When Dinosaurs Walked...

The ancient people of the Jewish scriptures talked about leviathans and dragons and monsters of the deep. It is accepted as fact that there were many species of incredibly large animals, not even on the scale of dinosaurs, that have become extinct just during the 276,000 or so years that mankind has existed in communities around the world.

The record of mankind's sophistication in technological involvement continues to be more specifically defined by such processes as "argon-argon" dating and other means of establishing time-lines.

While the narrative of mankind has passed down thousands of generations, with much similarity across a wide span of geography and eras, none of this begins to reach as far back as the fossils discovered in Maryland and across the south of dinosaurs that lived 110+ million years ago!

I feel that I sometimes need to remind Christians that God didn't begin with the creation of homo-sapiens. God existed LONG before mankind ever started walking out of Africa perhaps three million years ago.

The God Who is Eternally Existent...the Alpha and Omega, the Beginning and the End - was part of the beginning and ending of worlds, cosmic star systems, dust and gas universes vast beyond our ability to even adequately measure much less comprehend.

He isn't defined nor dated by mankind. We are defined and dated by Him along with the hundreds of billions of star systems that stretch far beyond our wildest imagination.

For anyone to teach their children that the world is only a few thousand years old is to do their kids a terrible disservice and injustice in limiting their perception of the God of the Universe: Who Was, and Is, and Is to Come.

When dinosaurs walked, hundreds of millions of years ago, there was a lush landscape here on earth that was as nearly perfect in its variety as can be imagined. That there were enormous birds, reptiles and mammals eating plants, and animals eating animals, and monsters of the sea larger than Greyhound buses that were enormous, powerful predators has nothing to do with idyllic man, nor 'original sin' or any other discourse having to do with the attempts of man to live in relationship with God.

In fact, it is important to realize that God's relationship with mankind existed long before there was Abraham or Jews or 'Palestine.'

The revelation of God to man had been on-going since before recorded time...just a brief example of that is the story of Melchizedek (Hebrew: Malki Tzedek) who was described in Genesis chapter 14 as 'king of Salem' and a priest. He evidently was able to be instructive to Abraham about God.

I think it quite interesting how ego-centric religious people are in their assumptions that in just a 'few days' God decided that He couldn't do without the company of a 'man.'

The bottom line for me is this...it is far more important how I improve my relationship with God than it is for me to understand how God related to mankind for hundreds of thousands of years before Abraham was born. Or, for that matter, how He may have interacted with those pre-history humans with angels and personal manifestations.

For anyone to think that God suddenly began to love mankind four thousand years ago when Abraham began to get an understanding that there was indeed a God, is the ultimate in ethno-centricity.

The more I learn about the magnificent creatures that roamed the earth and swam the seas in the millions of millennia before mankind arrived, the more in awe I am of God's great Creation that we call Earth...and the more I wonder about what else He has created beyond the reach of our telescopes and understanding.