Parables and the Creation

Several days ago, I mentioned that the Holy Spirit started pushing me to focus on pieces related to just two subjects: salvation and eschatology, the study of End Times prophecy. And that came as a bit of a shock even to me: as an amateur eschatologist, I've been under the impression that we are well under two years from the end of the Age, the Rapture of the Believers to Heaven and the beginning of the Great Tribulation where those that remain are subjected to seven years of Hell on earth before being sent to the actual Hell which most of them don't believe in (or else they'd probably been picked up with the rest of us true Christians). But the implication of the Holy Spirit's command is that at the very least I'm right about the time frame of the End Times, and more likely we're staring at an even shorter window than I thought before Christ brings us actual Believers Home - as soon as any moment, literally, and no longer than my previous nineteen month guesstimate.

This was the very piece I was working on when He interrupted me.

But having printed an article about Australian footy the other day, it seems silly NOT to print articles like this as well, if I have them ready. So I will indeed focus on the topics God the Spirit has asked me to...but as other things come to mind, I'll write about them as well. 

Remember as you read this that nothing here is deal-breaking as a Christian. You're free to agree with me or disagree with me - it doesn't make either you OR me any less of a Believer. But I hope you'll read it and think about it. - Thanks! -gps

 

            “Then the disciples came and said to Him, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ And He answered them, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.’”        - Matthew 13:10-11

            The Bible is filled with analogies, similes, parables, and metaphors from Genesis through Revelation; everything from the dream statue of King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2 (made of clay, iron, bronze, silver and gold, it represented the dynasties of the pre-Christian world) to the beast coming out of the sea in Revelation 13 (with ten horns and seven heads, and yet ten crowns on its heads – representing the nations which will host the antichrist when he comes.) to the messages from the Lord that people like Nathan (David’s seer in the book of Samuel) to the many, many parables of our Lord, Jesus Christ: the parable of the Mustard Seed, the parable of the Sower, the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Fool and the Lost Son, and so forth. The Almighty delights in hiding the truth – and especially the Truth – in plain sight.

            On the flip side, the Bible is also filled with historically accurate fact – in many cases, facts detailed to an amazing degree of accuracy. One of the mysteries of the Biblical world when I was young was the impossibility of the story of Noah and the Flood That Drowned The World. There was no way that story could have conceivably been true…until archaeologists started to connect the strata of flood plain evidence across the continents marking multiple cultures that matched the time of Noah, followed by the discovery of the actual remains of Noah’s Ark, right about where it should be, matching the dimensions and construction Scripture expected it to have (see Genesis 6:14-16 for a starting point). As we continue to learn more definitively about our past, we find striking evidence that culture, cities, events, royalty, all seeming to be exactly what God has told us it was, through the pens of Moses and his fellow God-guided writers.

            “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways.

          As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”                               - Isaiah 55:8 - 9

          It’s also clear (by Sherlock Holmes’ theory that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left – however improbable – must be the truth) that God does not view time the way we do. It becomes the only explanation that accounts for the prophecies He projects to Daniel, Isaiah, and indeed half the authors of the Old Testament; it’s why other Biblical writers can insert information they have no way of knowing in advance (such as the foreshadowing of Christ’s birth, life, and death that appear in virtually every book of the Old Testament); and it’s the only explanation how John can have “visited” (if, indeed, quotation marks are even appropriate) the End of Time and seen and heard all of the events of Revelation, which have already happened – except…wait, what about free will? But… if God knew what was going to happen and free will does exist (which it does, or else people wouldn’t have the choice between Heaven or Hell), then it must be because He not only has seen the future, He can constantly see the future, because He can see all of time simultaneously (if indeed “simultaneously”, which means “at the same time, can reasonably be used to describe the indescribable of God). I find that I picture God as having extra dimensions He exists in – more spatial directions, like someone from the book Flatland (don’t know the reference? Read it. You need your mind opened.) AND more temporal directions, like someone who can see the entire script of a play when the characters can only experience the “now” they happen to exist at…well, er,…now. You get the idea. [There’s more on this topic in an earlier essay of mine,“Free Will or Determinism”]     

          “But if he has a reddish-white sore on his bald head or forehead, it is a defiling disease breaking out on his head or forehead. The priest is to examine him, and if the swollen sore on his head or forehead is reddish-white like a defiling disease, the man is diseased and is unclean. The priest shall pronounce him unclean because of the sore on his head. Anyone with such a sore on his head must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside of the camp.”

- Leviticus 13:42-46

            Finally, consider the motivation for the kosher laws and menstrual regulations of the Pentateuch, where His incredibly strict rulebook regarding such topics as dealing with leprous people, blood, and the like served a purpose that (curiously) apparently didn’t exist when Christ made the New Covenant with His people fifteen hundred years later. Is there anyone who seriously doesn’t think that those original rules were specifically designed for the primitive society which existed before man had the ability to practice sufficient or effective hygiene, store most foods safely for the long term, and who did not yet understand what you and I would consider basic germ theory or disease control? Jesus Christ replaced the animal and grain sacrifices with His own death and glorious resurrection, but He didn’t replace the Jewish kosher laws (or, frankly, half of Leviticus and Deuteronomy) with anything…because they had served their purpose. God’s people had succeeded in not accidentally extinguishing themselves, and they were no longer needed. In Moses’ time, mankind had a very primitive understanding of the way the world worked. That was to be expected: God knew He had created us to be learning creatures, in all fields of knowledge. Consider Paul’s explanation to the Corinthians in his first epistle to them: “And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you were not yet able to receive it.” (First Corinthians 3:1-2) He understood (as we all do) that when we are fledgling learners in any area, we need to be spoon fed simple material at first, or we won’t learn at all.  As Peter says in his First Epistle, chapter 2, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into Salvation.”

†

          Are you with me so far?

        1)   The Bible uses analogies to both show and hide the truth.

        2)   God does not view time the way we do.

        3)   When we are fledgling learners, we need simple material at first.

If so, the next step is pretty short if you’ve paid attention.

            “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be Light’, and there was light.”

- Genesis 1:1-3

            What does the first chapter of Genesis describe? Traditional doctrine – read, scholarly human kind – has long argued that it describes exactly 144 hours in the life of God, in which He “created the heavens and the earth”, in which He filled the waters with “swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth”, and then He “created Man in His own image.”

            Meanwhile, modern science, using the skills and tools which the Lord Almighty helped us develop over the course of millennia, developed proofs for so many of the truths that are detailed in God’s Word. They did, however, come up with a slight discrepancy from the exact timing that traditional doctrine demands for these miracles.

            Traditional doctrine says “six days”. Modern science says “13.7 billion years.”

            Unfortunately, that’s a bit large for us to consider it a rounding error, a “lost in translation”, or an “oops! Forgot to carry the five!” mistake.

            One answer or the other is off by a factor of 8,334,166,666,666,667%.

            However, the problem is that one of those numbers comes from the Bible, which is inerrant, and the other comes from independent calculations (verifiable in multiple ways) using the very same methods we rely on for determining other equally fundamental and ineffable measurements of His Creation (see the second paragraph of this very vignette, for example). Even the age of the Earth itself, 4.7 billion years, has been authenticated in so many different ways as to be beyond doubt. We can’t have it both ways – either all of our historical science is fatally flawed, in which case there isn’t any independent verification of the Bible, or the vast, vast majority of it holds true to the methods He guided us to develop, in which case….what?

            Here’s “what”.

            Return to the premises we accepted. Just because Daniel says “seventy weeks” doesn’t mean it’s 490 days! We know God does not view time the same way humans do: at the very least, given the apostle John’s temporal journey to the End Times he described in such detail in Revelation, Our Lord has complete and utter mastery of time as well as space, and most likely exists outside of time entirely except for when He chooses to go wading in the timestream with His children (us) here and there.

            So, “six days” could easily be a substitute for a much longer span of time – six months, six years, six decades. There’s absolutely no Biblical reason to presume 144 hours in this case; in fact, it’s almost unprecedented to assume that it would be exactly six days. If we refer to Moses’ own words in Psalm 90:4 (“For a thousand years in Your sight/Are but as yesterday when it is past/or as a watch in the night.”), six days could easily be six thousand years, or even far more. John MacArthur notes in his study Bible on the subject of time dilation, “God understands time much differently from man. From man’s viewpoint, Christ’s (second) coming seems like a long time away. From God’s viewpoint, it will not be long. This may not be a specific indication of the fact that there are actually one thousand years between the first phase of the ‘day of the Lord’ and the last phase a thousand years later at the end of the millennial kingdom.” We so blithely assume this thousand-or-more-to-one time dilation with regards to the End Times – why do we resist the obvious need to apply it at the front end, too?

            Unfortunately, even with that, we’re still well short of the scientific assessment – by a factor of two million or so.

            That’s where the realization of whom God was talking to in Genesis comes into play. While as Christians we acknowledge that all sixty-six books of the Bible were ghost-written by God (which I suppose makes them “Holy Ghost-written”!), the universal acknowledgment of human authorship of the Pentateuch is of Moses, a Hebrew by birth raised and educated in the Egyptian royal court of 1500 B.C. (forgive me – I can’t get used to saying “B.C.E.”!). Without question, Moses had firsthand knowledge and understanding of the events of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and almost all of Deuteronomy – and was probably the only one who could have known much of what transpired on Mount Sinai, for example. The very end of Deuteronomy, where he dies, was presumably tacked on by Joshua or one of the Levite priests; and Genesis was assembled from eleven separate histories passed down orally and in writing, the assembly of which tradition ascribes to Moses. (Whether or not it was actually Moses is probably immaterial for our purposes: certainly the material of Genesis 1, for which the Trinity Itself were the only sentient witnesses, had to have been dictated to some human scribe of the same time period, in 1500 B.C.; Moses was probably as well-educated as any man in the world at the time, so for sake of argument let us take Mosaic authorship as given.)

So, Moses was as well-read and as well-schooled as any Hebrew – as far as that era goes. But three and a half millennia ago, even a man of Moses’ acumen was going to be well out of his depth if God started describing what current science believes He must have accomplished! Think about the Lord explaining this to Moses: Billions of light-years away, in an instant, a universe of matter and anti-matter exploded into existence from nothingness (and talk about an irrefutable proof of God! To me the Big Bang is a more definitive demonstration of His unimaginable Power than hovering over the face of the water and saying “Let there be light”!). From that point singularity, I set in motion an infinitely complex ballet of gases swirling into galaxies, into stars, into planetary systems, and so forth, finally reaching its pinnacle in a backwater arm of a galaxy, away from the deadly radiation of the galactic core, which I coddled protectively so that I could bring about Human Life on the planet I so carefully placed at precisely the correct location in orbit around the right class of star to sustain the climate I chose.

Can’t you just hear Moses (or anyone of that time!), who was probably still of the opinion that the earth was flat, asking, “Um, excuse me, Lord, but…what?!?” 
(“Yes, Moses? What part do you have a question about?”) 
“Um,… all of it, Sir! I don’t know what most of those words even mean.”

God knew that would be the problem, of course. That’s a safe bet. And even if He somehow made Moses understand the entire Creation set-up (which of course the Lord could make happen if need be), the readers of Genesis wouldn’t understand it, either. So, either He increases everyone’s scientific comprehension three thousand-plus years just to tell a scientifically accurate story (and who knows? Maybe we’re still too primitive and the real story is still outside our grasp!), or, much more likely, He would do what Jesus did in the parables – tell a story that gets the crucial message across with the essential pieces of truth.

“Let there be Light.” To me, this is the essential statement of Creation. Whatever else happened along the way, this is the critical moment of His handiwork: that moment when Creation itself burst into existence. Notice a couple of things –

1)    The phrase captures a suddenness that describes nothing else in the universe as succinctly or vividly as the Big Bang. Countless human writers have used that four-word phrase in various media forms of expression as punch lines for explosions – even mock-ups of the Big Bang itself. It doesn’t really describe whatever doctrine thinks happened in Genesis 1:3. Which, by the way…

2)    …was NOT the invention of the Sun, which doesn’t happen until later, in verses 14-16. “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 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.” So, if that light wasn’t the sun, which didn’t exist yet…and the light wasn’t God, who already existed – what WAS it?

Now, look at verse 4: “God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.” So, what were this light and darkness? Despite the claim of verse 5, it cannot be day and night the way we know it today, because the sun and the moon are still ten verses away from existence. One scholar says that God set up a second light source on one side so that He could start the Earth rotating and begin the process of day-and-night… but, you’d think he’d mention that. MacArthur himself suggests the same thing, except God is the light source on one side of the planet. So – why did He need to replace Himself? Not for the light, says MacArthur, but so the sun could provide “signs and seasons” to earth. Hmm.

There’s a better solution, and it’s staring us in the face. If verse four depicts the Big Bang, then as the initial explosion expands at the speed of light or just below (or if you buy into the current cosmological concept of ‘inflation’, just above!), the nucleus of that blast starts to separate – distinguishing the “light” (the nascent star systems) from the “darkness” (in between those star-system collections of glowing matter). The fact that we call the black of space “night” isn’t far from what we say today, since the only time we see into space is at night, that’s how we refer to it – “as black as night”. And it places the events in the proper order without making up details that aren’t there. We must take the Bible at its Word for what it actually says, not what we want it say. Even MacArthur is guilty of this sin as he describes his solution for this situation, desperately wanting to make a literal interpretation of “six days” stick. Here’s his explanation (from his Study Bible notes on Genesis 1:14) for the late appearance of the sun and moon in verse 14: “For three days there had been light in the day as though there was a sun, and lesser light at night as though there were the moon and stars. (Really? How do you figure that?) God could have left it that way, but did not. He created the “lights, sun, moon, and stars” not for light, but to serve as markers for signs, seasons, days, and years” – so, wait, we’d had no markers for days, but we’d had four days? And…how long were those days, if we had no markers for them, and so you had no possible measure of defining those days? (The underlines are mine for emphasis.) Those who continue to demand a literal “six days” for the Creation of the Universe while the moral compass of human society points more and more straight downwards are wasting their energy, as well as poisoning the public’s opinion on Christianity at a time when we can’t afford to be shoved out to the fringe any more than we already are.

So, when does Adam arrive on the scene? Well, there’s nothing in the Scripture that demands a particular timeframe, given the Big Bang understanding of Genesis 1:1-16. After He has created everything else, then (in Genesis 1:26) we read, “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” When does that have to happen? Eight thousand years ago? Four million years ago? 4.7 billion years ago? Does anything in Scripture really tell us? No – but it does have to be after the creation of a planet filled with creatures. So, cross out 4.7 billion years. 
But then, why not accept the initial appearance of humans as defined by modern science? Not “proto-humans”, if you take an evolutionary view, but the first human beings, created in God’s image – much more recent than four million years ago. There has always been a gap in our understanding of primitive humanity: where did Homo Sapiens come in, and how did the Neaderthals die out so suddenly? What advantage did Sapiens have? What if you presume that God created "man" - the Homo Sapiens - and because they were God's favored children, they overwhelmed the other proto-humanoid species and ruled the planet from thereon, as God intended for them to do. The Bible and the scientific record line up, and each side has to understand what it's looking at: the confirmation of its own records, with the correlation alongside the other side's evidence. 
(And it also solves one of those age-old conundrums: where did the extra DNA come from? How did we get humans married off to others to extend the species when God only started with Adam and Eve? There presumably was some incestuous relationships, approved by God when options were limited, but we also know that these early species interbred at times. If you can factor that in, then perhaps the tribes of Cain and others are accounted for, among other similar Genesis issues.)

As believers in Christ and in God’s infallibility, we do our faith a grave disservice by spitting into the wind on a topic that not only doesn’t have to be a “them-or-us” duel, but is actually one in which we are better served corroborating the scientific evidence that validates our Scriptures instead of fighting a vain battle based on our own ignorance and pride.


      Having said all of that... none of this is vital. It's one man's interpretation of God's Word, but as a human being, I cannot know its validity for certain. Believing this or not believing it is not critical to our salvation - it's not a fundamental part of our faith. I choose to think it's the most likely way of finding the truth concerning the correlation of God's Word with scientific discovery, but none of this changes the Gospel - we are sinners, and we need Christ for our salvation. 

Evolution, Dragons, and the Bible

          The major tenet of the scientific method is that one cannot presume the outcome while doing the experiment or research. No matter what your opinion of the subject is, you must begin all research projects or experiments from an objective point of view – set your prejudices aside, verify all your assumptions, and start completely from scratch.

            This subject, this research, re-taught me that principle, to my chagrin.
            I warn you now: this conversation will undoubtedly cause disagreement. Please proceed with an open mind and the Spirit of God to guide you.

†

            After graduation from high school, I was a student at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, perhaps the most difficult entry for American math and science majors. Caltech is home to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where all of NASA’s satellites are managed, as well as Palomar Observatory, one of the finest deep space telescopes in the world. It also has an entering undergraduate class of only 210 freshmen each year from around the world, over half of whom had a perfect SAT score in math the year I was accepted. I say all of this not to boast, but to point out that for the formative years of my life, I was richly steeped in (A) the scientific method, from one of its foremost practitioners, and (B) treating the Bible and all other non-scientific treatises with skepticism, although I considered myself a Methodist Christian at the time. But years later, having left Caltech during my sophomore year to care for my dying mother, and then following in her footsteps teaching for thirty years, I was born again as a true Believer in Christ, and have since become as vehement for the Lord as a few of my Caltech classmates were against Him.

            So today, when I approach the subject of evolution within the Biblical framework, I do so with full comprehension of the volatility of the subject, and of my rare position situated as I am as both a trained research scientist and a fiercely devout Christian determined not to undermine God’s Word. I approached it the same way an earlier Vignette about Genesis 1 and the Big Bang (and in fact every such topic) was addressed: by starting and ending with the Scripture itself. I use the ESV, KJV, NASB, and NIV versions, utilizing BibleHub.com, the MacArthur and several other study bibles to help with as much reference to the original Hebrew (and Greek and Aramaic, when appropriate) as a non-linguist can get; and while I read and consider the input of as many learned commentators as possible, the actual Bible verses in question are always the Alpha and Omega of my research. (As Charles Spurgeon said in his book on commentary, “Sometimes, I find that the Bible can shed a lot of light on the commentaries…”)

†

            Born-again Christians have the reputation of blindly treating “evolution” as a nine-letter swear word, and a large percentage on non-believers see creationists, frankly, as myopic fools who simply parrot what their pastors tell them. Needless to say, the range of opinions held by reasonable men and women spans from “evolution doesn’t even exist”, to “Darwinian mutation is the power behind all change in all forms of life”, and a host of more reasonable points in between. In order to prove a particular viewpoint, one of the most common and effective methods is to assume the opposing perspective and prove a contradiction exists. That’s not exactly my methodology here, but it’s close: what I started with in this research is to assume the hardline Creationist viewpoint and then examine the Bible to see where verses might contradict it, particularly in conjunction with proven facts of nature. But I also found that I started looking for evidence in either direction: something that demanded one viewpoint or the other. 

While in a previous essay I went to some trouble to demonstrate that multiple possibilities exist regarding God’s creation of Adam and his bride in the Garden of Eden, let’s assume (for the sake of the investigation) the traditional “dust and rib” origin of our ancestors, full-grown adults not born of woman (hence the classic brain-teaser, Did Adam and Eve have navels?). Dive into Genesis 1 with me, won’t you?

            “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.” (Genesis 1:11-12, NASB)

            Key in this pair of verses is the phrase “yielding seed/bearing fruit after their kind”. The implication by many strict creationists is that these phrases, along with “And God saw that it was good”, demand that God created the plant life as it was and it never changed. Rubbish. All that demands is that apples made some kind of apples, oranges made some kind of oranges, and so on. “After their kind” doesn’t even imply “identical to” – in fact, it really sounds more like God expected variations in what grew from His creations. Certainly, the humans that came from Adam and Eve were not all identical to Adam and Eve, and if someone is going to insist that all humans came from these two (and in fact, from Noah and his wife, a few generations later post-Flood), they’re going to be hard-pressed to look at a deep-skinned African and a near-translucent Scandinavian and argue that “after their kind” includes no significant variation at all! In the lifetime of most European cultures, the evolutionary changes in plant life have been well documented – even apart from what geneticists and other scientists have done separate from God in their greenhouses and university labs.

            Notice in Genesis 1, the author (although Moses was probably the one who put pen to scroll, the actual information had to have come from God, the only sentient Being present at the time) carefully uses the phrase “after their kind” in verses 21, 24, and 25, specifically for His creation of the animals in their herds and flocks, and does NOT use that phrase when He tells the creatures to procreate in verse 22 (or to “be fruitful and multiply”, to be precise). Nothing in here implies that every one of the creatures in Genesis 1 are the same creatures on earth today. Certainly, the “evidence” in verse 25 that I’ve heard Mace Baker and a few others fall back on as their rejection of evolution is at best inferential and at worst ludicrous: “And God saw that it was good.” In a Bible filled with florid descriptions of God’s perfection in so many other instances, “good” seems if anything to be an argument for evolution: God saw that it was a good start, and He would continue to guide their improvement over time. (And don’t try to prop the argument up by pointing to verse 31 where He calls it “very good”. That’s just sad.) 

As I went to great length to say in that previous essay, we are absolutely required to read what the Bible actually says, and NOT read into it what it does NOT say. What the first book of Genesis does NOT say, is that God created every creature exactly as it would stay for the rest of eternity. While it also does NOT say that He didn’t, there is another, decisive factor when Biblical evidence is at a stalemate. 

            Scientific evidence. 

            God gave us brains for a reason. He gave us the ability to read and write and communicate and deduce and derive and observe our universe. In Genesis 1:28, He specifically said to the first man, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it; and rule over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the sky and over every living thing that moves on the earth.” He gave us the scientific method for a reason, and I am firmly convinced that reason is to give man a way to discover the beauty of what He created. I’m all for siding with the Word of God over the scientific evidence of man, since the first is infallible and the second is not. But where the Word is silent, I side with the scientific community, which laughs at the segment of creationists who never get it through their heads that when science uses the word “theory” (as in “the theory of gravity” or “the theory of evolution”), it does not mean what they think it means. In science, “theory” means it’s derived from real evidence. (As opposed to a “postulate”, which is an assumed trait of a system. Believe me, if it were the “postulate of evolution”, we’d be right in shoving THAT word down the scientists’ throats!) A theory is just about the strongest term science has. In fact, theories are often stronger than laws, in the sense that the “laws of nature” have been overturned more often as we discover more about the case we’re studying – cf, quantum physics, for example.

            But I digress. Failing to find a definitive answer in God’s Word (and “it was very good” hardly qualifies as proof that evolution doesn’t exist), I believe the tons of evidence which shows the progress of evolution over the course of time from the Garden of Eden until the present day. Failing to find a Biblical answer virtually demands that we include the scientific evidence, rather than making up our own preferences and inserting them into God’s Word.

            Consider the number of species that have gone extinct. Were they “very good”? Is it a mistake of God’s that the dodo bird no longer roams the earth? If you respond that it’s man’s doing, that the animal is extinct simply because of man, are you saying that God failed to take that into account ahead of time? Or, if that was indeed part of God’s master plan – for some animals to go extinct – why then would you deny the possibility that God’s plan might also include the post-Genesis creation of some animals? 

† 

          Now, here’s where I got in trouble as a scientist. I had held certain beliefs about evolution before I was born again, and as a Christian I studied this topic incessantly to see if I was wrong or right; the Holy Spirit led me to see that I needed to change some of my stances, but that the traditional conservative creationist position was also in error, and that the Biblical truth was in between.

            But in the process of that study, I ran across some animals whose evolutionary background “helped my position” immensely…at the cost of my long-held beliefs about those animals. Those beliefs were more tightly ingrained than my thoughts about evolution, and I struggled to eliminate them from my prejudices entering into this examination, mostly because it wasn’t the original focus of my study. But the Biblical evidence is solid (even though, ironically, much of it was mistranslated originally, as we’ll see soon), and although it rocked my own opinion on one subject, it proved it on another.

† 

            So, one of my initial questions was this: Was there evidence of evolution within the text of the Bible itself? Were there animals that either changed or died out and were replaced that wouldn’t be explained away through Scripture? The first step was to establish what it was that God created in Genesis 1, and follow those animals as best as I could.

          From that point, I started tracing the animal life in the Bible, to see if I could find evidence one way or the other about animals that changed – either died out (perhaps, animals that are talked about which no longer exist) or were different than described Biblically (for example, if the Bible described a plant or animal or something that was not the same as we know it today). If so, that would be a start to my Biblical proof of the existence of evolution. As is true of almost everyone, I had my own opinion on this and a number of connected topics coming into my research, but as a firm proponent of the scientific method, I was judicious in not allowing those opinions to distort my study. 

But another point that hides beneath the surface of Genesis 1:20-25 shows up when we consider the original Hebrew terms for the animals being created by God. Consider Genesis 1:24…

“And God said, “Let the earth bring forth living creatures according to their kinds – livestock and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their kinds.” And it was so.”

So, here we see three categories of animal. In the original Hebrew, the English word “livestock” comes from “be-he-mah” (Strong’s #929) often translated into the words “cattle” or “beasts” or “beasts of the field”, and is generally inferred to mean not just bovine but goat, sheep, and other such semi-domesticated beasts of the farm and ranch variety. “Creeping things” comes from the Hebrew “wa-re-mes” (Strong’s #7431), and is understood to encompass all the insect and spider and other critters that make your skin crawl and sitcom housewives jump onto chairs screaming.

The third phrase is the most problematic: “beasts of the earth”, which reads in the original Hebrew as “we-hay-tow-e-res” (Strong’s #2416 and 776, together), and in more recent phonetic translations as “chayah ertz”, implies the “wild, carnivorous animals” (per Mace Baker) we think of as “jungle” animals: lions, tigers, and bears (“oh, my!”), elephants and giraffes, wolverines and zebras, and so forth. This interpretation is (I’ve been told) fairly straightforward, although I don’t read ancient Hebrew to verify that for you myself, and its definition is essentially unquestioned. You’ll see in a minute how that will complicate matters for us.

Now, back up a bit, to Genesis 1:21…

“So God created the great sea creatures and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm, according to their kinds, and every winged bird according to its kind.”

“Winged bird” is pretty easy – “o-wp-ka-nap” (Strong’s #5775 and 3671), which is translated very consistently throughout the Old Testament as such. The Hebrew word for “fish” is “bid-gat” (Strong’s #1710), which frankly I don’t see in my Hebrew interpretation of verses 21 or 24, but it does appear in the follow-up phrases in both verses 26 and 28, where God designates them to be under the dominion of Man.

The phrase in question, then, is at the start of verse 21, referring to “the great sea creatures”. The original Hebrew word in this place is “hat-tan-ni-nim” (Strong’s #8577), which appears uniquely in this one verse within the entire Bible, and is alternately translated as “whales”, “sea-monsters”, “magnificent marine creatures”, and (oddly) just “sea” in a couple of more obscure Bible translations. (The “Jubilee 2000” translation has something different, which we’ll get to in a minute.) Now, because we didn’t have a word for “fish” elsewhere in God’s list of creations in verses 21 and 24, it would be natural to assume that “hat-tan-ni-nim” meant all of the swimming creatures in the oceans: fish, sharks, whales, krill, and so forth. 

But that’s not what “hat-tan-ni-nim” means; not in the slightest. God seems to have covered that category in verse 20, with “Let the waters swarm with swarms of living creatures…” , and in verse 21 with “and every living creature that moves, with which the waters swarm…”. No, “hat-tan-ni-nim” implies size: hence, “whales”, “monsters”, and “magnificent” in the last paragraph. Does it seem likely that the whale would have been singled out, when all forms of livestock were lumped together into one word? Or when all forms of “wild creatures” were jumbled together as “chayah ertz”? Whales, to the ancients, were as described in Jonah 1:17 – “dag ga-do-wl”, or “great fish” (technically, “fish great”, and modern scholarship is now leaning towards the possibility that Jonah was really swallowed by a “great fish”, not a whale). Not “hat-tan-ni-nim”. Matthew refers to the creature in Jonah’s adventure (at 12:40 of his Gospel) with the Greek word “ketos”, which does precisely mean “whale”. 

I teased with the Jubilee 2000 translation earlier. I’ve never read that version of the Bible, but I have seen how it translates Genesis 1:21 – “And God created the great dragons and every living soul that moved, which the waters brought forth abundantly…”

Whales wouldn’t need a separate category. But dragons surely would.

†

The word “hat-tan-ni-nim”, it appears, is basically an adjective extension of either “hat-tan-nin” or “hat-tan-nim” (and someone who understands ancient Hebrew, please correct me if I’m mistaken!), which do show up elsewhere in the Bible. Both of those two shorter versions mean dragon, unquestionably, every time they’re used. “Hat-tan-nim” is used in Ezekiel 29:3 (“Behold, I am against you, Pharaoh king of Egypt, the great dragon that lies in the midst of his streams”) and “hat-tan-nin” occurs in Nehemiah 2:13 and Isaiah 27:1; we’re going to look at this last one in a minute.

There are several shorter variations of hat-tan-ni-nim listed under Strong’s word #8577, besides the two listed a moment ago:

Ø  “Kat-tan-nim” is used in Micah 1:8, translated in the KJV as follows: “Therefore I will wail and holler, I will go stripped and naked; I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls.” Oddly, there are several versions which translate this word as “jackals”, others that translate the word for “owls” as “ostriches”, and one as “daughters of an ostrich”, which absolutely fascinates me.

Ø  “Le-tan-nim” is used in Job 30:29 as dragon as well: “I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls”. (KJV) Again, we have some of the same translation conflicts as kat-tan-nim, with some versions using “jackals” instead (and ostriches instead of owls for “lib-owt”…and the same obscure version has “and a companion to daughters of the ostrich”, which would certainly make me reconsider my translation...).

Ø  The most interesting variation, because of where it appears, is “le-tan-ni-nim”, which shows up in Exodus 7 when Moses and Aaron are confronting the Pharaoh and demonstrating the power of their God. Verse 10 (KJV) says, “And Moses and Aaron went in unto Pharaoh, and they did so as the Lord had commanded: and Aaron cast down his rod before Pharaoh, and before his servants, and it became a serpent.” (It translates universally as either ‘serpent’ or ‘snake’, both here and two verses later when it ate up the Pharaoh’s sorcerers’ creatures.) Imagine how Pharaoh would have reacted if it had been a WHALE that the rod became! No, it seems fairly apparent that the “tannim” family of words has more to do with a family of animals that I had believed belonged more to mythology books than historical texts, which we know by the Word of God the Bible to be.

Ø  (And it’s worth noting that the rod which Moses threw down, in Exodus 4:3, became “le-na-hash”, which is the same creature that tempted Eve to eat from the tree of knowledge in Genesis 3, but NOT the same one Aaron’s rod turned into three chapters later. If Aaron’s rod transformed into something more dragon-like, I don’t doubt that it DID swallow up the Pharaoh’s sages’ creatures!)

So, what’s the point of all of this? OK, the Bible believes in dragons. Great. Why should we care?

Look at the time frame of the examples we showed.

Dragons co-existed with people. And since then, they’ve apparently gone extinct.

† 

But, was there any evidence outside of the Bible that dragon-like creatures existed in comparatively modern times? Or were they consigned to the times of the dinosaurs, if they existed at all? There is certainly no indication that dragons exist today, outside of the occasional Weekly World News tabloid report and other checkstand fodder. 

So, did dragons indeed live in human times and then go extinct? Modern science doesn’t give us a definitive answer.

Well, how about examining some not-so-modern science? 

In 79 AD, Pliny the Elder wrote what is considered the benchmark for encyclopedias, Naturalis Historiae. His methodology of studying and crediting original citations, along with his vast resources as a confidante of Roman emperors Vespasian and Titus, made this lone surviving work of his seminal in its authority. It included this tantalizing sentence: “Africa produces elephants, but it is India that produces the largest, as well as the dragon.”

Claudius Aelianus’ De Natura Animalium, a seventeen book collection of information about nature and its creatures written in the general neighborhood of 220 AD, includes this sentence: “The Phrygian History also states that dragons are born which reach ten paces (25-30 feet) in length.”

 

The Oakland Museum (CA)’s Discoveries Relating To Prehistoric Man, published in 1924, and Prehistoric Indians, by Barnes and Pendleton around the same year, both refer to cave drawings clearly implying the artists were depicting living brontosaurus-like creatures.

It’s possible. 

Turn back to Job 40, and start reading in verse 15, where the Almighty Lord describes Behemouth (in the present tense), up through verse 24:

“Behold, Behemouth, which I made as I made you;

He eats grass like an ox.

Behold, his strength is in his loins, and his power in the muscles of his belly.

He makes his tail stiff like a cedar, the sinews of his thighs are knit together.

His bones are tubes of bronze, his limbs like bars of iron.

He is the first of the works of God; let him who made him bring near his sword!

For the mountains yield food for him where all the wild beasts play…

Behold, if the river is turbulent he is not frightened;

He is confident though Jordan rushes against his mouth.

Can one take him by his eyes, or pierce his nose with a snare?”

I’ve read several interpretations of that passage which try to make Behemouth into a hippopotamus. Does that description sound like a hippo to you? It’s not a dragon, either – re-read Job 41 to see what a dragon looks like in a Biblical description. This is a perfect description of a brontosaurus-like dinosaur.

So, what’s our conclusion following all of this research?

Species change over time, both in characteristics and in existence. Therefore, just like the cosmos, God did not design a static, stagnant system, but one which evolves over time (yeah, I used that dirty word!). Even more miraculous than having created a stagnant world, He created a world in which the ingredients changed over time, and STILL He is able to micro-control every detail of the world so that it works out exactly as He has described it to us all the way through Revelation. From my perspective, that’s even MORE amazing than the traditional frozen-in-time “creationist” model! 

Secondly, incidentally, I found that creatures which I had thought died out millions of years ago (dinosaurs) or which I’d thought never actually existed (dragons) apparently DID indeed exist, and existed during human time periods. For me, this was the more revolutionary discovery, since I’d already derived the first conclusion independently before beginning this research.

So, to the creationists trying to rewrite Texas’ textbooks…to the science teachers refusing to acknowledge the possibility of divine intervention…Lighten up. Allow for the possibility that the world may be more wondrous than you’re giving it (or Him) credit for.