Sermon Transcript

0:00:14.0

If you have your Bibles, turn with me to the book of Genesis, Genesis 1.  And this week we’re continuing our study of the six days of creation.  This is part two of a message that I began last week during our Imago Dei series.  And last week we spent a consider amount of time talking about one word that appears 11 times in the first chapter of the book of Genesis.  That’s the Hebrew word yom.  It’s the word “day.”  Anytime you talk about the six days of creation, you need to ask and answer the question, what do we mean by a day?  It may seem like an obvious answer, but as you discovered last week, different people have different views on it.  And we landed upon the idea that a day, well, means a day.  That the intended meaning of the author in Genesis 1 and even the grammar, the syntax, the word studies that we did all indicate that yom in Genesis 1 is to be understood as a normal 24-hour solar day.  Thus, when we say the six days of creation, we understand that God created the heavens and the earth in six days, just like you and I understand six days.  We’re gonna pick up on our study of that this week beginning in day two because we did touch on day one last week.  But I want you to listen to me very carefully this morning.  Because by the end of our time together, somewhere around day five or day six, I’m gonna try to answer the question, where do dinosaurs fit in Genesis 1?  It’s always a fun question and one that the kids like a lot too.  So if you listen carefully, kids, we’ll try to answer that question this morning.

0:01:52.2

Let’s start in day two.  Genesis 1 beginning in verse 6.  “Then God said, ‘Let there be an expanse in the midst of the waters, and let it separate the waters from the waters.’  God made the expanse, and separated the waters which were below the expanse from the waters which were above the expanse; and it was so.  God called the expanse heaven.  And there was evening and there was morning, a second day.”  Day two begins a lot like day one in that God spoke.  And He spoke something into existence that was not previously in existence.  He spoke and created out of nothing.  And Genesis 1:6-8 tells us that he spoke into existence something known as the expanse.  And the expanse—also in some translations it’s the firmament—separates the waters below from the waters above the expanse.  What’s that all about?  What is the expanse?  Well, some say the expanse, or the firmament, was what we might refer to as outer space with millions and millions of stars and galaxies.  The stars aren’t in place at this point on day three, but God created the expanse of the universe.  That’s one day of looking at it.  Others sort of limit the scope of the expanse on day three and refer to it more as what we might call the breathable atmosphere of the earth.  One author describes it this way.  “Apparently there was no atmosphere on the earth in the beginning, but on the second day God spoke it into existence.  He released some of the earth’s water and sent it up.  And he made it a firmament of breathable gasses between the water above and the water below.  And as that firmament formed, the upper waters in the form of a mist or vapor rose into the sky, giving the appearance of a transparent vault or an invisible dome rising from the earth’s surface.”  And doesn’t the atmosphere, the earth’s atmosphere, sort of feel like that? A dome that has sort of…provides this canopy-like effect over the earth below.

0:04:16.0

If you can picture this in your mind, the expanse was to separate the waters below…and we can understand that.  At this point in the creation week, the earth is covered in water, even over the mountaintops.  But it separates the waters below from the waters above the expanse.  And it’s those waters above the expanse that creates kind of some interesting conversation.  According to one creation scientist named Henry Morris of the Institute for Creation Research, he believes that there was almost a protective canopy above the expanse that was there up until the time of Noah’s flood.  And this protective canopy and these waters above the expanse provided sort of like a greenhouse effect to the earth so that the inhabitants of the earth were protected from the dangerous ultraviolet light of the sun.  And Morris and others hypothesize about this canopy, that is was perhaps the reason that, as we read through the early chapters of the book of Genesis, it contributed to the longevity to people like Noah and Adam and Eve and others who lived for hundreds of years, even 6-, 7-, 8-, 900 years, protected from the sun’s ultraviolet light.  But during Noah’s flood, that canopy collapsed and it contributed to flooding the whole earth as well as waters bubbling up from the base of the earth as well.  This is just one of the theories out there.  I tend to believe that the expanse was the breathable gases of the earth’s atmosphere.  Morris’s canopy theory is very interesting.  It certainly explains what the waters above the expanse were at that time.

0:06:08.2

But what else can we say about the expanse?  Well, the psalmist in Psalm 19:1 comments on the expanse, whatever that was, whatever God created at this time.  The psalmist says, “The heavens declare the glory of God, and their expanse, [their expanse] is declaring the work of his hands.”  Here even on day two, something about God’s creation declared His glory, said something about His handiwork.  Even the expanse that He created that separated the waters from below from the waters above declared the glory of God.  And God on day two defines His own terms, doesn’t He?  He calls this expanse, the scripture says, heaven.  God called it that.

0:06:55.2

Now, how are we to understand the word heaven here?  Well, the New Testament tells us from Paul’s writings to the Corinthians that there are really three heavens.  There was a time when he experienced kind of an “out of body” moment and was caught up to the third heaven, he says, and heard unimaginable things told to him.  That third heaven is where God dwells on His throne.  And Paul says he was caught up into the third heaven to receive some things about the future from the Lord.  The second heaven we might refer to as outer space and, yes, the very expanding expanse of outer space.  The first heaven though—probably the heaven that is mentioned here in Genesis—is the immediate atmosphere of the earth.  God called it heaven.

0:07:44.8

Now, for those of you are really serious Bible students and like to dive into the text a little bit there, there is a Hebrew word that appears here in these verses.  The translation is the word “made.”  It says that “God made the expanse.”  It’s the Hebrew word asah.  Now, we came across a similar word in verse 1 where it says “God created the heavens and the earth.”  That’s bara.  Some people make note of the difference in the Hebrew words here and say, well, whatever God made in day two doesn’t rise to the same level of what He created.  It wasn’t something that He made out of nowhere.  You just need to know that that argument is out there, but it’s easily dismissed when you go to Genesis 2:3 where you see both bara and asah used interchangeably.  It says that “God rested from all his work which he created [bara] and made [asah].”  Okay?  So the fact that He created the heavens and the earth but He made the expanse, there’s really not much to make of that because those words are used interchangeably.

0:08:53.5

The other thing to notice on day two is this is the only day of the six days of creation where God doesn’t affirm His work by saying it was good.  And again, let’s not make too much of that, except for the fact that the earth still at this point on day two is uninhabitable by living creatures, certainly uninhabitable by man.  But God is in the process of creating a place where living organisms and even man himself and the animals can live, which brings us to day three of creation beginning in verse 9.

0:09:26.2

Let’s read on.  “Then God said,”—there’s that phrase again—“‘Let the waters below the heavens be gathered into one place, and let the dry land appear’; and it was so.  God called the dry land earth, and the gathering of the waters He called seas; and God saw that it was good.  Then God said, ‘Let the earth sprout vegetation: plants yielding seed, [and] fruit trees on the earth bearing fruit after their kind with seed in them’; and it was so.  The earth brought forth vegetation, plants yielding seed after their kind, and trees bearing fruit with seed in them, after their kind; and God saw that it was good.  There was evening and there was morning, a third day.”  God was busy on day three, wasn’t He?  Twice it says, “Then God said…”  He spoke in day three twice, spoke things into existence that hadn’t existed before.  The first was He spoke the sea and the dry land into existence.  Now, they both had already been existing, but when He spoke this time, the sea and dry land separated.  On day one He separated the light from the darkness.  Now on day three He separates the sea from the dry land.  He doesn’t create the dry land on day three.  The dry land always existed.  But up until day three when He separated the sea from the dry land, the whole earth was covered in water, even above the mountaintops.  This is the view of psalmist in Psalm 104.  And I’m gonna invite you to turn there with me.

0:11:07.2

I love the way other places in scripture echo the days of creation.  And through beautiful poetry and beautiful language, sort of add layers of pictures for us on the days of creation.  Psalm 104 is one of them.  And verses 5-9 tell us a bit about what God did on day three.  Listen to this.  Beginning in verse 5, “He established the earth upon its foundation, so that it will not totter forever and ever.  Thou didst cover it with the deep as with a garment; The waters were standing above the mountains.”  The whole earth at this time, again, was covered in water, even above the mountain peaks.  “At Thy rebuke they fled, At the sound of Your thunder they hurried away.  The mountains rose; the valleys sank down To the place which Thou didst establish for them.  Thou didst set a boundary that they may not pass over, that they may not return to cover the earth.”  Beautiful, poetic words to describe God’s creative work on day three where the mountains fled.  They hurried away.  The valleys sank down.  The mountains rose up.  God is separating the seas from the dry land, and the dry land begins to appear.

0:12:29.9

But God speaks a second time on day three, doesn’t He?  And this time He speaks plant life and trees and this green mantle of vegetation that begins to cover the earth.  This is an interesting place where evolutionists and creationists begin to disagree.  Because here in the order of events in the creation week in Genesis we have the first living organisms appear.  This is the plant life and the trees and the vegetation.  Evolutionists would say, no, the sun needs to come first because plants and trees and vegetation needs the photosynthesis from the sun, and the birds and the living creatures, the insects, need to come before the plants because they need pollination and so forth.  But here in the order of events in Genesis 1, the first living organisms that God creates is the plant life.  Now, if it took millions of years to get to the birds and to the insects and to the sun, the plant life would have died off.  But we understand this to be six normal solar days, so I think it can survive probably for 24 hours before those other elements come into play.

0:13:44.7

Notice here that God creates mature organisms.  He didn’t create a seed for somebody to plant in the ground that would later grow up into a tree.  He created a fully mature tree with seed already in it.  He gave that tree the seeds and commanded them to reproduce—and here is an interesting phrase—“after their kind.”  That word “kind” is a Hebrew word that is sort of akin to our word species.  But’s important to understand that everything that God had created that was a living organism would reproduce after its kind.  That means apple trees would produce apple trees.  Orange trees would produce other orange trees.  Mangos would produce more mangos.  But an apple tree would never produce an orange.  And an orange tree would never produce an apple.  That would be producing of a different kind.  That word “kind” is very important to understand.  We might say that change can occur within a kind, but a kind cannot evolve into another kind.  You follow me there?  Whether it’s plant life or later we’ll find the same command given to animals…and we certainly know when God created man in His own image and then gave him a woman, they were commanded to reproduce as well.  To understand the difference, again, between microevolution, which is change within a kind, and macroevolution, which is a kind evolving into another kind, think of a deck of cards.  A deck of cards typically has 52 cards in them.  And you can shuffle that deck a thousand different times.  And no matter how many times you shuffle the deck, you’re still gonna end up with the same 52 cards, okay.  You’re not gonna end up with 53 or 54 cards or a different set of 52 cards.  You're just going to reorder that finite number of cards there.  And the same is true when it comes to a kind.  The essential DNA character of a kind can change within that kind, but it cannot produce different DNA to produce another kind.  You can reshuffle the DNA within a kind, and that’s how we end up with different species.  But evolutionists say that that deck of cards changes into an entirely different deck of cards where a marine mammal, for instance, become a land creature.  And as we said last week, if that happens over millions of years, then where are the missing links or the in-between fossil forms that show half-marine animal and half-land animal?  The Genesis record tells us that God created, and He put all the essential DNA within that kind.  And that kind would produce within its kind, after its own kind, okay.  Again, microevolution versus macroevolution.

0:16:51.0

Let’s go on to day four.  Beginning in verse 14 it says, “Then God said…”  Every day is preceded by those words, “Then God said.”  His creative power.  He speaks and something appears.  This time, “Then God said, “‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years; and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth’; and it was so.  God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; [He made] the stars also.  God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth, and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.  There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.”  Now, on day one God said, “Let there be light,” singular.  On day four here He says, “Let there be lights,” plural.  On day one, as we talked about last week, the light that He created was a light source or an energy force.  It wasn’t the sun.  It wasn’t the moon.  It wasn’t the stars.  And I would even suggest to you it wasn’t God Himself, because He said, “Let there be,” when He was already in existence.  So whatever He created in day one, it did separate the day from the night.  But by day four He replaces that light source or energy force with the lights in the expanse, the expanse now referring to the greater expanse of the universe.  He sets the sun and the moon in place, a light generator and a light reflector, and the stars of the expanse.  I love how the writer here just says, “And he made the stars also.”

0:18:57.3

Have you ever looked into a starry night?  (0:19:00.1) Got outside the city somewhere or out into the country and, wow, it just all appears, doesn’t it?  Millions of stars.  Our mind cannot even fathom how many stars God created.  And the writer of Genesis tells us that He created these lights for a couple of reasons- for signs and for seasons and for days and years.  What happens in the universe with the stars and the sun and the moon, we calendar our lives according to this.  By now the earth is probably tilting on its axis, and it’s rotating.  And the seasons of summer and fall and winter and spring are beginning to appear.  The sea and the dry land is separated.  This mantle of green vegetation is on the earth and the earth is beginning to take form.  But the scripture also (0:20:00.1) says that they were for signs.  In what way were they signs?  Well, we know for centuries that sailors have used the stars as navigation points as they sailed the seas.  Astronomers also use the stars to predict tides and eclipses and seasonal changes and so on.  And some people say that God actually wrote the gospel in the stars.  Have you ever heard that before?  But the signs of the Zodiac have been sort of polluted by pagan astrology.  Now, that’s a real interesting discussion.  And we don’t have time to go into it this morning, but you can do some research on your own.  I’ll warn you ahead of time, there are some theological problems with the “gospel in the stars” theory out there.  But it does make for an interesting discussion if you want to chase that on your own a little bit.

0:20:49.1

One thing we can say is that God never intended for us to worship the sun, moon, and the stars.  And that may be an obvious thing to people at Immanuel Bible Church and maybe an obvious thing to people in North America.  But the scripture tells us in Romans 1, and certainly the history of humanity proves that we are prone to worship the creation rather than the Creator.  For instance, just in Greek mythology, Apollo is worshipped as the sun god, and Artemis is the goddess of the moon.  The Greeks also worshipped a number of what we call sky deities.  And these sky deities appear in other religions as well.  The Hindu religion, for instance, worships Aditi, who is the mother of the sun and moon gods, Mitra and Varuna.  Don’t ever name your kids Mitra and Varuna, all right?  It just sends a bad theological message there.  The Eskimos worshipped the sun spirit and the Mayans worshipped the god of the sun.  Sun goddesses are also found in the Japanese culture, and the list goes on and on and on.  The history of humanity is that we are prone to worship the creation rather than the Creator.  And some have speculated that’s why God didn’t create the sun and the moon and the stars on day one for fear that we might find preeminence in that and worship the creation rather than the Creator.  No matter what day God created them—and here we find these luminaries in the sky appearing on day four—we are still prone to worship the creation rather than the Creator.

0:22:26.5

And one more thought here on day four.  As we think about the sun and the moon and the stars, I couldn’t help thinking about Abraham.  God had a way of using His creation as an object lesson to some of His servants even in the scriptures.  You remember Abraham, when the Lord came to Him and said, “Abraham, I’m gonna create a whole nation out of you,” Genesis 12.  And by Genesis 15, Abraham was doubting a little bit.  And he wasn’t quite sure of the promises of God.  He had set out from the Ur of Chaldees to head toward that Promised Land, believing that he would be given a son, the start of a new nation and all these descendants.  But by Genesis 15 he is doubting a bit.  The Lord said, “Abraham, step outside your tent and look up into the sky and count the stars if you can.  Your descendants will outnumber them.”  I think God probably had a smile on His face when He said that to Abraham.  He said, “Abraham, look what I created.  And you're doubting that I can give you a son and make you the father of a nation?  You can’t even count the number of stars that I created.”

0:23:41.8

When the Messiah came, God in human flesh, when the word became flesh and dwelt among us, Christmas…we’re about getting ready to celebrate it here and Immanuel in a few months.  Remember the star of Bethlehem?  Again, God reached back into His creation.  And when He announced the arrival of His Son, He put a star in the sky.  And the Bible says some wise men from the east followed that star until it hovered right over the city of Bethlehem and over that stable where the Son of God had been born.  God created the sun and the moon and the stars on day four.

0:24:26.9

And day five, beginning in verse 20 it says this.  “Then God said, ‘Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.’  God created the great sea monsters.”  Circle that, will you?  We’ll come back to it.  The great sea monsters.  “And every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarmed after their kind, and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.  God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the waters in the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.’  There was evening and there was morning, a fifth day.”  I suspect there are a few fishermen and birdwatchers in our midst today who are just right on the edge of your seats.  I remember growing up as a child and watching the undersea adventures of Jacques Cousteau, and just being amazed at what God had created beneath the waters of the sea.  It’s the fish and the birds that appear here on day five.  Now, there is an interesting Hebrew word that characterizes what happening here.  It’s the word “living.”  Swarms of living creatures.  First time this Hebrew word nephesh appears.  And it’s a life principle kind of word that applies only to humans and animals.  The plant life and the vegetation, that green mantle of vegetation was not called nephesh.  God has stepped up His creation a notch or two here by creating the animals.  And later He will create man in His own image.  This word nephesh, when it’s applied to humans, can also be translated soul.  Now, we know that an animal does not have a soul like a human does.  But something has notched up here in God’s creation.

0:26:39.6

And here is a place too where, again, the conflict between the order of events in evolutionary history and the order of events in the creation week appear.  Evolution says that it took millions of years for marine life, plant life, land animals and birds to appear, in that order.  That’s the order of events in evolutionary history- marine life, plant life, land animals, then birds.  But Genesis says it took six solar days for plant life to appear on day three, marine life and birds simultaneously to appear on day five, and land animals—we’ll get to that in a moment—to appear on day six.  So again, just another example of how it’s hard to fit millions of years and evolutionary Darwinism into Genesis 1.  The order of events don’t fit.

0:27:31.5

But let’s get back to some of the birds and the fishes for a moment.  When I was a college student, one summer I interned at a bank.  I was a financial planning major.  And I came home and I said, well, I’m gonna get a little bit of experience in that area.  So I worked in the trust department of a bank.  And the guy that I reported to was a birdwatcher.  I was a football player and a baseball player.  I’d never met a birdwatcher before, right.  I met my first birdwatcher.  And this guy would go on exotic trips around the world.  I mean, he’d take his vacation time and go on these exotic trips just to find a spot on the beak of some bird that he had read about in books, okay.  It’s bird watching.  And I didn’t take much interest in it then until I read something that Jesus said in Matthew 6:26.  He says, “Look at the birds of the air, for they neither sow nor reap nor gather into barns; yet your heavenly Father feeds them.”  Elsewhere He says, “Not a sparrow in the sky falls to the ground without my heavenly father noticing.”  And then He adds, “Are you not of more value than they?”  Remember what I said in week one?  If you get nothing else out of this series, know your life matters.  You’re not a cosmic accident.  You are not just pond scum plus chance and time.  Your life matters.  And when it come to the birds of the air, Jesus says look at these creatures, these amazing creatures.

0:29:17.5

John Stott is one of the well-known theologians of our time.  He’s a British theologian.  Some of you may have read some of his books.  I bet you don’t have this one in your library though.  It’s about bird watching.  I mean, Stott is one of these birdwatchers.  He’s the second guy I’ve ever met who is…I haven’t met him personally, but second guy I know about who is a birdwatcher.  And I came across this book a few years ago that I have in my library.  Again, he’s taken these exotic trips all around the world.  He’s a photographer as well, and he’ll take pictures of these birds and do a little write-up.  And then as a theologian, he would give his perspective of what God was trying to teach us through this particular bird.  Look at the birds, Jesus says.  They don’t sow.  They don’t reap.  But your Father takes care of them.  He feeds them.  They don’t store anything up in 401k accounts, but your Father takes care of them, doesn’t He?  “Are you not of more value than they,” Jesus says.  Turn to your neighbor and say, “I’m more valuable than the birds, and so are you.” Come on.  Do that right now.  After the market has dropped the way it did, we need to remember that neither the birds store up in their accounts, do they.  But God still feeds them, and He takes care of them.  I hope nobody here is from the Audubon Society and is offended by suggesting that we are of more value than the birds, but that’s what scripture teaches.

0:30:45.1

What about the fish?  Let’s go back Psalm 104 and read another one of these echoes from the days of creation, this one in verses 24-26.  The psalmist says, Psalm 014:24-26, “O LORD, how many are Thy works!  In wisdom Thou hast made them all; The earth is full of Thy possessions.”  Now, listen to this.  “There is the sea, great and broad, In which are swarms without number, Animals both small and great.  There the ships that move along,”—now, listen to this—“[And] Leviathan, which Thou have formed to sport in it.”  Of all the fishes of the sea, this echo from day five of creation mentions a sea creature named Leviathan.  Now, I’ve heard of whales.  I’ve heard of shark.  I’ve heard of sharks and minnows.  I’ve heard of bass.  I’ve never heard of Leviathan except here in the book of Genesis.  What or who is Leviathan?  Well, according to Ken Ham of Answers in Genesis, Leviathan was a giant, fire-breathing sea creature not only mentioned here in the book of Psalms, but also mentioned in the book of Job 41:1-34.  You remember that time when God sort of flexed His cosmic muscles in front of Job and said, “Where were you when I made Leviathan?  Canst thou draw out Leviathan with a hook?”  In other words, “Job, you can’t fish for this creature that I made.  You’ll never catch him.”  Ham goes on to say that Leviathan, also known as kronosaurus, was rediscovered in 1899 by A. Crombie near Queensland, Australia.  It’s more than 40 feet long with a skull measuring 9 feet.  This sea creature was a powerful and agile swimmer with very sharp teeth.  They found the fossil remains of what they believe was Leviathan.  Ken Ham believes that Leviathan was one of the great sea monsters.  Remember I said circle that phrase there in day five?  It’s one of the great sea monsters mentioned in Genesis 1:21.  He goes on to say, “The Leviathan was most likely a sea-dwelling dinosaur-like animal that is now extinct.”

0:33:31.1

So back to my question that I hope got you leaning forward at the beginning of the message.  Where do the dinosaurs fit in Genesis 1?  Well, they may be contained in the great sea monsters mentioned in day five.  But let’s read on at least in the first part of day six, verse 24.  “Then God said, ‘Let the earth bring forth living creatures,’”—here is that phrase again—“‘after their kind: cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth after their kind’; and it was so.  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.”  Where do dinosaurs fit in the early chapters of the book of Genesis?  Ham—and I agree with him and others—say right here in day six.  Now, evolutionists will tell us that dinosaurs lived 235 million years ago—that’s when they first appeared on planet earth—and roamed the earth not with human beings but kind of by themselves.  Sixty-five million years ago, according to the evolutionists, the dinosaurs died out.  They became extinct.  Now, one place that both the creation scientists and the evolutionary scientists agree is that for something to be fossilized, like a dinosaur, a catastrophic event needs to take place.  The normal deterioration of a dead body, not to mention the predators that, you know, come and eat upon the flesh and so forth, that normal process of a dying carcass does not produce a fossil.  It’s a catastrophic event that produces a fossil record.

0:35:17.6

The evolutionists say 65 million years ago their best guess is some asteroid hit the earth and changed the living conditions on planet earth, and that’s how the dinosaurs disappeared.  But creation scientists, who read the early chapters of Genesis like the history book of the universe, putting on their biblical glasses, look at day five and day six and see the giant sea creatures and the beasts of the earth as places where the dinosaurs fit in the early chapters of Genesis.  And if you read it from a young earth perspective and you do all your dating with the genealogical records in the Bible and your best guess and all that, young earth scientists would say that the earth is about 6000 years old, and about 4500 years ago or so dinosaurs were, in fact, roaming the earth with humans.  There is a lot of misunderstanding about dinosaurs, oftentimes propagandized by the evolutionary scientist because there is such fascination with dinosaurs.  A couple of things that I learned though is that not all dinosaurs were necessarily ferocious animals.  Just because they have sharp teeth doesn’t mean they were ferocious, meat-eating animals.  In fact, until after the fall, everybody, including man, was a vegetarian.  We’ll run into that next week as we look further at day six and man created in the image of God.  But also an interesting thing to discover about dinosaurs is that when you go into the fossil record, the average size of a dinosaur…are you ready for this?  I was shocked by this.  The average size of a dinosaur evidenced in the fossil record is no bigger than a sheep.  Now, there are some other obviously large, giant creatures mentioned even in the scriptures, Leviathan being one of them, a giant sea monster.  That word monster could also be translated “dragon.”  But also in the book of Job 40—and we don’t have time to go there—but chapter 40 and verses 15-24 it appears that God also mentioned what could be another dinosaur-like creature.  His name being behemoth.  You ever read about behemoth?  Well, behemoth, the name is a transliteration from the Hebrew because the translators didn’t know what to call this.  So like the word baptizo in the Greek that became baptism, which really means “immersion,” a behemoth in the Hebrew…well, it became behemoth in our English language.  Some of your translations will have a little notation in the margin, or some of the more modern translations actually insert the word “hippopotamus” or “elephant.”  I think that’s an unfortunate translation, because the tail that God describes of behemoth, “He wags like a cedar.”  Check out a hippopotamus and an elephant.  He doesn’t have a cedar-like tail, okay.  Check him out sometime.  So creation scientists will suggest that dinosaurs fit here, certainly in day six, perhaps as the great sea monsters in day five, even roaming with humans as they're created.  What happened to the dinosaurs?  Well, like many other animals, they became extinct.  We don’t know exactly why, but there was nobody putting them on the endangered species list thousands of years ago.  So for some reason, they became extinct, and we have remains of dinosaurs in a fossil record.  Creationists believe the catastrophic event was not a meteorite or an asteroid, but the flood of Genesis 6, 7, and 8, which certainly gives reasonable evidence for a catastrophic event that would explain some of the fossil records.

0:39:13.6

Well, that is a quick fly-through of day two through six.  And I’m sure it raises a number of questions for you.  I want to encourage you to go to our website, look at the resources we have listed there.  I encourage you even to take a look at Ken Ham’s book The Great Dinosaur Mystery Solved.  Fascinating reading.  And it may give you another way to think about how God created the heavens and the earth and some of these great creatures.  Let’s pray together.

0:39:45.1

Father, thank You so much for Your Word.  Thank You for sharing with us the amazing handiwork of your creation.  The heavens declare the glory of God and the expanse even talks about Your creative handiwork.  And we worship You for that.  We’re careful, Father to worship our Creator and not the creation.  But as we stand and live and exist in the midst of Your beautiful creation, we can’t help but have our hearts open up and lift up in worship to You.  And, Father, if there is anybody here this morning who has not bowed in humble obedience to You as their Creator and to Jesus as their Savior, the One whom the scripture says was there on the moment of creation as the agent of creation, the One speaking things into existence, Father, I pray that today would be a day of salvation for every one of us in this room.  Especially for that one who has struggled to make sense of Christianity and who Jesus is and creation and all of that.  Father, even as we still have questions about Genesis, I pray that today would be a day that every one of us would bow before the cross of Jesus Christ and receive Him as our Savior.  And I pray this in Jesus’s name, amen.

0:41:34.7