day. Episode 5. In the shadow of giants, the formation of continents with varied environments allowed for an explosion of biodiversity and turbocharged the evolution of mighty dinosaurs.

[33:47] What we're studying today, in the sixth day. And then, out of the ashes, the dinosaurs met their end with a cataclysmic asteroid impact.

[34:02] Rising from the ashes, birds reinvented themselves into a dynasty, 10,000 species strong. Thank you for the birds. Inheriting the earth.

[34:14] Emerging from the dinosaur shadows, mammals went from underdogs to global power. With game-changing adaptations that would conquer land, air, and sea.

[34:25] Age of Ice and Fire, the final episode. As the ice age thawed, humans rose above the rest.

[34:35] But, here we go, the possibility of a sixth mass extinction now looms has our ingenuity caused our downfall. And so, they breed fear into your heart and make it sound like it's all up to you to save the planet.

[34:59] You know, I make fun of this in some ways and that's allowed because it's ridiculous. Birds, 10,000 strong, created a new dynasty and reinvented the earth.

[35:15] And it gets worse and worse. Now, I've watched some of these episodes not one single time do they ever say possibly, might have been, could have happened, perhaps, everything is presented as dogged fact.

[35:36] We know that. When the earth happened, when volcanoes did, like they were standing right there and they give you all the visuals as if the cameras were there three and a half billion years ago watching all of the muck start to come up and form.

[35:55] It's very convincing. And I feel for kids who are going to sit down and watch all of this and take it right into their hearts and then grow up and find the world.

[36:06] It's scary stuff if we didn't know God was sovereign and it was his world and that God's got a grip on all of that. Look at verse 24 with me again.

[36:17] Then God said, let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind. And it was so.

[36:27] What an important little phrase at the end of that verse. Living creatures after their kind. Well, what kinds are mentioned? Cattle, creeping things and beasts.

[36:39] All right. Cattle, cattle is actually an interesting word. It's the word behemoth. Yes, that's where we get the singular form behemoth. It's a transliterated word from this word behemoth.

[36:53] It typically refers to domesticated animals used for helping humans. From the very beginning, God made these tame, tameable animals to help us, to be part of what God wanted for us in our rule over the world.

[37:15] Remember, before sin, animals were just vegetarians, right? Everything ate plants and all. There's no carnivorous meat eaters or anything like that. It goes on to tell us cows, oxen, sheep, donkeys, even camels would be examples of behemoth.

[37:36] Helpful animals, domesticatable animals. God hardwired these animals to be tamed and useful for us from the beginning. No fight for dominance, no evolution to become tame, no competition against mankind.

[37:54] The dinosaurs aren't running around eating people right now. It's not happening. Then he goes on to this category in the verse, creeping things, remes, moving things is what he's talking about.

[38:07] It doesn't have to be all the creepy crawlies that we, you know, freak out about. Remes, moving things. They can be the creepy crawlies like beetles and roaches and ants.

[38:19] Sure, but it goes beyond that. It takes in small mammals like mice. And then how about these guys? Meerkats.

[38:31] How about this guy? I'm sorry, I thought about a particular person in our congregation and I just, Jessica, hold his hand right now and comfort him because I don't want to put in there.

[38:41] We heard a story from a certain gentleman in our congregation who will remain nameless on Saturday and so when I saw this I said I got to throw this one in there. It's okay, buddy, it's okay.

[38:54] You get the story afterwards. It's a good one. The Mexican red knee tarantula. Yeah, God made that. How about this one? The millipede and lots and lots of cousins and then I thought of Mike and Annette when this one came up so I had to include this one, the mallard duck.

[39:13] Amen. Yum, yum, yum, yum, yum, yum. Right. And then this little guy, because most of us probably have never even heard of him, the margay, the margay.

[39:27] Also reptiles like lizards were made on the sixth day. Then we come to the category of beasts. You see that in the text there? creatures after their kind, cattle, creeping things, and beasts of the earth.

[39:44] All right? Beast is from the Hebrew haya. And it simply means to live. It is often translated as living thing or animal or particularly wild animal.

[39:58] Typically it means a wild animal as opposed to livestock. livestock. The context makes it clear. That's the context of this verse. This is wild animal as opposed to domesticated animals or land animals in contrast to birds and fish.

[40:18] That's what we're dealing with. So tigers, wildebeest, giraffes, bears, mountain lions, buffalo, deer, and even dinosaurs. Each of these creatures played a part in God's economy and creation in relation to mankind who will then be given charge to rule over all these creatures.

[40:40] The water creatures, the air creatures, the land creatures, all of them. But perhaps you and I are prone to misunderstanding about God's design for dinosaurs.

[40:54] Maybe that's where we are most susceptible. In fact, Ken Ham warns this way. dinosaurs are used more than almost anything else to indoctrinate children and adults in the idea of millions of years of earth history.

[41:11] That's Ken Ham from Answers in Genesis. He's the guy that built the theme park, as it were, out in, where is it, Greg? Kentucky, where the ark, he built the ark and has the museum and all.

[41:24] Has anybody been there from Ark on? You guys have seen it? Have you seen the ark? Were you there to see that? I've heard it's awesome. So yeah, this is the guy that I'm quoting now. The world's highly unscientific evolutionary idea about dinosaurs has confused and shaken the confidence of so many Christians who can't seem to reconcile science's depiction of dinosaurs with scripture.

[41:52] Remember, whenever and whatever the Bible speaks, it speaks truth. Period. Anything that does not line up with what the Bible speaks to is not truthful.

[42:08] And it cannot pass as true science. Does the Bible speak to every aspect of science in every single way? No. Medical science would be one of them and brain surgery might be one that we would pick out.

[42:22] I'm not going to find a passage in scripture that's going to talk to me about the medical science of brain surgery. But I'm going to find scripture telling me that God created the brain and that God's the author of how we think and process information and all that kind of thing.

[42:38] That doesn't mean that God didn't make the brain, does it? It doesn't mean that God's removed himself from the activity of what he made us to be in terms of how our brains work. The Bible can, can help us put the dinosaurs in God's place for them.

[42:54] And I know that some of you in your homeschool efforts have probably studied some of this and know some of this, but let me rehearse just a little bit of it for you. God made the dinosaurs on the sixth day, the day we're studying right now.

[43:08] Originally, the dinosaurs ate grass and plants. That's according to chapter 1, verse 30. They were not meat eaters until when? After the fall. After the fall.

[43:19] Today's teaching has dinosaurs living in stages from 165 million years ago. It's why they have so much trouble explaining soft tissue, blood cells, and DNA.

[43:31] But the Bible says that dinosaurs were God's creatures, listen now, living contemporaneously with human beings beginning on the sixth day.

[43:43] God made the dinosaurs before he made man. Adam and Eve lived at the same time of the dinosaurs according to scripture.

[43:53] That doesn't have to be a big mystery and a big hairy deal. Just like other air breathers, any dinosaurs that weren't on the ark with Noah died in the great worldwide flood.

[44:06] There were most likely only 50 to 60 distinct groups of different kinds of dinosaurs that God originally made. 50 to 60 distinct groups are different kinds of dinosaurs.

[44:19] It's one of the reasons that we can understand how it was that Noah took dinosaurs on the earth. Another article I read said that the majority of dinosaurs are no bigger than the size of, I think they said it was a cow.

[44:35] The majority of them. But we see the great big ones with the, you know, and they're running around eating everybody. True science if they were honest, would also report these kinds of things.

[44:49] Let me just go a little bit further with this with you. Again, I'm setting you up by design for more of what I'll say to you next week, God willing. All right? Let me just show you this.

[45:00] Here's a remarkable specimen, and I want to tell you about this guy. That is not a reproduction. That is what they found.

[45:16] Mineralized. That's the dinosaur. That's not clay. It's not fill-in. That's the critter. Look at that.

[45:35] He's estimated at 110 million years old. Even after that long, the article with this picture said that it was so well preserved, they were able to take samples of its last meal from its stomach.

[45:54] 110 million years. Hmm. Look at this. The dinosaur fossilized, this is a quote, the dinosaur fossilized under remarkable circumstances that they're baffled about.

[46:13] Some, I'm quoting now, somehow, this animal ended up dead in a river and then was swept more than 100 miles into a seaway that once split North America in two from the Gulf of Mexico to the Arctic Ocean and we have no idea how that happened.

[46:32] Weird. Do you have any idea how that might have happened? I wonder what great cataclysm of water could wash this dinosaur from where it was 100 miles away into the sea.

[46:48] Even after 106, that's an artist's rendition of him. even after 165 million years have gone by, here's some examples of dinosaur tracks by the hundreds.

[47:06] By the hundreds. Now, you look at that off the coast of Scotland and you think, you know, Jeff, those just look like holes. They just look like tidal pools. And you know what? You'd be right to think that.

[47:16] And lots and lots of people thought that for lots and lots of years until somebody went out there and started looking at them and they found toe impressions in all of them.

[47:29] Some of them so well preserved that they actually found the indentation of the heel, the fatty part of the heel that you see on the dinosaurs actually still in the soil.

[47:42] As if they just stepped into that hole. That's hundreds of dinosaur footprints 165 million years ago. this is what the article said.

[47:55] That's just one of them with the toe marks. Here's the impression of the heel right here. You see that outline? They even marveled at that in the article and talked about how you can actually see parts of the skin off the folds in the impression.

[48:15] That's pretty impressive for 165 million years old, man. Come on. all the weather that we've had and all. Really? Hundreds of tracks discovered along Scotland's coast show that huge, long-necked dinosaurs once walked here.

[48:32] The footprints formed the largest dinosaur site ever found in Scotland. They also showed that sauropods, which included the largest dinosaurs of all time, were at home along the shore.

[48:43] They used to think that these sauropods only visited marshes and things. They had no idea they ventured out like this. Sauropods were the largest known animals on earth.

[48:53] They were plant eaters, vegesaurus, right, with small heads, long necks and tails, and five toes. The impression of that dinosaur print that I showed you with the clear toes and the heel mark was I think they called it a theropod, not a sauropod.

[49:11] It was something else that they said walked out there with them. And that's because there was only three toes in there. Here's the description of what might be a sauropod from the Bible.

[49:22] It's in Job chapter 40. Remember Job is right before Psalms. I'm going to take you there. I took you to Job chapter 41 last week and read a portion of what Job described as Leviathan.

[49:38] Now in Job chapter 40, 15 through 24, this sounds like a description of a sauropod. Behold now Behemoth, the singular of Behemoth, which I made as well as you, Job.

[49:55] He eats grass like an ox. Behold now his strength and his loins and his power in the muscles of his belly. He bends his tail like a cedar. Cedars were the largest known trees in Israel at the time, in that area.

[50:11] They were humongous trees. He bends his tail like a cedar. The sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze.

[50:21] His limbs are like bars of iron. He is the first of the ways of God. Let his maker bring near his sword. Surely the mountains bring him food and all the beasts of the field play there.

[50:36] Under the lotus plants he lies down in the covert of the reeds and the marsh. The lotus plants cover him with shade. The willows of the brooks surround him.

[50:47] If a river rages, he's not alarmed. He is confident, though the Jordan rushes to his mouth. Can anyone capture him when he's on watch? With barbs can anyone pierce his nose?

[51:01] It could be actually describing this creature. And you can see at the bottom there in relationship to man. this is a brachiosaurus.

[51:15] There are several creatures in this family group that have these long necks and these great, huge, huge tree trunk-like tails that come out. And these real small heads.

[51:26] So I could go on and on with telling you what a design marvel it is for this animal's body to pump blood through that neck up to that brain. That in itself is a scientific marvel.

[51:42] But I got to hasten on. I can't tell you all this stuff, right? The term dinosaur itself was coined by Sir Richard Owen, a British guy in 1842.

[51:55] Owen was a famous British anatomist. He was a devoted anti-Darwinist and the first superintendent of the British Museum. He used a combination of two Greek words.

[52:06] Danos, terrible, potent, or fully great, and Saros, lizard or reptile. So this is why you don't find the actual word dinosaur in the Bible because it wasn't coined until the 1800s.

[52:19] Now I can't cover all the questions that we might ask about dinosaurs, but there are so many good, good references out there now and resources. One of them would be Answers in Genesis from Ken Ham that I just quoted you.

[52:32] Also the Institute for Creation Research, ICR, has a ton of free articles outlining all kinds of questions and answers about dinosaurs and the ark and how the dinosaurs ate and where they moved and what they did and when God made them.

[52:47] It's marvelous stuff. And all of that from a biblical perspective. The point we're making from our text, particularly in verse 24, is this.

[53:00] God made these creatures on the sixth day. God made them and they served God's purposes for bringing him glory, just like the other creatures made on the sixth day.

[53:15] Dinosaurs, all the different mammals and all of them brought God glory and served his purposes. Did the dinosaurs serve the purposes of God?

[53:26] Yes, they did. Do I understand all of that? No, any more than I understand why God made rattlesnakes. How does a rattlesnake serve God's purpose? I don't know. It eats rats. Well, there's lots of things that eat rats and don't have fangs and put poison in people.

[53:40] But I'm not going to question the Lord in all of that. I don't want to get into all that. Notice the final words of verse 24. And it was so.

[53:54] That is God's definitive statement of fact about what we're reading. It's all true, but listen, yeah, we it's all true, Jeff, but listen, here's the second part.

[54:04] It's all true as it's written. And it's written in this order and in this way for good, good reasons. So whenever true science weighs in on these issues that God speaks to, true science will never contradict what God's word is telling you about our origins and about what God made.

[54:28] True science won't contradict scripture because true science belongs to the realm of almighty God. Again, they're his laws. Now I'll only take a few minutes to cover verse 25 and the features that are there.

[54:40] We've already talked about these truths from previous verses in the creation account. So literally, just give me a few more minutes here. If you'll look at verse 25 with me. And this is the good of God made in making these land creatures.

[54:54] Verse 25 says God made. That's how it starts. God made. What did he make? He made the beasts of the earth after their kind and the cattle after their kind and everything that creeps on the ground after its kind.

[55:09] Folks, there's no evolution here. God made. He made them and it was so. He made them mature and ready to reproduce. This is every single account throughout Genesis 1.

[55:21] Day after day, this is how God is presenting his creative activity. Just like God did with the plants, the trees, the vegetation, the sea creatures, and the birds. These land creatures were made after or according to their kind.

[55:37] The different kinds of creatures were made to have offspring like their parents. So all the diversity within the various kinds of animals and insects, all the complexity and usefulness designed into these critters were from the very beginning, on the sixth day.

[55:55] It didn't evolve and develop. God didn't need to do that. He hardwired all of this into these creatures as he created them from nothing instantaneously.

[56:07] That was his purpose and design. He gets to decide because he made them. You say, Jeff, that's a miracle. That's right. It's supernatural. From our perspective, we can't put our minds around that because we can't speak anything into existence.

[56:23] But God does. Notice what the text says. And God saw that it was good. There was, look folks, there was no death.

[56:35] All right? There's no death in our origins. There's no cataclysmic struggle in our origins. That's not how we came to be. That's not how this all came to be.

[56:47] There was no death because there was no sin. Not yet. There was no evolution, disease, sickness, struggle, fighting, competition. None of the bases and foundations for the theory of evolution were needed or were in play when God made these animals.

[57:06] None of it. The animals didn't need to battle with each other for dominance. That's the, and you watch all these episodes if you were to do that, and in every single one of them, the primary theme for anything happening is struggle and dominance and the will to be the apex.

[57:27] I want to be the apex predator. I want to be the apex all authority over this sphere or this domain. And that struggle to be that, and then the lesser creatures, the way they survive, is they realize that they've got to adapt.

[57:44] If they're going to deal with the apex predators, they must adapt. And so that struggle for survival drives everything. That spirit of competition drives everything in terms of our origins.

[57:56] That's how we got here. The only way that you and I were able to evolve from apes is that we struggled to do so. We had to adapt in order to survive.

[58:09] What do you see in the Genesis account? Everything is in order. God is speaking. There's no chaos, no cataclysmic event, no struggle, no dominance.

[58:20] The only dominance in the creation account is the authority of Almighty God speaking everything into existence. That's it. And it's all done with peace. The animals didn't need to battle because it was God's purpose and design that they come together.

[58:39] The earth does not bear the scars or the science of a titanic struggle for the survival of the fittest in our origins. It does not. That is not science.

[58:51] What the earth shows us even after the fall, even after the great flood, is a world of vegetation and animals, a world made by our God for us to live in together.

[59:03] God preserved them even after the flood in his grace. So the fact that it can be ugly and even horrible evil in this world is due to our sin and not to some failure or lack in God or in his design.

[59:19] With all the animals now made, all of the animals placed in their spheres to do what God purposed and designed for them to do, this pristine paradise is now ready for God's matchless creative feet.

[59:33] And that's where we're going to prayerfully pick up next Sunday. Will you join me in prayer? Almighty God and Father, we are using these texts of scripture to glorify you as our sovereign creator.

[59:52] And we are doing that as we refute one of the great, if not the greatest lies ever perpetuated on humankind. And that is that we basically made ourselves through struggle, through our innate desire to survive, through our cleverness of adaptation.

[60:15] Everything that we know in the way of what's alive on this planet reinvented itself. And God, we know that's a lie.

[60:26] That's a lie from the devil to keep people imprisoned in themselves and looking within themselves for the answers that plague us as human beings.

[60:38] Father, please help us as your people to bring the hopeful and the wonderful and the beautiful message of the creation of who we are and all that you've made as the one standing behind the supernatural reality that you spoke all this into existence in an instant.

[61:02] And over a six-day period, you set the cycle for us to live as human beings, ruling the earth and being stewards of all that you've made. Help us to combat sin in our own lives, Lord.

[61:15] The selfishness, the greed, the pride, the apathy and neglect that we sometimes live in and with and allow in our lives. Please forgive us. And help us to remember that you want to use us to speak the joy of Jesus into people's hearts.

[61:31] thank you for each soul here today. May you use us, dear Lord, to speak the truth in love to the greater glory of the Lord Jesus Christ.

[61:42] In his name we pray and for his glory. Amen.