Some years ago I'd heard that dinosaurs were possibly the ancestors of our birds. However newer evidence of feathers (quill indentations in newly discovered fossilized skin fragments) on infant and even some full grown beasts indicated that feathers, like the ones depicted on the Allosaur shown above were useful in regulating temperature for their bodies. Even stranger to me was the information that many dinosaur bones are actually hollow, even as bird bones are, as a way to lower the tremendous mass of their body weight, and to balance them for faster movement and super-quick turns. As the movie 'Jurassic Park' showed, trying to outrun a T-Rex can be fatal. Oh, and their blood, as known today, was more warm than cold. They aren't even correctly classed as lizards anymore, though the full name of Tyrannosaurus Rex means 'King of the Thunder Lizards'.
So why spend two paragraphs in a spiritual blog discussing paleontology? Because in today's learning I also gained fresh education in the wonder of God's universe! Not just because if dinosaurs exist at all they do so only because God created them, whenever He chose to do so. No, because I once more saw evidence of scientific 'fact' which I had been tested on in class at D A Marshall Elementary School which was now, due to new information gleaned through hard research and sweaty field study, proved WRONG.
My grandfather, the Reverend J. Fred Andreas, itinerated up and down the Susquehanna Valley of Pennsylvania for over forty years. He preached, along with eternal salvation in only Jesus Christ, against the 'absolute facts' of Darwin's various theories of evolution, many of which have been found false or at least in need of serious reconsideration by new scientists in the last one hundred years.
I grew up hearing of the failure of recovery by drug and alcohol addicts except through 'modern, scientific methods' only to learn in my last thirty years of the best and most successful anti-addiction process on the planet: Teen Challenge. Now with addiction recovery centers in dozens of country's, and several within a day's drive of my home this solidly Christ based teaching regimen combined with a ten Commandments based lifestyle beats hollow all recidivism rates of every other known secular, scientific program in existence.
And today I, as a pastor soon to retire in this the early 21st century see kids growing up in my own neighborhood who have no connection to any place of Christian Biblical learning because their parents say 'science has replaced religion'. Then a couple of years later those same parents often wonder why their kids have not done well even though they gave them every prescribed medicine and sports club advantage but no moral compass to live into adulthood by.
I found myself chuckling in wonder today in the museum, the oldest natural history museum in the United States, as I saw once again that what science says is absolute is never without change at least one generation to the next. What I saw was that all the energy we Christians expend arguing with secularists over the truth of Scripture is wasted air and should be devoted to simply teaching the love of Christ in our own word and deed for the scientists, secularists, and atheists will, of their own accord, (indeed they are by argumentative nature forced into it), be damning many of the discoveries of their father's day to oblivion as they learn new 'facts' of science tomorrow.
Dinosaurs had feathers, not scales. Jesus the Christ was a historical man not an imaginary magician. And I can trust God's Word to get me through the next day better than I can any scientific tome.
PS: I learned something else today which interested me personally. There never was a Brontosaurus. The lovable huge beastie I first came nose to toe with at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington DC in 1957 (see the pic below) was an amalgam of several skeletons found a bit close together and a head that came from a completely different animal!
I sleep well knowing that God has the world and all creation in His hands, and we humans haven't been able to wrench it from him at all.
-Ken
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