The Original Jungle Book

This is the largest land creature God ever created. And God is essentially saying to Job, I invented that creature. I conceived of that belly and its hind legs to be able to lift a head at the end of a 40-foot long neck to lumber and move and not suffocate under the weight of its 90,000 pounds.

Job, I knew how to put that massive creature together just like I knew how to put together you. When God wanted to demonstrate his power to Job, he did it by reminding Job of the magnificence of his creation. God created everything from the tiniest organism to the largest of all the animals. When we study God's creation, we can learn how small we are, but also how great our Creator is. Welcome to Wisdom for the Heart, featuring the Bible teaching of Stephen Davey. Stephen is the president of Shepherds Theological Seminary. Today, Stephen continues his series on the topic of creation.

He's called the message you're about to hear, the original Jungle Book. Well, we have added a pair of binoculars to our Bibles. I trust you're not just hearing, but you're listening. You're not just looking, but you're seeing.

You're not just tasting, but you're savoring. If I were to ask you if you ever saw a movie or read a book that featured lions and cheetahs and bears and crocodiles, you'd probably say yes because you'd either read or seen the movie The Jungle Book. Wild animals on every page, in every scene, around every corner. A thing captures our fascination and curiosity and amazement, like a good story involving there's something awe-inspiring about true or legendary tales of wild creatures. One of the most overlooked wonders of the Bible is that it introduces to us hundreds of different kinds of animals, including crocodiles and cheetahs and lions and bears and snakes and frogs and deer and antelope and badgers and locusts and foxes and sheep and wolves and fish and whales and on and on and on and on it goes.

The Bible happens to be the original Jungle Book, just so you know. Most of the animals mentioned in the creation account and revealed throughout the Bible are to be understood as realistic. Frankly, nobody gets any indigestion over the cheetah or the crocodile, but the bigger the animal gets, the more doubt creeps in. Probably nothing illustrates that more than the fascination and the speculation surrounding the world of the dinosaur.

In fact, the dinosaur is the evolutionist's favorite poster boy, used more than any other creature to indoctrinate generations of children and adults that the earth has to be millions of years old. The truth is, much of the mystery surrounding the reality of the dinosaur exists only because the biblical record has been abandoned. The Bible happens to be the history book of the universe. It tells us much of what happened. And if you take time to investigate the only eyewitness account we have, the eyewitness being God, who by the way cannot lie, Titus chapter 1 verse 2.

He's not making this up. He delivers the account of creation to Adam, passes it down from generation to generation, ultimately written down later by Moses under the direction of the Holy Spirit. According to the only eyewitness, God, the eyewitness of creation informs us that dinosaurs, as a part of every land creature, was created on the sixth day of creation week, topped off on that same day by the creation of a literal, historical, real, physical couple named Adam and Eve. All of that on the sixth day. And according to God's creation account, the world and the universe created on the previous five days were created to sustain the animal kingdom and the human race, which would come on the sixth day.

In other words, the stars created and their light already supernaturally sped up to provide their light to earth, although billions of light years away. Trees created, according to the creation account in chapter 1 of Genesis, already bearing fruit, already carrying boughs filled with leaves, ready to eat, grass already rich and luxuriant, ready for the beasts of the earth to graze upon Adam and Eve, by the way, created not as little embryos or kept as little infants in some incubator, but immediately, physically created as adults, walking without practicing, walking without learning, worshipping immediately their creator God. By the way, if you have trouble with that creation account, you're going to have trouble when you get to the end of the book and you're given the description of the new creation. Now everything changed when Adam and Eve sinned, rebelled against God.

Before they sinned, their world, that dispensation of innocence, we call it, one author called it the fearless age. That's because there wasn't any fear between animals and humans. For one thing, the Bible tells us Adam and Eve and all the animals were originally herbivores. We know now from research that many of these dinosaurs continue to grow until they die and Noah was to take on animals that would later reproduce, meaning he took on young animals, but ever since the fall of man, the bigger you are, the better you've got it on the food chain. But to this day, the animal kingdom is riddled with fear that something that God informed Noah would be invested in the animal kingdom following the flood. In many ways, that's good. So that when you see that snake out in your backyard, for the most part, it will slither away from you and not toward you.

It's afraid of you, which is a good thing. Paul writes this to the Roman believers, through one man sin entered the world and death through sin. Notice carefully Paul did not write through one man sin entered that one man.

No. Through one man sin entered the entire world. It impacted the entire world. It affected, it altered, it corrupted, it changed the world. Paul also writes further in chapter eight, the effects of sin for the creation was subjected to futility. That word means it lost its original direction.

It got altered, changed. And Paul adds of a future redemption, that creation itself also will be delivered from the bondage of deterioration into the glorious liberty of the children of God. In the meantime, Paul adds, we know that the whole creation groans. Imagine all of creation is groaning for that day of redemption. Groaning, agonizing, there's agony in creation now.

There's fear and terror and pain. There's coming a day of redemption and he hints at the coming glory of the millennial kingdom, that 1000 year reign of Christ on earth and we reigning with him and we'll look at that more in detail later, but let me show you what Isaiah describes about that coming kingdom. Listen to how during that 1000 year kingdom yet to come, the animal world will revert back to the days of Eden and the wolf will dwell with the lamb. Wolves usually eat lambs. No, they're gonna live together. The leopard will lie down with the young goat.

They're gonna take a nap together. And the calf and the young lion will feed together and the little boy will lead them. In other words, his pet might be in the kingdom, a calf or maybe even a young lion.

How great would that be? Notice and the cow and the bear will graze. The lion will eat straw like an ox. It's gonna go back to the days of the fearless age for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord. You know, the mystery and the heartburn that's in our world today only grows when you abandon this history book about where we came from and even the dinosaurs, which I want to focus on because when you ignore this history book of the creation of all there is and you begin to speculate, the dinosaurs, you know, eventually evolved from amphibians. They came in from the water some 235 million years ago. We're guessing, by the way. And then they suddenly disappeared 65 million years ago. Now we're still guessing, by the way. In fact, we've lived long enough under the cloud of this current theory of origins known as the evolution of species through natural selection.

In the late 1700s, early 1800s, there were other races. Darwinianism wasn't the first. And by the way, it isn't gonna be the last because of now what we know that he didn't know, you're already beginning to hear rumblings. If even the unbelieving world wondering how in the world a single cell could have so much information that it reproduces itself.

Where did this design come from? And so in order to keep from saying it must be God, I think 100 years from now, I'm guessing, but I think the speculation will be that some extraterrestrial advanced society seeded earth. And that's where we came from.

And you're already beginning to hear that, even to this day. But it's always interesting now as we're watching Darwinianism stagger under the weight of information that we're discovering. Experts are now getting a little embarrassed when they've declared something to be extinct and discover it alive and well. For instance, in the 1990s, explorers found elephants in the Nepal region that had many features of mammoths, which were supposed to have gone extinct thousands of years ago.

Still nobody rewrote the textbooks. One author wrote that explorers in the jungles of the Congo encountered what they described as dinosaur-like animals. We can't call them dinosaurs, but we can call them dinosaur-like animals. Even more interesting, by the way, are the cave paintings, and you can go online and you can look this stuff up.

It doesn't show up in the textbooks. Cave paintings by Native American Indians which depict natives hunting mammoths and dinosaurs. And what's interesting is all the textbooks have included the cave drawings of the natives fighting the mammoths, but they leave out the references to dinosaurs. See, dinosaurs have to be millions of years old for evolutionary speculations as we know it today to remain intact. Are they really millions of years old? Once again, I love the discoveries that are taking place.

Let me give you a current illustration in the 21st century. In 2005, a team of scientists headed up by Mary Schweitzer and paleontologists published a paper. It was published. You can read it online, in which they described an unusual find. They found an upper leg bone, a femur of a T-Rex. And although the outer bone was completely fossilized, the interior region was somehow sealed off from fossilizing fluids. And inside that T-Rex femur were found intact blood vessels and red blood cells. You can imagine the paper produced, as I read, an uproar in the scientific community.

And you can imagine why. The T-Rex was supposed to have disappeared 65 million years ago. And if it did disappear 65 million years ago, blood vessels and soft tissue would have long ago disintegrated.

And by the way, I'm going to pull over for just a moment. In my research for this study, I read this interesting comment that paleontology, which is the study of fossils, is politics with a shovel. In other words, they can uncover and study the same set of bones and come away with entirely different conclusions most often based in large part on their predispositions and biases.

Well, the scientific world immediately attacked Mary Switzer's conclusions. They said that the blood vessels were film created by bacteria, that bacterial residue created will only look like red blood cells, and her findings were completely written off. But then in 2009, Mary Switzer and her team produced a new paper based on their most recent study of the bones of a duck-billed dinosaur. It's considered to be 80 million years extinct, but 80 million years old. And what they found were soft tissue structures in the bones, proteins, hemoglobin, and bone-forming cells that have a scientific name I cannot pronounce, so I just said bone-forming cells. This time, Mary Switzer and her team allowed wisely multiple independent laboratories to test their findings, and their discovery and claim of soft tissue was validated. And all of the textbooks are right now being rewritten.

Oh no, not exactly. These bones are not 80 million years old, but in step with this history book, more than likely no more than a few thousand years old or less. Now, and I want to get closer to my point, I'm going to finally come to the end of my introduction, but why does this matter to the Christian?

Well, three reasons. Number one, the eyewitness account of Genesis is proven true or false depending on the statement in chapter one that God created all the land animals, which would have included the dinosaurs, along with mankind on the same day. Secondly, if the record of creation is not true, then not only is the biblical description of the ancient world untrue, but the biblical description, as I've sort of mentioned, of the future world is probably untrue as well. We're just making that up too. Lions will never lay down with a lamb.

You know, a little boy isn't going to lead around a lion in the front yard. That's just make-believe. God just wants us to feel good about the future. But thirdly, and this will get to my point, if dinosaurs went extinct millions of years ago and human beings never saw them, were never awed by them, then we have been robbed of what the Bible considers to be one of the most amazing evidences that he cares about us when we suffer.

Let me show you where. I want you to take your history book and open it to a book. I'm going to give you some clues and you figure out which book it is. It happens to be the book that's filled with references to creation, the universe, the global flood, early creation moments, including the stars and the planets, the animal kingdom.

In fact, Dr. Henry Morris, the founder of the Institute for Creation Science, once wrote that this book in the Bible contains more modern scientific insights than any other book in the Bible. Turn to the book of what? Job. Genesis has a lot of that, but the answer is Job.

Turn there. Job's suffering is about to end. God shows up and as we've already discussed, he gives Job a tour of creation. Remember, if you were with us a few weeks ago, we talked about the ostrich. And just as the tour is wrapping up, God gives Job a wonderful description asking Job to look at, implying he can see them, the two largest animals he created, the largest sea animal, the leviathan, which I believe is a fire-breathing creature, if you look at the description in Scripture, and the largest land animal, the sauropod dinosaur. Now, when you look at chapter 40, you're not going to see the word dinosaur.

The word dinosaur wasn't coined until 1841. Up until that point, the word that defines the largest land animal, the Hebrew word, is the word behemoth. And by the way, and I am going to get here, but it amazes me, even in the evangelical world, that they'll look at all the animals that we'll see in the book of Job and in the book of Genesis and have absolutely no trouble with them until you get to this one. And then they try to make the behemoth.

In fact, you probably have in your study notes, which are not inspired, a reference that this is probably a hippopotamus. Will you just keep that in mind as we read the description? Now, God says to Job in chapter 40 in verse 15, behold, now, you could render that, look now. By the way, this implies that Job can what? Job can see it, the behemoth, see it with his own eyes. Look now, Job, behemoth, which I made as well as you. I love that, so we got to stop for just a moment.

Don't miss this. Look, Job at the behemoth, the dinosaur. I made him as well as I made you.

Now, notice the description of what many believe to be the sauropod, the subclass of dinosaur of the largest ever discovered. He eats grass like an ox. Behold, now, his strength in his loins and his power in the muscles of his belly. He bends his tail like a cedar, a cedar tree. It's not a hippo, got a little twig. This is a cedar.

By the way, that rules out the elephant as well or the water buffalo or whatever your uninspired study notes happen to say. The sinews of his thighs are knit together. His bones are tubes of bronze.

His limbs are like bars of iron. He is the first of the ways of God. That doesn't mean he's the first animal created. That means he's the first in size.

This is the first in rank. This is the largest land creature God ever created. God is essentially saying to Job, I invented that creature. I conceived of that monstrous beast. I built into it amazing engineering dynamics, some of which I studied in my research this week that I don't have time to give to you but it required enormous strength in its belly and its hind legs to be able to lift a head at the end of a 40-foot long neck to lumber and move and not suffocate under the weight of its 90,000 pounds.

I put this thing together. Job, I knew how to put that massive creature together just like, here's the implication of God's words to Job, here's your hope in mind just like I knew how to put together you and your life. You see, through this amazing demonstration, God is delivering a number of lessons.

Let me give you two of them. First, mankind is frail and his abilities are unimpressive. I mean, in the presence of some massive creature like this, we're suddenly unimpressive. God is essentially putting Job in his place here. Job has been strutting around a bit. Now in the presence of a 90,000 pound, 75-foot long creature with a neck 40 feet long, try sticking out your chest.

Suddenly you become very small and frail. These awesome creatures remind us of how small we are and how dependent we are on the providence of God and our trust in the provision of God who created this earth for our benefit and all these creatures for our amazement. This is a humbling moment for Job and this is where we're drawn into to be humbled as well that we think twice before we ever challenge the creator who was capable of creating such a monstrosity. Secondly, lesson number two, God is powerful and his plans are unstoppable. This is why at the end of the visual tour, look over at chapter 42 in verse 2 where Job says to God, I love this, I know you can do all things. Has he seen all things? No. Why is his confidence restored that God can do all things because he's looking at a 90,000 pound creature?

That's why. Notice further, and no purposes of yours can be thwarted. God, you are not only powerful but your purposes are unstoppable as if to say, Lord, if that dinosaur can't get in your way, nothing probably can.

I suppose you can take care of my life too. Beloved, I believe that God created, and every time we discover something he created in our natural world, he created it for at least this reason as well, among other reasons, to create something so massive and so jaw-dropping, so amazing that we would take comfort in seeing this living illustration or the remains of it or that skeleton that God is greater than anything and in control of everything. During this series, many of you have sent articles to me and devotional clippings and I appreciate that and I add it to my study and I read all of it, by the way.

One note I received a few weeks ago was an excerpt that I thought would be fitting here where one author wrote these words, I have seen you stalking the malls, walking the aisles, searching for that extra special gift, stashing away a few dollars a month to buy him those new boots or staring at a thousand rings to find her the brightest jewel or staying up all night assembling that new bicycle and why did you do it so that the eyes would pop and the jaw would drop and to hear those words, you did that for me. It's one of the reasons why God did it. The next time you see something in the natural world that is glorious, the next time you see a sunrise that steals your breath or a meadow of flowers that leaves you speechless, remain that way and try to listen to the whisper of heaven saying, I did that for you. According to God's history book of creation, it was given to us so that we would marvel at it and study it, these natural wonders, these enormous creatures, this world that we would cultivate it and benefit from it and be sustained by it and oh yes, don't miss this, to be awed by it and to give them to our creator the highest compliment we can think of, Lord, wow, you did that, you designed that for me to see and then like Job, during days of deep valleys and uncertainty, return to your creator with a greater sense of trust and deeper confidence as you marvel at creation and with fresh insight bow before your creator. God is powerful and his plans are unstoppable.

What a great reminder today. This is wisdom for the heart. Stephen Davey, your Bible teacher, is the president of Wisdom International. Our ministry is located in Cary, North Carolina. Stephen publishes a monthly magazine that he gives as a gift to all of our partners. He also sends three complimentary issues to anyone who requests them. Call us at 866-48-BIBLE or visit wisdomonline.org. We'll continue this series next time, here on Wisdom for the Heart.