Sermon
Where Do Dinosaurs Fit in the Bible_ What Genesis Actually Says (No Ads)
Publisher transcript
Transcript
-
Welcome back to the Bible Stories. You may notice there
-
are no ads on this video because YouTube has demonetized
-
our channel. To support us, you can scan the first
-
QR code to join the Bible Stories podcast app, where
-
you can listen offline and access exclusive episodes. Or, if
-
you simply want to give, you can scan the second
-
QR code to donate directly. Thank you for helping us
-
keep these Bible Stories going. Open the first chapter of
-
the Bible and count the animals that are called by name.
-
31 verses, the whole filling of the sea and the
-
sky and the land, and you will not find a
-
single one, no lion, no eagle, no sheep. Before you
-
ask why the giants are missing from Genesis, you have
-
to explain something stranger. Every other animal is missing, too.
-
That changes the question, and almost nobody gets that far,
-
because two answers get handed out long before anyone stops
-
to count. The first says the giants were left out
-
because the men who wrote Scripture had never seen one.
-
That answer falls apart as soon as you remember that
-
Genesis never describes the lion either, or the eagle or
-
the ox, animals those men lived beside every single week.
-
The second answer says the giants are in there after all,
-
hidden under the old word dragon, and standing in front
-
of Job at the end of his book. That one
-
falls apart too, because the chapter in Job never tells
-
you when that creature lived, and the word dragon is
-
a translator's decision rather than the name of a species.
-
Both answers are working hard to repair a problem that
-
the first chapter of the Bible does not actually have.
-
So here is where dinosaurs really fit. They sit in Genesis,
-
exactly where every other land and sea creature sits, on
-
the fifth day and the sixth, inside the wide categories
-
the chapter uses for all of them. No verse was
-
taken out, nothing was buried, but that is only half
-
of the answer, and the other half is the part
-
almost nobody notices, even after reading the chapter for fifty years.
-
Come back to that empty list. A chapter that leaves
-
out the sheep and the lion along with the giants
-
was never trying to tell you what lived on the earth.
-
It held back that list on purpose, and the reason
-
it held back is the answer you came here for.
-
Find it, and this question stops being a threat to
-
your faith and starts explaining why the Bible was written
-
the way it was. Because when this book finally does
-
name an animal, two chapters later, the reason it gives
-
has nothing to do with size or teeth or how
-
long the creature lived. It has to do with you.
-
Underneath this question sits a fear that many believers carry
-
and almost never say out loud. The fear that your
-
Bible is smaller than the world you are living in,
-
that the museums and the textbooks hold the facts while
-
your Bible holds only the comfort, and that one honest
-
question from a grandchild at the kitchen table could bring
-
the whole thing down. It cannot, and the first chapter
-
of Genesis is about to show you why. Go back
-
to Genesis chapter 1 and slow down at the fifth day.
Genesis 1 chapter mention
-
God fills the water and the sky. The text says this,
-
So God created the great creatures of the sea, and
-
every living thing with which the water teems, and that
-
moves about in it according to their kinds, and every
-
winged bird according to its kind. Genesis chapter 1 verse 21.
-
Read that line again and look for a species. There
-
is not one. There is a category of enormous water creatures,
-
a category of swarming life, a category of winged things,
-
three buckets and nothing inside them labeled. Then comes the
-
sixth day and the land fills up. And God said,
-
Let the land produce living creatures according to their kinds,
-
the livestock, the creatures that move along the ground, and
-
the wild animals, each according to its kind. And it
-
was so. Genesis 1.24 Again, three buckets, animals that live
-
near people, animals that move low along the ground, animals
-
that live out in the wild, beyond the reach of
-
the village. That is the whole land inventory of the
-
Bible's first chapter, three words wide enough to hold everything
-
that has ever walked. Now do something most readers never do.
-
Ask where the familiar animals are. Where is the lion
-
in Genesis chapter 1? Where is the horse that Job's
Genesis 1 chapter mention
-
God describes so beautifully, or the eagle, or the ox
-
that shows up in half the laws of Moses? None
-
of them are there. The animals you assume are in
-
the creation account are no more present than the ones
-
you came looking for. Genesis chapter 1 has no animal
Genesis 1 chapter mention
-
names in it at all. So the question changes shape.
-
The honest question is not why the giants were left out.
-
It is why Genesis names no creature on earth, and
-
whether that silence was a mistake or a decision. Keep reading,
-
and you will find the first individual creature the Bible
-
ever names. It is not in the creation account. It
-
arrives two chapters later in the garden, and it is
-
the serpent. Think about what that tells you. The Bible
-
waits until chapter 3 to name an animal, and when
-
it finally does, it names one that walks into the
-
human story and changes it. The serpent is not named
-
because of its size or its scales or its place
-
in a list of living things. It is named because
-
of what it said to a woman and what that
-
cost the world. That is the first rule of this book,
-
and once you see it, you cannot unsee it. Genesis
-
names what touches the relationship between God and people. Everything
-
else stays in categories. which means the silence you came
-
here about is not aimed at dinosaurs. It is the
-
ordinary way this book treats all animal life. The great
-
reptiles are not being hidden. They are being filed along
-
with the lion and the sparrow and the whale under
-
words broad enough to carry them. Now, that raises a
-
fair objection, and I do not want to skip past it,
-
because it is the objection that keeps thoughtful people stuck.
-
Somebody always says it at this point. The Bible has
-
no word for dinosaur, because the word had not been invented.
-
That is true, and the date is easy to check.
-
The term was built in 1841 by an English anatomist
-
named Richard Owen out of two Greek words meaning something
-
close to fearfully great lizard. Moses could no more write
-
that word than he could write the word telephone, but
-
this answer is weaker than people think, and I would
-
rather hand you a strong answer than a convenient one.
-
A missing word has never stopped anyone from describing a creature.
-
The writers of Scripture had no scientific vocabulary for the
-
hippopotamus or the crocodile either, and they still managed to
-
put both of them on the page in ways you
-
can recognize. If an ancient man had watched a long-necked
-
animal the size of a house eating from the top
-
of a tree, he could have described it in the
-
language he had. The absence of the modern term does
-
not explain the absence of the picture. Here is what
-
actually explains it. Genesis does not give you a picture
-
of any animal. It gives you no description of the
-
lion either. Not a line about its mane, its hunting,
-
its roar. The creation account is not a book of
-
nature study with one page torn out. It is a
-
chapter that was never writing that kind of page about
-
any creature at all. There is one place, though, where
-
the text does stretch for something enormous, and it deserves
-
an honest look. There is one phrase in that first
-
chapter that keeps coming back, and it is the key
-
to the whole arrangement. According to their kinds, plants after
-
their kinds, water creatures after their kinds, birds after their kinds,
-
livestock and ground creatures, and wild animals after their kinds.
-
In a chapter of about thirty verses, the writer says
-
it again and again, as though he wanted nobody to
-
miss it. So what is a kind? It is a grouping,
-
and it is a wide one, much wider than the
-
narrow category a scientist means when he gives an animal
-
a two-part Latin name. A kind can hold variety inside it.
-
When the Bible later lists birds in the law of Moses,
-
it names one bird and then adds any kind of it,
-
gathering a whole family under one heading. That is how
-
the word works. One kind can contain creatures that look
-
very different from one another and still belong together. Now
-
hold that against the question you came with. A single
-
phrase in Genesis chapter 1 is built wide enough to
Genesis 1 chapter mention
-
cover an animal that fits in your palm, and an
-
animal that wouldn't fit in your house. The sentence was
-
made to carry weight. Nothing has to be squeezed in
-
and nothing has to be left out. And notice what
-
the repetition is claiming. Over and over, the chapter says
-
that life came up in order, with boundaries, each sort
-
of creature answering to the word that called it. Genesis
-
is not handing you a biology lesson, and I'm not
-
going to turn it into one. It is making a
-
far simpler statement. The living world did not arrive by accident,
-
and it is not a mess. Every kind that ever
-
breathed came out of a word God spoke on purpose,
-
including the ones nobody alive has ever seen. In the
-
fifth day line, one phrase stands out from everything around it.
-
The Hebrew word underneath it is tanin, and it is
-
a strange, heavy word. It appears across the Old Testament
-
for large, serpentine creatures and sea monsters. Older English Bibles
-
often turned it into dragon. In the prophets, it becomes
-
a picture of an arrogant power that God alone can break,
-
and Egypt gets called one of these creatures, thrashing in
-
its own river. So the first chapter of the Bible
-
does have a category for something colossal moving through the
-
water— That is real, and it is in the Hebrew,
-
and anybody who tells you Genesis is entirely silent about
-
anything huge has not read the verse closely. But I'm
-
not going to hand you more than the word can carry.
-
Tannin is a category, like all the other words in
-
that chapter. It covers whatever moved through the deep water
-
in enormous form. To translate it straight across as a
-
marine reptile from a museum display is to make the
-
text say something it never said. And the moment somebody
-
shows you that the same word is used for a
-
picture of a proud empire, your argument falls apart and
-
your faith takes the fall with it. I would rather
-
you hold a smaller claim that is true than a
-
bigger one that breaks. This is also where the famous
-
dragon of the older English Bibles comes from. If you
-
grew up with a Bible from 400 years ago, you
-
met that word dozens of times, and if you read
-
a newer one, you will usually find sea monster or
-
jackal or serpent in the same places instead. People sometimes
-
treat that as evidence that something was removed. It is
-
a translation question. One wide Hebrew word was being carried
-
into English by men who chose the widest English word
-
they had, and later translators chose differently. No creature was
-
edited out of the Bible. A single word was handled
-
two ways. What the word does prove is the pattern.
-
Even when Genesis reaches for the largest thing in the sea,
-
it still speaks in categories. The book is consistent all
-
the way down. And then comes the one moment in
-
Genesis where a list of animals should exist and does not.
-
Turn into Genesis chapter 2. The account slows down and
Genesis 2 chapter mention
-
comes to ground level, and God brings the animals to
-
the man. He brought them to the man to see
-
what he would name them, and whatever the man called
-
each living creature, that was its name. Genesis chapter 2
-
verse 19. Stop at the strangeness of that. Here is
-
a scene where creature after creature is placed in front
-
of a human being and given a name by him.
-
Here is the exact moment a catalogue of living things
-
is being created inside the story. And the Bible records
-
the act and keeps none of the names. Think of
-
how differently this could have gone. We have the names
-
of Cain's descendants. We have the ages of men who
-
lived before the flood, counted out year by year. We
-
have the sons of Noah, the sons of their sons,
-
and a long roll of nations that most readers skip.
-
Genesis is perfectly willing to keep lists. It keeps them obsessively.
-
Every one of those lists is a list of people.
-
So the writer had the room, had the habit, and
-
had the moment. He simply did not consider the roster
-
worth the ink. What he kept was the relationship. A
-
man standing in front of living things that God had made,
-
given the dignity of speaking over them, and finding, at
-
the end of all of it, that not one of
-
them could keep him company. That is why the scene
-
is in the book. Adam naming the animals is not
-
an inventory. It is the discovery that he was alone.
-
There is something else in that scene worth holding on to.
-
God does not hand the man a finished list to memorize.
-
He brings the creatures over, one after another, and waits
-
to hear what the man will say. The text puts
-
it almost tenderly that God brought them to see what
-
he would name them. The first work ever given to
-
a human being was not heavy labor. It was speaking,
-
and God stood there, listening to a voice he had
-
made the day before. If you have ever felt that
-
the world is full, and you are still by yourself
-
in it, you have stood where Adam stood. And notice
-
what God did with that loneliness. He did not lecture
-
the man about gratitude. He met the need. There is
-
another place where people expect a list and do not
-
get one, and it is the ark. The flood account
-
describes creatures coming to Noah by category, the same categories
-
as the creation week, birds and livestock, and creatures that
-
move along the ground, each according to its kind. No species,
-
no manifest. And then, when the water rises, Genesis says
-
something people rarely stop on. Everything on dry land that
-
had the breath of life in its nostrils died. Genesis
-
chapter 7 verse 22 That sentence does something to this
-
whole conversation. Extinction, the thing that is supposed to be
-
the problem, is already inside the Bible's own story. Genesis
-
describes a world where entire populations of living creatures stopped existing.
-
It never promises that every creature God made is still
-
walking around somewhere for you to photograph. The book that
-
people think is embarrassed by bones in the ground is
-
a book that tells you plainly that an enormous amount
-
of life died and was buried underwater. I am not
-
going to tell you that explains every fossil in every
-
rock on every continent. Faithful Christians have argued about the
-
mechanics of that for 200 years, and they are not
-
going to settle it in a video. But the shape
-
of the objection changes once you see the verse. The
-
world you live in is not presented in Scripture as
-
a complete display of everything God ever made. It is
-
presented as what is left after a judgment and a rescue.
-
So if someone tells you that Genesis cannot account for
-
creatures that are no longer here, you can answer gently.
-
Genesis has a category for that. The book opens with
-
a world full of life and then tells you, less
-
than seven chapters later, that most of it drowned. There
-
is a harder question hiding behind the one about fossils,
-
and sincere people have wrestled with it for centuries. At
-
the end of the sixth day, God looks at everything
-
he has made and calls it very good. So was
-
there any death in that world before human beings turned
-
away from him? Believers have landed in two places. Some
-
are certain that nothing could have died before the fall,
-
not a bird and not an insect, because a world
-
with teeth and claws and blood in it could not
-
be called very good. Others, just as serious about Scripture,
-
say that the death of animals was never what Genesis
-
was talking about. What broke in that garden was a
-
relationship between people and their Maker, and the verdict very
-
good was spoken over a finished world, working the way
-
God had set it running. I am not going to
-
invent a certainty the text does not give. The chapter
-
does not stop to answer it, and I would be
-
doing you no favors by pretending otherwise. But notice what
-
Genesis is clear about, because this is the part that holds.
-
The damage in this world came through human beings, not
-
through a rock falling out of the sky, not through
-
a monster, not through some flaw in the way God
-
built the place. Something went wrong in a garden where
-
two people decided they knew better than the voice that
-
made them, and everything since has been God moving toward
-
the repair. Every honest reader has questions that Genesis does
-
not answer. You are allowed to have them. A faith
-
that can only survive on a complete set of answers
-
was never faith to begin with. Now there is a
-
passage people always bring up, and if I avoided it
-
you would think I was dodging. It is the end
-
of the book of Job. Job has lost his children,
-
his health and his standing, and he has spent thirty
-
chapters demanding an explanation. God answers from a storm and
-
asks him question after question, and near the end God
-
points at a creature. Look at Behemoth, which I made
-
along with you, and which feeds on grass like an ox.
-
Job chapter 40 verse 15 The description goes on, bones
-
like tubes of bronze, limbs like bars of iron, strength
-
in the hips, and the line everyone remembers, that it
-
moves its tail like a cedar, which is a tree
-
that grows tall enough to roof a palace. Christians have
-
read this creature two ways for a very long time.
-
Many have seen a river animal the Hebrews knew, a
-
thick-bodied grass-eater that nobody could approach. Others have looked at
-
the cedar and concluded that no living animal fits, and
-
that God was pointing Job at something the world no
-
longer has. I am not going to pretend the text
-
closes that door, because it does not. And I am
-
certainly not going to build your confidence in Scripture on
-
a reading that the next clever video can take apart.
-
What I will say is this. Whichever creature stood in
-
front of Job, the passage is not doing what people
-
use it for. Job is not told the age of
-
the animal, where it came from in the order of creation,
-
or when it last walked the earth. The chapter gives
-
no date. It was never written to settle a timeline.
-
It was written to end an argument. God shows a
-
shattered man one work of his hands that the man
-
cannot tame, cannot approach, cannot explain, and the shattered man
-
goes silent. And remember where we are standing. Job is
-
not Genesis. The question in front of us is what
-
the first book of the Bible actually says— and the
-
first book of the Bible does what it has done
-
from verse 1. It speaks in kinds. There is one
-
more answer in wide circulation, and you have probably met it.
-
It works on the first two verses of the Bible.
-
The first verse says that in the beginning God created
-
the heavens and the earth. The second says the earth
-
was formless and empty, with darkness over the surface of
-
the deep. The idea is that an entire age fits
-
between those two sentences. A first world, finished and full,
-
perhaps with the giants in it, destroyed in a judgment
-
nobody records, leaving the ruin described in verse 2. On
-
this reading, the six days are a rebuilding rather than
-
a making, and the great reptiles belong to the world
-
that was wiped out before ours began. It is a
-
tidy answer. I understand why people reach for it, and
-
plenty of sincere Christians hold it, but I would not
-
build anything on it, and here is why. Start with
-
the age of the idea. This reading appeared in the
-
early 1800s, which makes it younger than the hymn Amazing Grace.
-
It is not what the church read in that verse
-
for the first 18 centuries of its life. That alone
-
does not make an idea wrong, but when a brand
-
new reading arrives at precisely the moment a culture needs
-
the text to accommodate something, it is worth being careful.
-
Then look at the verse itself. The second verse says
-
the earth was formless and empty. It reads as a
-
description of the starting point, unshaped ground, waiting for the
-
God who is about to shape it, which is exactly
-
what the next five days do. Nothing in the sentence
-
announces a catastrophe. The ruin has to be carried into
-
the verse from outside it. But the real trouble is simpler.
-
That whole theory exists to answer a problem that Genesis
-
does not have. It is trying to find a place
-
to put the giants as though the first chapter had
-
an empty space where their names should be. There is
-
no empty space. The chapter never gave names to anything.
-
Once you see that, you do not need a lost
-
age to store them in. They were in the water
-
and on the land all along, inside the kinds, right
-
where every other creature is. Now I want to show
-
you the thing that finally made sense of this for me,
-
and it is in the shape of Genesis chapter 1 itself.
Genesis 1 chapter mention
-
Read it straight through and watch the camera move. The
-
first three days make spaces. Light and dark are divided.
-
Water and sky are divided. Dry ground appears. Then the
-
next three days fill those spaces in the same order.
-
Lights in the sky. Creatures in the water and the air.
-
Creatures on the land. The chapter is built with care
-
by someone who knew exactly what he was doing. Then
-
watch what happens at the end of day six. Everything
-
up to that point has been widening, more water, more sky,
-
more life, more kinds, and suddenly the chapter stops widening
-
and narrows to a single point. One creature, made in
-
the image of God, spoken to directly, handed responsibility for
-
all the rest. The whole chapter has been moving toward
-
a conversation. That is why there is no catalog. A
-
catalog would be the chapter widening at the very moment
-
it was built to narrow. Genesis is not a survey
-
of everything that lived. It is the opening of a
-
story about God and the people He made. And every
-
line in that first chapter is already leaning toward the
-
moment when God speaks to someone who can answer back.
-
Once you see that, the silence stops feeling like an omission.
-
The giants are not missing from the story. They are
-
inside the categories, in the water and on the land,
-
under the same good word God spoke over everything else.
-
They simply are not the subject, and neither is the lion,
-
and neither is the eagle. So does the complete inventory
-
exist anywhere in the Bible? In a sense, yes, and
-
it takes one sentence. It is in a letter Paul
-
wrote to a small church in a town called Colossae,
-
and he is not writing about biology, he is writing
-
about Jesus. For in him all things were created, things
-
in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible. Colossians 1.16
-
That is the roster. Everything that ever breathed, swam, flew, hunted,
-
or grazed, every creature that filled the earth before anyone
-
was there to write a word about it, is gathered
-
into three words. All things were created, and the sentence
-
does not stop at making. It says, they were created
-
through him and for him, which means that the creatures
-
no human eye ever saw were still his, still held,
-
still part of what he was doing. Psalm 104 says
-
the same thing in the language of worship. The earth
-
is full of God's creatures, and the sea teems with
-
things beyond number, beyond number. The Bible is not pretending
-
the world is small. It is telling you without blinking
-
that what God made runs past the end of our counting,
-
and then it turns its attention to the one creature
-
that could hear His voice. Let us come back to
-
the fear I named at the start, because that is
-
what this question has always been underneath. If the Bible
-
leaves out something that enormous, can it be trusted with
-
something as small as your life? Turn the question over.
-
A book that tried to tell you everything would have
-
told you nothing well. Genesis does not give you the
-
age of the rocks, the chemistry of the water, the
-
grammar of the stars, or the roll call of the animals.
-
And the reason is not ignorance. It is focus. This
-
book has one subject, and it never loses it. God
-
made the world. He made people, and He made them
-
for Himself. They turned away. He came after them. Everything
-
in Scripture, from the garden to the empty tomb, is
-
holding to that one line. The great reptiles are not
-
a whole in that story. They are part of the
-
world the story happens in, a part God made and
-
called good and never promised to describe to you. And
-
when a book refuses to wander, you can trust it
-
where it does speak. The same Genesis that declines to
-
tell you what walked the earth in the ages before
-
Abraham will tell you, carefully and in detail, the name
-
of a woman who laughed in a tent, the number
-
of silver pieces a brother was sold for, and the
-
exact words of a dying man blessing sons who did
-
not deserve it. It keeps what matters to its subject,
-
and its subject is people like you. I want to
-
speak to you directly now, because this question is rarely
-
only about bones. Some of you are older than you
-
ever expected to be. The years have taken more than
-
you were ready to lose, and the world you live
-
in talks constantly about things that are vast and ancient
-
and makes you feel like a speck inside it. You
-
read about ages before human beings existed, and something in
-
you quietly concludes that you must be very small, and
-
that small things get forgotten. Some of you are tired
-
in a way that sleep does not touch. Some of
-
you are in a house where nobody speaks to you
-
for days. Some of you have carried a doubt for
-
years and never said it out loud in church because
-
you were afraid of the look on somebody's face. Hear this.
-
The Bible's silence about the giants and the Bible's attention
-
to you are the same decision. This book passed over
-
an entire world of enormous creatures without a line of description,
-
and then spent chapter after chapter on barren women, frightened shepherds,
-
failed kings and fishermen who could not keep a promise.
-
It is not an accident of editing. It is what
-
God cares about. And if the question in your chest
-
is not really about creation at all, if it is
-
closer to whether God still has time for someone who
-
has been forgotten by almost everyone else, then let me
-
put it as plainly as I can. The God who
-
filled an entire world with creatures he never bothered to
-
describe to anyone is the same God who counted the
-
hairs on your head. size has never been how he
-
decides what is worth his attention if it were you
-
and i would not be mentioned in his book at
-
all and neither would a shepherd boy a widow with
-
two small coins or a thief dying on a cross
-
beside his son The creatures whose bones are in the
-
ground never had a word said over them in this book.
-
You do. The whole thing is addressed to you. Every warning,
-
every promise, every psalm written at three in the morning
-
by someone who could not see a way through. And finally,
-
a son sent into the world to find people who
-
had wandered off from the garden and could not get back.
-
You are not a footnote in a story about something bigger.
-
You are what the story is about. So, where do
-
dinosaurs fit in the Bible? They fit on the fifth
-
day and the sixth, in the water and on the land,
-
among the kinds God spoke into being and looked at
-
and called good. They are covered by the same words
-
that cover the whale and the wolf and the field mouse,
-
because that is how Genesis speaks about every animal it
-
has ever mentioned— There is no missing chapter, no hidden compartment,
-
no verse that was quietly removed. There is a book
-
that names no animal because it was written to name
-
something else. And the next time somebody tells you that
-
the silence in Genesis proves your Bible cannot be trusted,
-
you will have an answer that does not need a
-
theory to prop it up. Ask them where the lion is.
-
Ask them where the eagle is. The chapter that left
-
out the giants left out everything else, too, and then
-
it turned, with great deliberateness, to a man and a
-
woman standing in a garden, and God speaking to them
-
as though they were the point. They were, and so
-
are you. The world is older and stranger and fuller
-
than you can hold in your head. Bones you will
-
never see are lying underground. You will never walk on,
-
and God knows every one of them, and never once
-
thought they were the reason he wrote the book. He
-
wrote it for you. He is still speaking in it,
-
and nothing in all that vastness has made him forget
-
your name. If this video helped you grow deeper in
-
God's word, I want to personally invite you to be
-
part of what we are building here. Every video on
-
this channel takes many hours of study and careful research
-
to make sure we bring you content that is faithful
-
to Scripture and worthy of your time. If you would
-
like to support this mission and help us keep making
-
these videos, you can find a link in the description
-
below to give a one-time gift or become a monthly supporter.
-
Every gift, no matter the size, goes directly toward creating
-
more content like this. And if you are not in
-
a position to give right now, that is completely fine.
-
The best thing you can do is subscribe, share this
-
video with someone who needs to hear it, and keep
-
studying God's Word with us. Thank you for being here,
-
and may God bless you richly. Thank you.