BIBLE TRUTH
In the time of the dinosaurs
This booklet is a continuation of our previous booklet. In that booklet we painted a bleak picture of what our many Anti-Christs are up to, but regardless of how it may look at this point, our purpose in putting out these booklets is not to sound a note of defeat—quite the contrary. In spite of how many forces are arrayed against God and his people, regardless of how many are determined to wipe the gospel from the earth, God will win; he always does. Truth is, indeed indestructible.
Satan has had his many Anti-Christs since the days of the apostles, but, our theme in this book is to show that the forces of evil are going to fail. Regardless of how well organized they are; regardless of how well financed they are, and how many powerful positions they hold, they are going to fail.
For a thousand years, all through the Dark Ages, the Lord’s people were convinced the Roman Catholic Church and the Papacy were the Anti-Christ. They were right; but Anti-Christ has never been limited to the Catholic Church.
The Inquisiton claimed its millions, but Islam is just as Anti-Christian as the Papacy ever was. They have killed their own millions. Communism has killed its tens of millions in Russia, and more tens of millions in China. There is nothing any future Anti-Christ can accomplish in seven years that all these past and present Anti-Christs have not already done many times over. Their two thousand year record of torturing, dismembering, and murdering the saints dwarfs anything any future Anti-Christ could accomplish in seven short years.
And yet the truth lives on—the Lord’s church lives on.
God has a church in the world. Ever since he set up his church two thousand years ago, he has had a church in the world. And he will have a church in the world when he comes again in the clouds of glory.
In Daniel 2:44 he tells us, “And in the days of these kings shall the God of heaven set up a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed: and the kingdom shall not be left to other people, but it shall break in pieces and consume all these kingdoms, and it shall stand for ever.
In Ephesians 2:21 he tells us, “Unto him be glory in the church by Christ Jesus throughout all ages, world without end. Amen.”
God could not be glorified in the church throughout all ages, if the church did not exist throughout all ages.
In Matthew 16:18, the Lord told Peter, “And I say also unto thee, That thou art Peter, and upon this rock I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”
There is no need to multiply proof texts; God has promised that his church will stand throughout all ages; and he has always been faithful to his promise. God will always have a church in the world.
We said it before, people are much easier to control when they are cold and sick and hungry, and there can be no doubt those men would like to see Americans cold and sick and starving. Why else are they so determined to bankrupt the country with their outrageous spending. Why else have they put us so deeply in debt to Communist China.
There is no way to know how many of our elected representatives in Washington are up to no good, and how many are simply are up for election. But there is one question that is clear beyond all doubt, and that is that very few of them have the foggiest idea of what is going on.
One of the clearest proofs that very few of them know what is going on is the fact that it has become a truism in Washington that, “We are piling up a huge debt for our children and grandchildren to pay.” Virtually all of them say it, and nobody contradicts it.
But is it not true? No, it is not true, regardless of how obvious it may appear to be.
It is true that the previous generation did that to us; and the generation before them did the same thing. But to say that we are leaving a debt for our children and grandchildren to pay assumes that it is possible for the debt to be paid.
Our elected officials in Washington are piling up a debt that cannot be paid, not by our children, not by our grandchildren, not by anybody.
The trillions of dollars of debt we are incurring will never be paid. We are not leaving them unmanageable debt—we are leaving them a bankrupt country. At some point we can no longer pay the interest on the debt; nobody will lend us money; and the funny money the Fed conjures up will lose its purchasing power faster than we can spend it. That is what these many Anti-Christs have planned for us. They intend to bankrupt the country. They intend to see to it that we are cold, and hungry and sick. They are sure they can better control us if they can have us flat on our backs.
But will it work? No, it will not work. They will cause us untold misery, misery such as we cannot imagine, and we certainly cannot describe. But it will not work. It has been tried before; it did not work then, and it will not work the next time.
The Lord has a church in the world; he will have a church in the world when he comes again, and they will still be preaching essentially what the true church is preaching today.
It looked like the world was coming to an end when the Roman Empire fell apart, but the church survived the fall of the Roman Empire. The Roman Empire was the wonder of the world; it lasted for hundreds of years. It has been gone for over fifteen hundred years, but we still study their government, their laws, their military, their institutions. We are still amazed at all they accomplished. Our law students still study their legal system. Powerful as it was, the Roman Empire finally fell apart—but the truth lives on—the Lord’s church lives on. Our old Anabaptist brother was right—truth is indestructible.
Our infrastructure in America is falling apart. Our cities are alarmed that their sewers and their water pipes are falling apart, and they have no idea how they are going to pay for the necessary repairs. After two thousand years some of the old terra cotta water pipes the Romans installed are still working. They built aquaducts which are still working. They built roads that tied their empire together. True, their main concern in building those roads was to make it easy to move troops from one place to another to quell any insurrection that might arise; but the fact is that they served their purpose—and then the Roman Empire fell apart.
The people abandoned the cities. They had to raise what they ate; and you cannot do that if you are living in an apartment in the city. The highways were abandoned; there was no reason to go anywhere. People dug up the cobblestones in the highways to build houses. Commerce came to an end. Money went out of circulation. They gravitated to self-sufficient manor farms. The population was reduced to virtual slavery on those farms. Feudalism was not slavery; and the serfs were not slaves—not quite. But it would have been hard to tell the difference. There was nowhere to flee to. The only thing on the other side of the forest was more manor farms—and more misery.
But the church survived the fall of the Roman Empire. Truth is indestructible.
When the Empire fell apart the nearest thing to a government that was left was the Roman Catholic hierarchy. The Bishop of Rome declared himself God’s vicar on earth. He was sure God turned the government of the world over to him. For fully a thousand years, during what we call the Dark Ages, the Roman Catholic Church held the continent of Europe in its grip. They forbade any worship other than their own. They pursued, and tortured and killed Christians by the millions— and still the church survived.
Satan cannot destroy the Lord’s church. You would think that given almost total power, and a thousand years to do their work, the Roman Catholic authorities could have tracked down the Lord’s people and done away with them. But throughout that entire thousand years, there were little Baptist (Anabaptist) churches scattered all over Europe and England —and they worshiped God in essentially the same way, and preached essentially the same doctrines we are preaching today.
God has promised to preserve his church and he will do it. We have no idea what misery we are going to go through; but we can be sure the Lord is going to bring us through it.
We might spend some time looking at what our people believed during the thousand years of the Dark Ages, and it can be demonstrated that their doctrine was essentially what the ministry preaches today. But it is not so much our purpose in this particular article to look at what our people believed during that time, as it is to look at what God’s people believed long before that.
SURVIVING THE AGE
OF THE DINOSAURS
During the remainder of our time we will look at what the Lord’s people believed in that long ago time when dinosaurs roamed the earth. I believe we can show that truth has survived since that time. We will look at what they believed, when they had to be careful to stay out of the way of Tyrannosaurus Rex and fire breathing dinosaurs.
The Bible gives us ample information as to what the Lord’s people believed in that day, and you may be surprised to discover that many of the texts our preachers use today were written at a time when dinosaurs were a danger.
If we can show by the Bible that our people survived— and that truth survived—the time of Tyrannosaurus Rex and his kind. And if we can show that the Lord’s people in that day had light on many of the same subjects we rejoice in today—it should give us some encouragement that we will survive all our present day adversaries can throw at us.
The book of Job gives ample proof that it was written at that time. Job knew about the dinosaurs; he knew about the Ice Age; and he knew about cave men. There never was any such thing as an ape man, somebody who was half ape and half man; but there were cave men, people who lived in caves in Job’s day, and in chapter thirty of his book, he talked about them.
The book of Job gives some insight into the climate at that time. Those who study such things talk about something they call the Ice Age. Geology clearly indicates there was an Ice Age. Huge rocks deposited in the middle of broad plains were clearly left when the glaciers carrying them along melted. Why else would you find huge boulders far out in the middle of level ground. Long scars were produced when glaciers dragged rocks across other rocks; that is another evidence of an Ice Age. There is no evidence there were several ice ages, but there is an abundance of evidence there was one.
That was probably when Job lived. People talk about what is on their mind, and the book of Job has more to say about snow and frost and ice and cold than any other book. They were cold and they talked about it.
Job mentions that in his day the surface of the ocean was frozen:
Job 38:30,31, “Out of whose womb came the ice? And the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it? The waters are hid as with a stone, and the face of the deep is frozen.”
“Out of whose womb came the ice?” That is a poetic expression for a slow moving glacier.
“The waters are hid as with a stone?”
When are the waters “hid as with a stone?” when they are frozen.
He goes on to say “the face of the deep is frozen.” The deep is a poetic expression referring to the ocean. In Job’s day “the face of the deep,” the surface of the ocean, was frozen. Perhaps that is not enough to prove that Job lived during the Ice Age, but it convinces me.
Our educational system tells us, and especially they teach our children about what man was like in a period they call prehistory. They like to talk about prehistoric man. Well, if it was prehistoric, I wonder how they know so much about it. But, anyway, I would like for us notice the Bible record of how things were then, and what people believed religiously, in what our educators call prehistory. We will look at what commerce was like, and what civilization was like. The Bible gives us a good record.
Job 1:1-3, “There was a man in the land of Uz whose name was Job, and that man was perfect and upright, and one that feared God and eschewed evil. And there were born unto him seven sons and three daughters. His substance also was seven thousand sheep and three thousand camels, and five hundred yoke of oxen, and three hundred she asses and a very great household, so that this man was the greatest of all the men of the East. “
Job was a rich man. We are told that he “was the greatest of all the men of the East,” and “his substance was seven thousand sheep.” He could not tend seven thousand sheep all by himself. Can you imagine how many people he had working for him to see after seven thousand sheep?
Job was at the center of a highly commercialized economy. He had “three thousand camels.” I don’t imagine he had all those camels for pets. Throughout history camels have been used to move freight. Can you imagine how much commerce there was in that day, that he needed seven thousand camels. With one man owning that many camels, it is obvious that commerce was more highly developed than our educators are willing to admit.
The point is that there was a highly developed commercial system in place in Job’s day.
They must have had a well developed monetary system. I have read long articles about the development of money, and how gold only began to be used as a unit of exchange about three thousand years ago. The Bible teaches it very differently. When Abraham bought a burying place for Sarah, he paid four hundred shekels of silver. They had a metal based (a silver and gold based) economy.
Nowadays, our elected representatives in Washington allow the Federal Reserve to print funny little scraps of paper and tell us it’s money. We pretend those scraps of paper are money, and as long as the people we give them to are willing to keep up the pretense they serve the purpose of money. Some day people will figure out that gold and silver are money, and paper—well, paper is just paper. I am afraid they are going to figure that out before long.
Evolutionists love to talk in terms of millions and billions of years. They do that to cast doubt on the Bible. They know that the Bible indicates the earth is much younger than that. They talk about how the dinosaurs died out sixty-five million years ago, and that would put them millions of years before Adam and the Garden of Eden.
But the Bible makes it clear enough that, in the early days of the earth, dinosaurs and men lived at the same time and in the same areas—and it makes it just as clear that in the days of the dinosaurs, God’s people believed much the same as we believe today.
If Bible truth survived the dinosaurs, and if it survived the virtual collapse of Western Civilization when the Roman Empire fell, and if it survived one thousand years of persecution by the Papacy, it can survive anything. Truly, in the words of our old Anabaptist brother—truth is indestructible.
But let us look first at the Bible record of the dinosaurs, and then we will look at what God’s people believed in the day when they were still around.
The Bible makes it clear enough there were dinosaurs around in Job’s day. Let me read you very quickly about one of them. Job says:
Job 40:15-17,“Behold now Behemoth, which I made with thee. He eateth grass as an ox. Lo now his strength is in his loins; and his force in the navel of his belly. He moveth his tail like a cedar; the sinews of his stones are wrapped together.”
The center column reference in my Bible tells me that is an elephant. I never saw a dinosaur; but I have seen elephants. And an elephant’s tail looks more like a rope than it does a cedar tree. But whatever this thing was, it had a tail like a cedar tree.
In verse twenty three, “Behold he drinketh up a river and hasteth not; he trusteth that he can draw up Jordan in his mouth.”
This thing was so big, he thought he could drink the Jordan river dry. This is a big thing we are reading about.
In the next chapter he talks about another species of dinosaur. People called them dragons until 1841. That was when Richard Owen, an English scientist, started calling them dinosaurs. People had been finding their fossils for years, and they called them dragons. Evolutionists tell us there never was any such thing as dragons, but there used to be dinosaurs, as if changing their name changed anything.
Job 41:1, “Canst thou draw out Leviathan with an hook, or his tongue with a cord which thou lettest down? Canst thou fill his skin with barbed irons or his head with fish spears?”
Again, in verse ten he says, “None is so fierce that dare stir him up.”
It sounds for all the world like Job is writing from first hand experience and describing a Tyrannosaurus Rex. He wants to know who is so fierce as to “dare to stir him up?”
Job says that if he came up on a T Rex, and he was sleeping, he wouldn’t bother him. I think that was a mighty good decision. He goes on to talk about this thing. He says:
Verses 14, 18-21“Who can open the doors of his face; his teeth are terrible round about,” verse 14. He says, “His scales are his pride, shut up together as with a close seal…. By his neesings a light doth shine. And his eyes are like the eyelids of the morning. Out of his mouth go burning lamps. And sparks of fire leap out. Out of his nostrils goeth smoke as out of a seething pot or cauldron, His breath kindleth coals, and a flame goeth out of his mouth.”
Have you read about fire breathing dragons? Job knew about them firsthand. How could any animal breathe fire? There are all kinds of things in nature that defy logic, and fire-breathing dragons are less mystifying than a lot of things we could talk about.
There is a little beatle that demonstrates how it could happen. It is called a bombardier beetle. I never saw one, but I have read a lot about them. It has two tiny chambers in his abdomen. There are different chemicals in each chamber, and if something gets after that little beetle, he empties those two chambers into a third container, and those two chemicals come together and instantly come to a boiling point. Then he sprays that concoction in the face of whatever is after him, and his tormenter leaves him along.
Paleontologists have discovered at least one dinosaur that has exactly the same kind of plumbing in his head as that little beetle has in his abdomen.
Nobody knows what was in the two chambers in the head of that dinosaur, or what happened if they came together. Nobody can prove they did not burst into flame when they were exposed to the air.
I remember when I was a boy, I had bought some chemicals and I was playing with them. I thought I wanted to be a chemist. I sure missed out on that. I learned it was not a good idea to set those some chemicals anywhere near each other. It is a wonder I did not burn the house down. I am not sure why anybody should have trouble imagining there are two chemicals that will burst into flame when they are mixed and exposed to the air.
Who can question whether God could enable dinosaurs to produce chemicals that would burst into flame if they happened to be mixed together.
Job said they could breathe fire. He saw it in action. The dinosaurs did not die out sixty five million years ago. They were still around when Job was here.
I said all of that to get to this. I want us to look at what people believed in that day. What did God’s people believe in Job’s day. What did they believe in the day of the dinosaurs. What did they believe during the Ice Age. We will give just a few examples, but they should be sufficient.
First, they believed in redemption.
Ch. 23:34, “Then he is gracious unto him and saith, Deliver him from going down to the pit: I have found a ransom.”
Again, ch. 19:25, “I know that my redeemer liveth, and that he shall stand at the latter day upon the earth.”
Job knew he had a redeemer, and he knew that redeemer was going to stand on the earth in the latter day.
Second, Job believed judgment was coming, and without a redeemer the wicked will be punished— that if God did not provide a ransom, we were all “going down to the pit.” But he was convinced that he had a redeemer, and he was convinced that redeemer was going to pay the ransom.
Third, in the days of the dinosaurs, God’s people believed the name of their redeemer is Jesus.
Ch. 13:15,16 “Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him; but I will maintain my own ways before him. He also shall be my salvation.”
You can look up that word salvation in your Strong’s Concordance. It’s easy enough. Look up the verse in the concordance. Look to the right of the column and you will see the number 3444. There is a Hebrew-Chaldee Dictionary in the back of the book. Go to page 53 and look at entry number 3444. The word that is translated salvation is the Hebrew word Jeshua The word is Jeshua in the Hebrew; and Jesus in the Greek. The expression literally translates, “He also shall be my Jesus.” In either language the word means Savior or Deliverer, and it is the proper name of our Lord.
Matt. 1:21, “And thou shalt call his name Jesus, for he shall save his people from their sins.
I sit here and the goosebumps run all over me, realizing that in the very time of the dinosaurs, God’s people knew we have a redeemer, and they knew his name is Jesus. Think about that; at a time when people were being careful to stay out of the way of T Rex they were talking about our redeemer and calling him by his proper name—Jesus. If that is not exactly what we believe four thousand years later, I confess that I have been deceived. But we have not been deceived. Job was right; we do have a Redeemer— and his name is Jesus.
One more text and we are done. In that long ago day, God’s people expected the Lord to raise them from the dead.
Ch.14:13-15, “O that thou wouldest hide me in the grave, that thou wouldest keep me in secret until thy wrath be past, that thou wouldest appoint me a set time and remember me If a man die shall he live again. All the days of my appointed time will I wait until my change come. Thou shalt call and I will answer thee; thou wilt have a desire to the work of thine hands.”
This is what they preached in the time of Tyrannosaurus Rex. This is what they believed when brontosaurus, and brachysaurus, and diplodycus, and all the other dinosaurs were wandering the earth. God’s people believed they had a Redeemer. They believed he would stand on the earth at the latter day. They believed he would pay the ransom price for our redemption. They believed his name was Jesus. And they believed he is coming back to call us out of the grave.
If God’s people survived Tyrannosaurus Rex, if they survived the virtual disintegration of Western Civilization in the fall of the Roman Empire; if they survived one thousand years of persecution during the Dark Age; and if they have survived every great catastrophe before and since that time, we can be sure his church, and the truth they stand for, will survive the chaos we see developing all around us.
God has a people in this world. And regardless of what may come our way, he is going to have a people here in this world when he comes again in the clouds of glory. When he declares that time shall be no more, there will be somebody somewhere meeting in much the same way we meet today, and preaching the same doctrines we are preaching today.
THE END