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Dragons Of The Bible
00:03:15
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| In your new book, you talk about dragons. | |
| Are dragons real, Derek? | |
| Oh, absolutely. | |
| Absolutely. | |
| The Bible makes it very clear that we've got a couple of major dragons that we have to deal with. | |
| And I want to point out for the fans of Lord of the Rings that while smog was really dangerous, the dragons in the Bible have seven heads. | |
| So that's like seven times smog. | |
| So this is really bad. | |
| Of course, we know in Revelation 13, Satan is described as the seven-headed red dragon who makes war on Michael and the saints and is cast down from heaven, seven heads and seven diadems. | |
| But there's also another dragon that as we dug into the book, and we talked, in fact, Josh Peck and I wrote a little bit about this in our previous book, The Day the Earth Stands Still, the idea of chaos. | |
| And I know Pastor Jim has preached on the spirit of Leviathan in the past. | |
| And as we researched more about this, we realized that this is a story that you see in many of the ancient Mesopotamian religions. | |
| This idea that chaos had to be subdued by a warrior God in order to produce the natural world that we see around us. | |
| But that's in the Bible. | |
| The Bible's the original story. | |
| We see it in Genesis 1, verse 2, where the Spirit of God is hovering over the deep. | |
| In Hebrew, that word is tahom, which is a cognate, which means same word, different language, to the Sumerian word tiamat, which was the multi-headed chaos dragon. | |
| In the Sumerian story of Anu or Enlil or Marduk, the story changed over time against the chaos monster who had to be defeated to create heaven and earth. | |
| So we've got this multi-headed dragon, which we see then described by Isaiah, Isaiah chapter 27. | |
| We see it in Job. | |
| Job chapter 41 gives a lengthy description of Leviathan, which is describing this character with a back with plates like shields that fit together, and his sneezes bring forth light, and his breath kindles coals, and a flame comes forth from his mouth. | |
| He's describing a dragon, but Isaiah makes it clear it has multiple heads. | |
| And this is consistent with the pagan stories from the ancient world. | |
| What's really intriguing is that the Bible uses the word sea in the Old Testament, Yom in Hebrew, which was the name of this chaos monster in the Canaanite religion, to describe or to represent the bottomless pit or chaos, primordial chaos. | |
| So there are times in the Old Testament where the sea is referenced when in fact it's just a symbol representing the chaos that God, our Creator, has subdued. | |
| When we get into the book of Revelation, the end times, Revelation 21, the very last enemy that's subdued by God, when he creates the new heaven and the new earth, the sea is no more. | |
| Praise God. | |
| Why mention the sea separately? | |
| If there's a new earth, you would assume the oceans and all the waters. | |
| No, it's because the sea is a reference to this primordial chaos dragon, Leviathan Rahab. | |
| And that is the fine. | |
| It's a counterfeit Alpha and Omega. | |
| We see it in Genesis 1, verse 2, the very first rebel God subdues, and the very last rebel defeated by God in Revelation 21, Leviathan Chaos, | |