I’ve been spending a lot of time with Tyrannosaurus Rex these days — and Stegosaurus, Triceratops, and Velociraptor. I’ve also made the acquaintance of some less-familiar figures, like the long-necked, small-brained Diplodocus and the head-crested Parasaurolophus (which actually rolls off the tongue once you get the hang of it).

I’m no paleontologist or museum curator. I haven’t seen the latest installment of the Jurassic saga. I’m just dad to a 2-year-old boy. And like so many young boys, he reads, plays, and roars dinosaur.

Over the last months, his dino shirts and books (and figures and stickers) have dug up old fascinations, mostly buried since The Land Before Time and a book of Brontosauruses I thumbed through as a kid. They’ve also unearthed some new questions, especially as I try to help my son trace God’s design in the dinosaurs.

If the heavens declare God’s glory (Psalm 19:1), and his wondrous works proclaim his praise (Psalm 104:24), then surely these long-extinct giant reptiles say something spectacular about him. But what?

These Old Bones?

What we tell our children about dinosaurs will be shaped, of course, by whether we think they roamed the earth millions of years ago or relatively recently. Both perspectives have biblical merit; both also have their difficulties. I have my own leanings on the question, as most of us do, but for the purposes of this article, I’m going to sidestep that matter entirely.

I won’t mind much whether my son embraces a young-earth or old-earth view of creation; I will mind greatly whether he sees dinosaurs (and all the earth) in relation to the God who made them. And the most important lessons dinosaurs teach, it seems to me, have little to do with the age of their bones. Whether they lived in the Mesozoic Era or the days of Noah, much remains the same: Many were fierce. Many were fantastical. And many were absolutely enormous.

What then can we learn from such incredible creatures? Among other lessons, consider three.

Trust the God of Wisdom

Steve Brusatte’s popular 2018 book The Rise and Fall of the Dinosaurs tells an absorbing history of the dinosaurs’ reign. Unfortunately, it also represents and reinforces the popular view that dinosaurs have nothing to do with God. Naturalistic evolution plays the deity in Brusatte’s telling — a blind and brainless force somehow endowed with tremendous foresight: “evolution created” beasts like the behemoth sauropods (108); “evolution assembled all of the pieces [and] put them together in the right order” (117); T. Rex and his ilk were “incredible feats of evolution” (225).

The naturalistic worldview may be relatively new; the underlying impulse on display here, however, is anything but. God’s people have always needed to confess God’s handiwork over against popular myths. In the ancient world, Israel’s Canaanite neighbors considered the tannînîm (fearsome sea creatures, sometimes translated as “serpents,” “dragons,” or “monsters”) to represent “the powers of chaos confronting Baal in the beginning” (Derek Kidner, Genesis, 54). Moses, meanwhile, writes in Genesis 1:21 that “God created the great sea creatures [tannînîm].” The Canaanites can say what they want. We know that even the monsters are God’s masterpieces.

In similar fashion, God’s final speech in Job takes a massive land animal, Behemoth, and a fierce water beast, Leviathan (another monster of Canaanite lore), and describes them as God’s creatures: “Behold, Behemoth, which I made” (Job 40:15); “Whatever is under the whole heaven is mine” (Job 41:11). Nor need we wonder if God would say the same of dinosaurs. Many scholars identify Behemoth and Leviathan with the hippopotamus and crocodile, but the poetic descriptions take on monstrous proportions. Behemoth and Leviathan could easily be mistaken for a sauropod or tyrannosaur.

“Divine wisdom adorns every creature, down to their very bones.”

Children growing up in a naturalistic age need to hear, often and joyously, the psalmist’s creation creed: “O Lord, how manifold are your works! In wisdom have you made them all; the earth is full of your creatures” (Psalm 104:24). Divine wisdom adorns every creature, down to their very bones. In the first place, then, dinosaurs invite us to name and trust their true Maker.

Fear the God of Power

Imagine the largest of elephants, seven tons of flesh and bone spread from trunk to tail. Now imagine, if you can, a creature seven times this elephant’s weight and three or four times its length, lumbering across the land with a towering neck, barrel belly, and tree-trunk tail. You now have some faint sense of Argentinosaurus, probably the largest land animal ever discovered.

Now consider another creature, far smaller than Argentinosaurus, but also far more ferocious. At the same tonnage as our elephant (yet ten feet longer), he romps around on thighs thick with muscle, his massive head holding a jaw that snaps with six tons of pressure — literally car-crushing in its force. You now have some dim idea of T. Rex, probably the fiercest land animal ever discovered.

Now picture yourself standing before such beasts. We would be right to say of them, as God says of Leviathan, “None is so fierce that he dares to stir him up.” And we would be right to draw the corresponding conclusion: “Who then is he who can stand before me?” (Job 41:10).

Dinosaurs ought to make us tremble — but not mainly before dinosaurs. Like a hurricane, they preach the power of the living God, the very God in whom we live and move and have our being, and before whom one day we will stand. As Matthew Henry says of Behemoth, so we might say of every dinosaur:

Consider whether thou art able to contend with him who made that beast and gave him all the power he has, and whether it is not thy wisdom rather to submit to him and make thy peace with him. (An Exposition of the Old and New Testament, 223)

God made every tooth in T. Rex’s mouth; he added every ton to Argentinosaurus’s frame. Though dead, their bones still speak, and teach us not only to trust their Maker’s wisdom, but also to fear his power.

Praise the God of Wonders

In Christ, however, the most fearsome displays of God’s power become occasions for praise. Faith transfigures the terrifying into awe-inspiring: thunder becomes the voice of God (Psalm 29:3), the vast cosmos his finger-work (Psalm 8:3), the raging sea a pavement for our Lord (Matthew 14:25), the fiercest beast a glint of his glory.

The children of God know how to look at Leviathan (and, by extension, dinosaurs) and see not only his beastliness, but his “goodly frame” (Job 41:12). They can sit inside his footprint and worship the God of wonders (Psalm 104:31–32). They can trace his scales and, like King David beneath lightning, cry, “Glory!” (Psalm 29:9).

Psalm 104 gives a good sense of what dinosaur-inspired praise might sound like. Here, the psalmist marvels not only at the gentle beauty of God’s creation — flowing streams and singing birds — but also at its harder edges: the young lions roaring for prey and, strikingly, even Leviathan himself sporting in sea (Psalm 104:21, 26). Some may hold the bones of long-lost species and see only “a meaningless swarm of life,” Derek Kidner writes. But the psalmist teaches us to see them “as giving some inkling of the Creator’s wealth, and the range and precision of his thought” (Psalms 73–150, 405).

“Rightly held, the fossils of these ancient beasts are tuning forks for songs of praise.”

Paleontology allows us to sing Psalm 104 with a cast of characters perhaps unimagined by the psalmist, but long enjoyed by God and long awaiting our discovery. Rightly held, the fossils of these ancient beasts are tuning forks for songs of praise.

Evangelical Chisels

In the century before the first dinosaur discoveries (around 1820), pastor and nature lover James Hervey (1714–1758) responded to the new, Newtonian science of his day by saying, “We should always view the visible System, with an Evangelical Telescope . . . and with an Evangelical Microscope” (The Spirit of Early Evangelicalism, 150). Study the stars if you’d like: chart their courses; measure their distances. Study too the cells: mark their features; describe their functions. Yet study both as the handiwork of God.

In an age of dinosaur discoveries, we might add to Hervey’s evangelical telescope and microscope an evangelical chisel. Study the dinosaurs: learn their names; consider their age; read a few dozen children’s books about them. Yet don’t neglect the even larger lessons they teach.

My son’s dinosaur-mania may fade. But in the meantime, we’ll be tracing the wisdom of God in his Ankylosaurus figure, and the power of God on his T. Rex T-shirt, and the praise of God in his 2-year-old roar.

Audio Transcript

What is the easiest step of love — a step so easy, you can accomplish it before you even get out of bed in the morning? Today, we find the answer in an unsuspecting context. The answer comes in an old sermon from John Piper on 1 Timothy 2:1–4. And it happens to be my favorite Piper sermon to turn to when geopolitical tensions become evident in the world, as we have seen a lot of in 2022.

The sermon is an early one, preached back on January 20, 1981. In fact, it was preached just two days before the Iran hostage crisis came to an end — also the same day Ronald Reagan was inaugurated as the new president of the United States. There was a lot of national and international news in the air when Piper preached this sermon on 1 Timothy 2:1–4. In this context, the apostle Paul was eager for Christians to hold to the faith with “a good conscience” (1 Timothy 1:19).

And to that end, as Paul explains, Christians should entertain a global view of reality. It’s why Paul urges these early Christians to offer

supplications, prayers, intercessions, and thanksgivings . . . for all people, for kings and all who are in high positions, that we may lead a peaceful and quiet life, godly and dignified in every way. This is good, and it is pleasing in the sight of God our Savior, who desires all people to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth. (1 Timothy 2:1–4)

For individual Christians, these prayers for kings, prayers for the leaders of nations, are essential to us keeping a clean conscience and not shipwrecking our faith. That’s an incredible claim, connecting our awareness of, and love for, the globe’s rulers to our own perseverance in the faith. Here’s Pastor John to explain how it all works.

A good conscience is a conscience that does not condemn us for what we do and that approves of what we do do. Did I say that right? It does not condemn us for what we do and approves us for what we do. That means, therefore, that the reason Paul is saying, “You’ve got to have a clear conscience in order to maintain faith” is that if we do things that our conscience constantly condemns, what’s going to happen is something like this — this is the way my experience works, anyway. See if yours doesn’t also.

If I fall into a habit that my conscience condemns, my conscience starts to say to me, “Piper, all that talk about trusting Christ and hoping in God is a lot of hot air, because if you really trusted in Christ and hoped in God, you wouldn’t go on breaking your conscience like that.” And therefore, conscience starts to bore holes in the belly of the ship of faith, and it starts to sink, and your confidence in the reality of your own conversion starts to melt away, because you’re constantly acting against your own conscience.

Either one of two things is going to happen. Either we confirm the genuineness of our faith by changing our behavior and plugging up those holes of conscience, or we go on and we show that our ship of faith was never seaworthy in the first place, and we sink into unbelief and blasphemy like Hymenaeus and Alexander did (1 Timothy 1:19–20).

Keeping the Conscience Clear

Therefore, Paul’s charges to Timothy to hold to faith and maintain a good conscience are tremendously important commands or admonitions, and anything that Paul can say that will help us maintain a good conscience ought to be welcomed with open arms. I think that’s what he does in 1 Timothy 2:1. Since you must keep a good conscience in order not to make shipwreck of faith, therefore, I urge you, first of all, pray for all men.

Now, in order to see why it is that failing to pray for all men will give us a bad conscience and jeopardize our faith, I think we have to ask, What is it that, for a Christian, pricks his conscience in relation to other people? The answer to that, of course, is clear from the whole Bible. All of God’s instruction is summed up in two commandments: love God with your whole being, and love your neighbor as yourself.

In other words, anything that a Christian does, or leaves undone, that is unloving, will give him a bad conscience — or ought to give him a bad conscience if it’s not seared. Now, with that as a foundation, I think it starts to become clear why we must pray for other people in order to keep a clean conscience and so not make shipwreck of faith.

I see three reasons why prayer for other people is of first importance. That’s what I’m after to explain: How come he says prayer is of first importance in keeping a clear conscience and not making shipwreck of faith?

Prayer Helps Others with God’s Power

First, prayer taps the power of God on behalf of other people. I could try to help you as a pastor. You could try to help your neighbors. You could try to help Ronald Reagan, Governor Quie, Mayor Fraser, without praying for them, and you might do a little good, and judged from a limited perspective, you could do perhaps much good in the world’s eyes. But the little good that we could do without praying isn’t worthy to be compared with the great good that God can do if he, in response to our prayer, starts working on behalf of another person.

“The first thing you do for a person, if you love them, is ask God to work on their behalf.”

So if we want to do what’s best for people, if we really love them, then I think of first importance will be to pray that God work for them. The first thing you do for a person, if you love them, is ask God to work on their behalf. Of course, the way that God answers that prayer is almost always going to involve your labor of love on their behalf, but what can be accomplished through prayer is vastly more than you could accomplish without prayer.

Prayer Is the Easiest Step of Love

There’s a second reason why I think it’s of first importance to keep our conscience clear through praying for other people. It’s the easiest step of love. You don’t even have to get out of bed to pray for kings and all those who are in high positions. It doesn’t take any great physical strain, no great financial output. Of all the forms that love can take, prayer is probably the easiest. You just get down on your knees and rest and talk to the Lord about what you want him to do for other people.

Isn’t it true that if we are unwilling to do for other people what is easiest, then it’s very unlikely that we will be willing to do what’s hard on their behalf? Therefore, it makes sense, doesn’t it, that Paul would begin by saying, “Of first importance, if you want to love other people, is that you pray for all men.”

Prayer Goes Farther in Its Effects

The third reason why I think it’s of paramount importance is that prayer reaches farther than anything else in its effects that we can do. Before there were those satellites up there going around the earth, we could send a live television program from coast to coast, but we couldn’t send it, could we, all the way around to the other side of the world live? But now, if we want to get it to the other side of the world live immediately, we send it away from the world, and then it comes back to the world. Pretty simple. Get it live immediately.

“Prayer reaches farther in its effects than anything else that we can do.”

I think that’s a beautiful picture of the efficacy and extension of prayer. Without prayer, we can have an influence on a limited circumference of people, we can work hard and try to do good for them, and if we wait long enough, maybe by osmosis, our influence will spread all the way around the world. But God’s influence is everywhere and immediate. Therefore, doesn’t it make sense that first of all, if we want to help other people, if you want to bless the most people in the shortest amount of time with the most blessing, it just makes sense that you’d start by going to the satellite, going to God?

When a broadcaster wants to get a message to the greatest amount of people in the shortest amount of time — you can be sure that’s going to happen today if those hostages are released before this service is over, or before we meet tonight; we’re all going to know about it because of those satellites. If a broadcaster wants to do that, isn’t it interesting that, paradoxically, to get the message quickest this way, he sends it that way? That’s what we should do for other people. To bless them quickest this way, we should look that way first, up to God.

Pray for All People

If we would not make shipwreck of faith, but rather keep a clear conscience, therefore, we must pray for all men because of these three reasons:

Prayer taps the power of God for other people.
Prayer is the first and easiest step of love.
Prayer reaches farther in its effects than anything else that we can do.

At first, it seems a little thing,A want unmet, a prayer unwinged.Voiceless, it interrogates the King,When sounded, Lucifer sings.

Grumbling.

If you do not stand at the gate armed with sword and spear, if you keep down the drawbridge and fail to post men on the watchtower, gurgles and grunts will occupy your heart. Self-love and unbelief have a fruitful marriage, multiplying little moans and murmurs as rabbits in the forest or as crabgrass in the front lawn.

What is in a grumble? The sound, unheard in heaven, is the heart shaking its head, rolling its eyes, cursing under its breath. It is the seemingly harmless exhale of several respectable sins — ingratitude, thanklessness, discontent. It’s a controlled rage, an itchy contempt, the muffled echo of Satan’s dismay. A broken tune. It can be voiced in a sigh or strangle a praise. It is the cough of a sick heart.

We overhear these pitiful pleas all over the New Testament. The volume turns up with the crowds and soon-to-be apostate disciples of John 6, and in episodes with the envious scribes and Pharisees. Yet New Testament authors often bend the ear backward to hear the mumblings of an ancient people. None better expose the horror of this muffled mutiny than ancient Israel.

The apostle Paul writes,

We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did and were destroyed by serpents, nor grumble, as some of them did and were destroyed by the Destroyer. Now these things happened to them as an example, but they were written down for our instruction, on whom the end of the ages has come. (1 Corinthians 10:9–11)

God’s Spirit records Israel’s history in the wilderness to teach us about this too-easily-committed and too-easily-overlooked sin of grumbling.

Lessons from the Mumblers

If we had to venture a guess as to who the first grumblers mentioned in Scripture would be, could any man or angel have suspected it to be God’s own people, and that right after their wondrous redemption from Egypt?

Ten plagues have fallen on Pharoah’s defiance. His army and chariots now lie at the bottom of the sea, a calm settles upon the water’s surface — Israel is free. Uproar sounds in the heavens, and praise to God extends to earth. Music sheets are passed around beside the Red Sea, they begin,

I will sing to [Yahweh] for he has triumphed gloriously;     the horse and his rider he has thrown into the sea. (Exodus 15:1)

Who could have guessed that these same tongues would rot into a chorus of murmurs by the end of the same chapter? Satan’s song intrudes. Lucifer’s lyrics, once sung, get stuck in their heads. Trial after trial — needing water, then food, then water again — leads to more and more muttering. Consider, then, just a few lessons from the all too familiar sounds of Exodus 15–16.

1. God deprives us to see what’s inside us.

God led Israel around the Philistines, in front of the Red Sea to bait Pharoah, and through the Red Sea, and now to the wilderness of Shur. Millions marched waterless. One day turned to two turned to three. Finally, in the distance, water. They bend down to drink — yuck. Dying of thirst, they spit out the sour beverage. They named the place “Marah,” meaning bitterness (Exodus 15:22–23). We finally find water and it is undrinkable? Is this where trusting the Lord gets you? For the first time in the Hebrew Bible we read, “And the people grumbled against Moses, saying, ‘What shall we drink?’” (Exodus 15:24).

“When you find yourself kneeling by the bitter waters of God’s providence, what does God hear from you?”

And then, as he did with the water, so God did with their stomachs: “he tested them” (verse 25). He “let them hunger” and led the people to depend upon him that whole forty years to see what was in their hearts (Deuteronomy 8:2–3). And he found Marah in his people — out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth sighs. When you find yourself kneeling by the bitter waters of God’s providence, what does God hear from you? Cries to your heavenly Father for help and mercy, or grunts against an unreliable god?

2. Grumbling complains against God.

Grumbling would weaponize our circumstances against God if we let it. Yet, it doesn’t always feel like that, does it? I am complaining because my darling child pooped through her diaper, or because I’m late for work and now stuck in traffic — not because I dislike God. Hear Moses’s analysis of Israel’s grumbling,

“At evening you shall know that it was the Lord who brought you out of the land of Egypt, and in the morning you shall see the glory of the Lord, because he has heard your grumbling against the Lord. For what are we, that you grumble against us?” And Moses said, “When the Lord gives you in the evening meat to eat and in the morning bread to the full, because the Lord has heard your grumbling that you grumble against him — what are we? Your grumbling is not against us but against the Lord.” (Exodus 16:6–8)

Moses speaks in capital letters: The arrows of your complaints fly at the Lord. So it is with us. He hears our creaturely objections, as protests against his throne, even when we do not lift our eyes to meet his. What is a boss or infertility or ruined plans or cancer that we gripe at them? God rules all with infinite wisdom and care. Against him, him only have we grumbled, and done what is evil in his sight.

3. Grumbling is severely short-sighted.

Then they came to Elim, where there were twelve springs of water and seventy palm trees, and they encamped there by the water. (Exodus 15:27)

The springless wilderness of Shur often leads to the plentiful land of Elim. Even in Shur, God responded graciously to his people’s huffing and puffing, turning the bitter water sweet. But before the relief arrived and the parched throats tasted sweet drink, how many kept trusting him?

This point climaxes at the arrival to Elim — and cuts me to the heart. How many times have I finally arrived at the place of twelve springs and lush palm trees — the place God was leading the whole time — with sharp regrets about my distrust? He blessed me, but despite me. I pouted the whole way.

“To my shame — and to the glory of his patience — our God is more gracious than we are grumbling.”

To my shame — and to the glory of his patience — our God is more gracious than we are grumbling. But this should make us hate the murmurs more. Our protests and complaints cannot see past our own noses. Often just around the corner is the respite of some smiling providence. Our God leads us out of Egypt to hold a feast to him in the wilderness (Exodus 5:1). Blessed is he who did not curse God under his breath in the meantime.

4. A grumbling heart distorts reality.

Would that we had died by the hand of Yahweh in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pots and ate bread to the full, for you have brought us out into this wilderness to kill this whole assembly with hunger. (Exodus 16:3)

The muttering heart thinks the worst of God and the best of its former suffering. God would be their provider and their healer (Exodus 15:26). Yet, meat pots and a full-service bakery in Egypt sprout in the malcontent’s mind. They would rather have died under the Lord’s plagues in Egypt than suffer want in this wandering wilderness. A month ago, they praised God for sinking his enemies under the sea like a stone; now they wished to be that stone.

When the way seems meandering and lost, when resources dry up, when circumstances seem too cruel to have a purpose, God is for his people, teaching us precious truths.

And he humbled you and let you hunger and fed you with manna, which you did not know, nor did your fathers know, that he might make you know that man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by every word that comes from the mouth of the Lord. (Deuteronomy 8:3)

God’s great Israel, Jesus Christ, learned this lesson in his forty days in the wilderness, and he quotes it at the devil when tempted (Matthew 4:4). These seasons can teach us also to walk by faith, to nourish our souls with his word, to venture all upon his promises. And these lessons, should we learn them, become the defining moments of our lives and our proudest memories in heaven.

Satisfied and Shining

At first, it seems a little thing,A knee now bent, thanks to bring.When in need, it trusts a worthy King,When sounded, heaven rings.

Prayer, praise, and thanksgiving.

This is the Christian’s lot — not just starving grumbles alone, but feeding worship. God has delivered us through a greater exodus and manifested a higher love in his Son: “God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us” (Romans 5:8). We are a people who now address one another with psalms, hymns, and spiritual songs “with thankfulness in your hearts to God” (Colossians 3:16).

How startling then, for angels to hear us begin our day with songs to Jesus, only to end that same morning with snorts of irritation and resentment. Paul gives a glorious battle cry against it. Directly after the momentous charge to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling, for it is God who works in you” (Philippians 2:13), listen to the first thing Paul would have us work out in the next verse.

Do all things without grumbling or disputing, that you may be blameless and innocent, children of God without blemish in the midst of a crooked and twisted generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast to the word of life. . . . (Philippians 2:14–16)

Paul describes the luminary life of trusting saints; a life that shines in a dark and thankless world (Romans 1:21). Blamelessness, innocence, proving ourselves to be children of God — all by a supernatural life of worship instead of bleating.

Don’t you want to live that brightly to the glory of Christ, holding fast to his word, journeying toward the greater Elim just around the bend?