Daily Devotional – August 31

History

Ancient people were great movers of stone - as evidenced by Egypt’s pyramids, Easter Island’s megalithic head statues and England’s Stonehenge. Yet, the largest cut stone has been found near Baalbek, Lebanon, in the ruins of an ancient city known as Heliopolis. Amidst these ruins is found the Temple of Jupiter with 70-foot columns that date back to the peak of the Roman Empire (~2000 years ago). They had quarried these columns in Egypt, barged them to Lebanon, and hauled them across the mountains in order to erect them. Quite a feat!

But the base upon which the columns stand is the real marvel. At the base of this Temple are three hewn stones called the “trilithon.” It is believed that these stones were in place before the Romans arrived, and they simply engineered their building on this foundation. Each of these foundation stones weigh over a million pounds. The individual limestone blocks measure 10 feet by 13 feet by 60 feet long. These stones were quarried three-quarters of a mile away and raised 26 feet into the air. We don’t even know how the builders transported these massive objects to their final location. Surprisingly, an even larger stone was found at the quarry measuring 14 feet high, 13 feet wide and 70 feet long - weighing an estimated 1.7 million pounds!

Compare the ingenuity of early man with NASA’s movement of a similar weight object in 1965 – the giant Saturn V rocket. This rocket weighted approximately 400,000 pounds. It was moved from its construction building to the launch pad on a giant tracked vehicle called the Crawler-transporter. This object weighted only half what these ancient stones weighted yet required a specially design vehicle to move it. People 3000 - 4000 years ago moved stones weighing twice as much WITHOUT modern crawler-transporters! Students are routinely given the impression that ignorant, Stone Age “hunter-gatherers” from this period were little more than bumbling cavemen. Hardly! Ancients were quite intelligent; just look at the stone structures they left behind. Man was created intelligent from the beginning.

There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after.

~ Ecclesiastes 1:11

Professing to be wise, they became fools.

~ Romans 1:22

“[An evolutionary origin of the human brain] is difficult to understand, because, unlike a computer, it was not built with specific purposes or principles…[no designer] only natural selection, the engine of evolution, is responsible.” - Gerald Fischbach, Scientific American, Vol.267, No.3, p.24.

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.

Daily Devotional – August 30

Paleontology

What a fossil find! It was a blood-filled female mosquito locked in oil shale. Jurassic Park, here we come! Near Glacier National Park in Montana, fossil collectors have dug up more than 16,000 tiny insect fossils in oil shale. One of the most unique finds was a female mosquito whose abdomen was filled with blood. She was buried and fossilized so rapidly that her last blood meal never had time to be digested. That itself is testimony to the catastrophic nature of the worldwide Flood that created these oil shales.

“The abdomen of a blood-engorged mosquito is like a balloon ready to burst. It is very fragile,” said the lead paleontologist. The odds against this mosquito becoming fossilized by slow evolutionary processes are simply astronomical. From an evolutionary view, our blood-filled mosquito had to have been blown to the water’s surface, sunk quickly to the bottom, and covered with oxygen-free sediment to prevent rapid degradation - all without disrupting the engorged abdomen that was, “ready to burst.” A better explanation is a sudden catastrophic burial of this mosquito along with countless other creatures beneath tons of water-borne sediment from the global Flood.

Much of the fossil record is a record of the order of burial, not the evolving of one creature into another. In fact, this supposed 46 million year old mosquito looks exactly like today’s mosquitoes from North America. Not a hint of evolutionary transformation! This fossilized, blood-filled mosquito is a testimony to the recent global Flood of Noah’s time.

And the waters prevailed upon the earth an hundred and fifty days.

~ Genesis 7:24

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.

Daily Devotional – August 29

Biology

The archer fish, named for its expertise in archery, has a distinctive way of getting its supper. This fish shoots its prey with water bullets! The aquatic sharpshooter shoots these “bullets” up to nine feet away with deadly accuracy to knock its prey off overhanging leaves and branches. To accomplish this requires the fish to have a unique design.

This small fish has a mouth that is angled upward with the roof of its mouth having a groove to hold the tongue. When the gills ‘pop’ or slam shut, water is shot through the mouth as the tongue presses into the groove. The tip of the tongue directs the water bullets - adjusting for velocity and volume in order to precisely hit the insect. The cricket, grasshopper, or butterfly falls into the water to be quickly eaten.

But the archer fish’s design is brilliant in many other ways. In order to conceal its position when hunting for insects above the water, its dorsal fins (the fins on its back) are farther back than almost all other fish. In this way, the hunter remains underwater and does not reveal its location. The archer fish’s eyes are also unique. They have a special portion of the retina that swivels into place allowing it to look at the air above the water. Try this when you are swimming, with your mask on underwater, try looking up into the air above the water. It is almost impossible to see anything clearly above the surface of the water in this way - but not for the archer fish!

The archer fish is uniquely made - from its angled mouth to the groove in the roof of its mouth; from the dorsal fin placed farther back to the swiveling retina allowing it to clearly see up out of the water and into the air. How does evolution explain this? Remember that the only option evolution has for explaining life is non-directed, non-purposeful mutations over millions of years. Other fish get their food in the water; no fish ever hunted its food in the air! So where did the archer fish get this idea? He didn’t. The archer fish testifies to the genius of its Maker.

The Lord sitteth upon the flood; yea, the Lord sitteth King forever.

~ Psalm 29:10

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.

Daily Devotional – August 28

Christian Truth

Where in the Bible does it say the Earth is 6,000 years old? There is no place in the Bible that gives the exact date of creation. By studying the genealogies of Genesis, however, we can figure out an approximate timeline from Creation to the time of Abraham.

From creation week to Abram’s birth was 2008 years. If we round the number to 2000 years from creation to Abraham, and 2000 years from Abraham to Jesus, and 2000 years from Jesus to now, that’s about 6000 years since creation. If we trust the Bible to mean what it says, the Earth/universe is about 6,000 years old, NOT hundreds of thousands of years, NOT millions of years, NOT billions of years. Note- The Jewish calendar states the Hebrew year is 5779, (2018 A.D).

In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

~ Genesis 1:1

Source: "Pearls in Paradise" by authors Bruce Malone and Jule Von Vett

References for this devotional.