Sermon Tone Analysis

*Science and the Bible, Pt 3: The Deluge and Dinosaurs (Genesis 7:13-16)*

/Preached by Pastor Phil Layton at Gold Country Baptist Church on April 19, 2009/

www.goldcountrybaptist.org  

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You may or may not have ever heard an exposition of what the Bible has to say about dinosaurs  that once roamed the earth, allegedly dying out 65 million years ago, but this is a question that comes up in our text (at least I think that) is important to have a biblical perspective on.

Maybe you’ve heard the story of the evolutionist tour guide who as he went around the museum would say things like, “and here is a skeleton of this type of dinosaur that died out 70 million /and 10/ years ago.”

When one kid asked what’s with the “and 10 years ago” part, the tour guide said, “Oh, well, when I started working here at the museum 10 years ago they told me the dinosaur died out 70 million years ago, so I just want to be precisely accurate.”

I’m not a scientist, but I will have to draw from those who are, and are much smarter than us.

There are many thousands of scientists who have questioned how precise and accurate the dating and data assumptions are of evolutionists.

You won’t hear on the news that there are thousands of scientists who have converted from evolutionists to Bible-believing creationists who have PhD’s in various fields of science and who are also convinced that Genesis 1-11 literally happened, including recent creation and a worldwide flood that changed the world, as we began to discuss last time.

In our verse-by-verse study through Genesis, our text this evening is 7:13-16, but I want to begin reading in v. 11 and we’ll also look at other passages that describe the creatures that went on the ark that we haven’t discussed yet, which I trust will be interesting.

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Genesis 7:11-22 (NASB95) 11 In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, on the seventeenth day of the month [/note the exact historical chronology, which virtually all conservative Bible scholars agree was only a few thousand years ago/], *on the same day* all the fountains of the great deep burst open, and the floodgates of the sky were opened.

12 The rain fell upon the earth for forty days and forty nights.

*13 **On the very same day Noah and Shem and Ham and Japheth, the sons of Noah, and Noah’s wife and the three wives of his sons with them, entered the ark,** **14 **they and every beast after its kind, and all the cattle after their kind, and every creeping thing that creeps on the earth after its kind, and every bird after its kind, all sorts of birds.**

**15 **So they went into the ark to Noah, by twos of all flesh in which was the breath of life.**

**16 **Those that entered, male and female of all flesh, entered as God had commanded him; and the Lord closed /it /behind him.**

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God closed the door of the ark on that day right before judgment came.

Noah didn’t close it, the text says God did.

God shut it.

God sealed it and at the same time sealed the fate of all who had shut their ears and hearts to the preaching of Noah.

This is the sobering truth: grace does have a limit, the offer does come to an end, there is such a thing as too late, and unbelieving man has no guarantee of life and grace when he refuses to repent of his sin.

Jesus said it will be just like the days of Noah in the last days as well, people carrying on with life as usual, when judgment comes.

Jesus called Himself the door, the only way, and the NT says Christ is also the ark of salvation through the judgment for all in Him (1 Peter 3).

Verse 13 tells us that Noah and his family, his wife and son’s wives, entered the ark exactly as God told them and on the very day God told them the flood was going to come.

They did not question like Satan did in Genesis 3, “did God really say?”

There was no observable or scientific reason to think it would rain 40 days and 40 nights and flood the whole world when they’d never seen a flood or storm or rain (?) like that.

It looked pretty ridiculous to the eyes of the sophisticated world to see this guy and his boys building a huge boat on dry land many miles from any water, a boat bigger than probably any structure most had seen.

But Noah and family trusted God and believed what God said, even though the whole world around them did not believe or trust what God had revealed to them.

If God said it, that settled it, for Noah and family whether or not anyone believed it.

Majorities and percentages don’t determine truth.

We know that ancient man from this period was quite intelligent and advanced, and perhaps the world’s smartest and most scholarly tried to convince Noah and family that there’s no way a worldwide flood could happen and all the experts agree and scholars agree you’re wrong, just like the same kind of people today still say to us.

The critics and skeptics of Noah for a century must have mocked him more than any mocking we receive today for believing what God said in Genesis, but Noah still trusted God and his family alone while the literal rest of the world (millions or even more than a billion people?) perished in disbelief.

What a great example for us, in a world where it seems like hardly anyone is committed to God’s Word from cover-to-cover, that we would be willing to believe God and stand alone if necessary.

If God says he created the world in six days with morning and evening, and the Ten Commandments say we are to work six literal days the same way, we shouldn’t question, “hath God really said?”

If God says all land creatures were created on the same day as Adam and lived /with man/ rather than millions of years before man “evolved,” I don’t question, “hath God really said?”

If God says it flooded so much that v. 19 says “… all the high mountains under the heavens were covered” – don’t object “hath God really said?”

I know scientists say those things can’t and didn’t happen, and they don’t stop with the first book of the OT, they do it with the first book of the NT.

A virgin birth is impossible, the same scientists would tell us, and those “miracles” Jesus did must have natural explanations or they’re not true, and a man can’t die on a cross and be in the tomb for 3 days and rise again like Jesus did.

Well, if you don’t believe Jesus literally died and rose as the Bible says, you’re not a Christian.

True Christians don’t bow to scientific or secular pressure in the first book of the NT; why do we think we have to in the first book of the OT?

Just because natural minds haven’t observed something and naturalistic processes can’t explain it doesn’t mean the supernatural events of God’s Word didn’t happen

 

If I can paraphrase and update the famous speech of Martin Luther: “I do not accept the authority of scientific ‘popes’ or councils of men who pontificate rather than prove their scientific theories, and [as Luther said of unsaved scholars in his day] who have erred and frequently contradicted each other [as evolutionists do].

Unless I am convinced by Scripture, and by plain reason, I cannot and I will not recant the interpretations of Genesis that Bible-believers have held since day one.

To go against conscience is neither right nor safe.

Here I stand, I can do no other.

God help me.

Amen.”

As I said last week, we don’t need scientists or science to /prove /the Bible (even if it could) but we also don’t need to be intimidated into thinking true science has ever been able to /disprove /any part of God’s Word, a book that is true in every area it speaks.

So look at verse 16, where it says male and female of “all flesh” entered the ark.

If you look back at v. 15, it describes animals going into the ark to Noah in pairs or twos of all flesh with the breath of life, or in other words, the creatures of the earth that breathe air (the air-breathing sea creatures and mammals of the water of course could survive in the water).

Verse 14 further clarifies that the creatures entering the ark were the /land/ animals (it even says “on the earth”) as well as flying creatures, a Heb.

word that probably covers more than just “birds” as NASB ~/ NKJV has it.

Several good translations have “everything with wings” (NIV, HCSB, NET), and ESV has “every winged creature.”

So it would not just be creatures that modern taxonomists classify as birds, but whatever flying mammals or flying reptiles were around then, bats, etc., perhaps even flying insects if they could not survive the flood.

Were some of the bigger land animals excluded from being on the ark?

No, the passage says there were 2 of all flesh and creatures with breath of life (and 7 of clean animals).

As we saw a couple weeks ago, the study of original “kinds” of animals, called /baraminology/ (which tries to trace back to the original genera ~/ genus ~/ family, approximate to biblical “kind”) suggests that all known non-extinct land animals and birds could have fit on maybe only one of the three decks of the ark.

So there was a lot of room in the 1.5 million cubic feet of the ark as Genesis 6 describes its dimensions, including known creatures now extinct and then some, and even the biggest of creatures like wooly mammoths and dinosaurs still around (50-55 dinosaur “kinds”?), undoubtedly smaller of these and giraffes rather than full-grown and tallest ones.

Verse 14 actually describes the land animals of the ark using the same exact language as Genesis 1.

So these are the same categories and land creatures God created at creation week and the genealogy of Genesis 5 reveals this was less than 1700 years after creation of all creatures.

That’s the biblical timeline.

Look at Genesis 1:

19 There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

20 Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures, and let birds [/ESV footnote says “flying things”/] fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.”

21 God created *the great sea monsters* [/we’ll come back to that later]/… 23 There was *evening and there was morning, a fifth day.*

24 Then God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures after their kind: cattle [/first one it mentions is the Heb.

word “behema” – we’ll see its plural form “behemoth” a little later/] and creeping things [/this term seems to include reptiles/] and beasts of the earth after their kind”; and it was so. 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 [/these creatures including reptiles are listed last in order of creation before man/]; and *God saw that it was good.*

26 Then God said, “Let Us make man 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.”

… 31 God saw all that He had made, and *behold, it was very good.*

And there was *evening and there was morning, the sixth day.*

So what day would land dinosaurs have been created?

Day Six.

Sea dinosaurs?

Day Five.

Weren’t these “days” long ages of thousands or millions of years and only at the very end did man come to be?

Many Christians try and reconcile Gen. 1 with assumptions of evolutionists.

There’s a number of reasons I gave awhile back that Gen. 1 days are 24-hour

 

*G         God's statement in The Ten Commandments*

*E          Evening and morning language indicates normal days*

*N         Night and day are defined and contrasted in the 1st day*

*E          Every time numerals are used with /yom /in Hebrew, it means a normal day*

*S          Seasons and years (longer literal timeframes) are contrasted with “days” *(v.

14-18)

*I           Interpretation of Scripture as a whole supports a literal Genesis 1 *(Mark 10:6, Rom. 8, 5:12, etc.)

*S          Scientific theories have not disproven biblical creation*

So mankind and all land and sea creatures that God created originally lived together in a very good creation, including dinosaurs.

Death came as a result of sin in Genesis 3, so you don’t have millions of years of death, decay, destruction, dying out of dinosaurs or any creatures with breath of life before Genesis 3.

 

Look at v. 21 again, which says God created “great sea monsters” (NASB), or other translations have “large sea animals” (NCV) or “large sea creatures” (HCSB) or “great creatures of the sea” (NKJV, NIV, cf.

ESV “great sea creatures”).

Emphasis on /size./

The Septuagint (ancient Jeiwsh translation of OT into Greek, often abbreviated as LXX) has /ta keta /[sea monster, huge fish] /ta megala /[mega in size]

 

What do the dictionaries and lexicons say?

/- New Bible Dictionary, /p.

43, translates “giant marine animals”

/- Brown Driver Briggs Lexicon/, 1072.2, gives “serpent” and “dragon” as other definitions

/- Hebrew & Aramaic Lexicon of the OT, /p.

1764: ‘the meaning of the sbst. is always sea-monster, dragon … sea-dragon

/- Dictionary of Biblical Languages with Semantic Domains: ‘/sea monster, sea-dragon, i.e., a serpent-like monster (of myth?) that lives in the deep (of river or ocean), which can only be controlled by great powers  … sea creatures, i.e., very large, impressive-looking creatures of the oceans … serpent monster, dragon, i.e., a serpent-like monster’ (DBLH 9490, #4)

/- Theological Wordbook of the OT /(Vol 2, p. 976)/: ‘/The word denotes “any large reptile” … Referring to anything from large snakes … to enormous sea creatures.’

/- Enhanced Strong’s Lexicon /(8577, Woodside Bible Fellowship)/: /‘[/tanniyn/, /tanniym/ ~/tan·*neen*~/] 28 occurrences; AV translates as “dragon” 21 times, “serpent” three times, “whale” three times, and “sea monster” once.

*1* dragon, serpent, sea monster.

1a *dragon or dinosaur*.