Snakes on Legs—They Just Keep on Coming

Hopelessness is such a terrible condition, a condition that affects one on a spiritual plane—directly affecting everything: health, social relationships, and more.  It is all-encompassing.  Hopelessness can be rooted in an incurable disease, a marriage in ruins, children addicted to Satan’s bondages, financial devastation, self-loathing, and more. 

But, there is a place, a different and shining place, where these places of utter dark despair are routed and put to flight.  All of our hopeless situations are swallowed up in Christ Jesus, whose name, in Revelation 19:13, is “The Word of God.” 

Hopelessness is the absence of faith in Christ.  The definition of faith is found in Hebrews 11:1:

Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Jesus Christ is the only begotten Son of God who gave His life as ransom for all who will call upon His name.  His is the only name under heaven by which men can be saved.  He is the solution to all of life’s troubles.  By His trial of suffering and His shed blood on Calvary’s hill, He has spoiled all the power of the devil and restored dominion to those who confess and possess the beautiful promises of His Word. 

Have you been born again?  Are you ready to allow your childlike faith in Jesus to break the back of Satan’s strongholds in your life?  Are you ready to replace your hopelessness with our Lord’s hope?  Today is your day of eternal salvation.  Click onto “Further With Jesus” for childlike instructions and immediate entry into the Kingdom of God.  Do it now.  We’ll wait for you here.  NOW FOR TODAY’S SUBJECT.

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:29-30:

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

GOD SAID, Genesis 3:14-15:

14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

MAN SAID: It’s just amazing how the earth and all its marvels and the finely-tuned wonders of the universe just exploded and evolved out of NOTHING!  It’s simply amazing!

Now THE RECORD: God’s beautiful, inerrant Word is the marvel of marvels.  By the Word of God, the earth and its inhabitants and its universe were created.  It is not merely printer’s ink and paper, but the Spirit of life and revelation.  It is our rock and sure foundation.  All of this world’s billions of books must bow down and worship. 

Welcome to GodSaidManSaid feature 755 which will once again certify the utter veracity and accuracy of your Holy Bible.  All of these faith-building features are archived here for the edification of the redeemed and as bait for the fishers of men. 

Be sure to take advantage of three very useful tools on GodSaidManSaid:

1. You have questions?  God has answers.  Whatever your question, type a keyword into the search bar (top right) and watch the screen populate with related information—from Adam and Eve to quantum physics.
2. Use the Tell-A-Friend feature above to send a message to someone you love.  It is so quick and easy!
3. Imagine—you can download nearly 200 hours of GodSaidManSaid features to your electronic device!  Listen to one every day.  

Thank you for coming.  May God’s face shine upon you and yours with Light and Truth. 

The paleontologists and archaeologists keep digging up amazing things and, after considering their finds, they come up with even more “amazing” conclusions.  I’m reminded of a September 2000 issue of Discover magazine and the feature titled “A Broccoli-Eating Croc?,” and the evolutionists’ dodge to fit this new, contradictory information into the evolutionary paradigm.  Two paragraphs from the GodSaidManSaid feature “All the World Was Once Vegetarian” follow:

The Scriptures clearly teach that in the beginning, man and all animal kind were vegetarian. 

A branch of linguistics called etymology has a foundational rule known as “the rule of first occurrence.”  This rule declares that when a word is used for the very first time, its first use frames its definition.  The original definition of the word meat (and still one of its definitions) is food.  In the beginning, at first occurrence, that food was herbs, fruits, vegetables, and grains.  One of the sacrifices in the Old Testament which the children of Israel were directed to offer unto the Lord was a meat offering: It consisted of meal—grains.  Some Bible footnotes say that it literally means meal, but that’s erroneous.  It means just what it says.  It was a meat offering, which in its original form was grains, herbs, fruits, and the like.  It was not until Adam and Eve had cast off the pure Word of Truth that man began to eat flesh.  At that moment, the law of sin and death began to reign upon the earth. 

In the beginning, man and all animal kind were vegetarians.  When you understand that fact, it makes the following discovery especially exciting.  Paleontologist Greg Buckley and his colleagues at Roosevelt University in Illinois recently unearthed quite a discovery.  The discovery was a very ancient fossil.  The fossil, which has the world of paleontology scratching its head, is that of a crocodile, and the shocking revelation is that this crocodile, as revealed by its dental structure, was a vegetarian.  Could it be that Mr. Buckley and his friends unearthed the world’s very first crocodile, or at least one of the first, created by the hands of God during the six days of creation?  Yes, man and the lion and the crocodile were all once vegetarian.  Man fell, but God created a way of escape.  Romans 5:21:

That as sin hath reigned unto death, even so might grace reign through righteousness unto eternal life by Jesus Christ our Lord. [End of quotes]

Around 30 years ago, GodSaidManSaid published its first feature concerning the snake and its legs, which we updated with new confirming discoveries in 2006.  A friend of GodSaidManSaid, Brother Robert, forwarded some of the latest discoveries concerning the snake-leg saga, published in July of 2015, suggesting that we update. 

Several paragraphs follow from the GodSaidManSaid feature, “Snakes Had Legs:”

In the midst of the Garden of Eden, the paradise God made for Adam and Eve, were two trees.  One tree was called the “Tree of Life,” and the other was called the “Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.”  Concerning the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, God’s commandment to our great-grandfather Adam was as follows (Genesis 2:16-17):

16 And the LORD God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat:

17 But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.

In Genesis 3:1-6, Satan takes on the form of the serpent and convinces Eve that God is a liar.  In an act of unbelief and disobedience, she eats the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil.  She also gives it to her husband to eat.  That very day, they both died to the spirit of life in Christ Jesus, even though they lived on in the flesh for many years.  That was the day the law of sin and death began to reign upon the earth—a concept known in science as the second law of thermodynamics.  Because of the evil that transpired, God’s judgment fell on all of creation.  Of the serpent specifically, God cursed it and said that it shall crawl on its belly, eating the dust all the days of its life.  It shall bruise man’s heel, while man bruises its head.  It fully appears that the snake, which is now a serpent that crawls on its belly, once had legs. 

I should note that Moses was given the first five books of the Bible, also known as the Pentateuch, by God.  He was directed to write these books very clearly.  This occurred approximately 2,500 years after God created the heaven and the earth.  It also must be understood that many, if not all, ancient civilizations had a record, written or oral, of creation, of the Garden of Eden, and of the serpent.  According to the February 2001 issue of Creation, in an article titled “Uncanny Coherence to Noah’s Account,” over 500 ancient cultures record a story quite similar to Noah’s ark and the destruction of the world by a flood.  But the record God gave to Moses is the ultimate, hands-on, eyewitness authority, and it is proven over and over again by history, archaeology, paleontology, geology, and other sciences. 

In Archaeology and Bible History, author J.P. Free writes concerning the “Temptation Seals” unearthed in the 1930s.  The seal was discovered at a level antedating 3000 B.C., or approximately 1,500 years before the first five books of the Bible were written.  The seal depicts a tree with a man to the right.  To the left of the tree is a woman plucking fruit, with a serpent behind her standing erect. 

In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh is directed to the “plant of life,” which can be found at the bottom of the sea.  Gilgamesh finds it, only to have it stolen by a serpent. 

Famed historian Flavius Josephus, in The Antiquities of the Jews, reviews and reports on the ancient records of the Hebrew people and of historians considered ancient in his time.  Josephus lived and wrote just after the time of Christ.  Concerning the serpent in the Garden of Eden and God’s punishment of it, he wrote: “Besides this, he inserted poison under his tongue and made him an enemy to men; and suggested to them that they should direct their strokes against his head, that being the place wherein lay his mischievous designs towards men, and it being the easiest to take vengeance on him that way; and when he had deprived him of the use of his feet, he made him go rolling all along, and dragging himself upon the ground.”  [End of quote]

Science and academia now support the idea of a snake with legs.  Through biological examination, John Crompton, an evolutionist and snake authority who authored the book Snake Lore, discovered that at one time, the snake that crawls upon its belly once had legs.  As a matter of fact, at this present time, the snake has not completely gotten rid of its legs.  Tiny vestigials remain of what were once legs, and are found in the bodies of many snakes. 

Crompton’s record is supported by Klaus Griehl’s book, Snakes.  Griehl points out that “primitive” snakes, such as boas and pythons, still show vestigial pelvic bones and anal spurs that represent the remnants of hind legs. 

From the October 11, 1997 edition of The International Jerusalem Post is the following excerpt:

A midrash about Adam and Eve now has scientific support: Hebrew University researchers have found evidence that prehistoric snakes had tiny legs.

According to Jewish tradition, the snake that tempted Eve to disobey God was punished by being forced to crawl on its belly forever.

The researchers also concluded from a close re-examination of snake fossils that they originated in the sea, rather than underground. 

A team from the Silberman Institute of Life Sciences, headed by Professor Eitan Tchernov, found that the fossils had two small, but anatomically complete, hind legs.  Tchernov will present his findings this month at the international conference of the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology in Chicago. 

A wire service report printed in the Beaver County Times, of Beaver, Pennsylvania, March 17, 2000, reads:

A team of researchers has reached into a dusty drawer and pulled out a snake with legs. 

The discovery could upset at least some theories about the evolution of snakes.

“The fossil had been sitting in the museum drawer at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem since the death of researcher Georg Haas in the early 1980s,” said Oliver Rieppel of the Field Museum in Chicago.

Another wire service reads as follows:

In their recent analysis of two 90 million-year-old lizard fossils from Israel, Michael W. Caldwell of Chicago’s Field Museum and Michael S. Y. Lee of the University of Sydney in Australia concluded that the bones belonged to an ancestral snake.  The fossils have several features in common with modern snakes, especially their long, slender bodies and distinctive skulls.

But the fossils also have obvious legs and lived in the sea.  That doesn’t jibe with the traditional view of ancestral asps, which are thought of as legless, burrowing reptiles.

So, in the April 12, 1999, issue of the journal Nature, Caldwell and Lee advance the bold suggestion that snakes are most closely related to mosasaurs—giant, swimming reptiles that lived at the time of dinosaurs. 

Their assessment that the snake once had legs is correct because God said so.  Their assessment of “millions of years” and “evolution” is incorrect because God said no. 

In a life laden with uncertainty, you can be confident of one very certain thing: God is and His Word is true.  [End of quotes]

Could Genesis be accurate?  The latest discovery concerning the snake and its legs is making the news once again.  The headline in the National Geographic, July 23, 2015, release reads, “Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science.”  A few paragraphs follow:

Snakes can famously disarticulate their jaws, and open their mouths to extreme widths.  David Martill from the University of Portsmouth did his best impression of this trick while walking through the Bürgermeister Müller Museum in Solnhofen, Germany.  He was pointing out the museum’s fossils to a group of students.  “And then my jaw dropped,” he recalls. 

He saw a little specimen with a long, sinuous body, packed with ribs and 15 centimeters from nose to tail.  It looked like a snake.  But it was stuck in an unusual rock, with the distinctive characteristics of the Brazilian Crato Formation, a fossil site that dates to the early Cretaceous period.  Snake fossils had been found in that period but never that location, and in South America, but never that early.  The combination of place and time was unusual.

“And then, if my jaw hadn’t already dropped enough, it dropped right to the floor,” says Martill.  The little creature had a pair of hind legs.  “I thought: bloody hell!  And I looked closer and the little label said: Unknown fossil.  Understatement!”

“At any one time in the Cretaceous, chances are you’ve got ten, twenty, maybe thirty species [of early snakes], all going off on their own evolutionary paths” says Martill.  “There would be a whole bunch of very snake-like lizards, all with the potential to become today’s snakes.  One of them does.  Maybe one of them goes off and loses its front legs and retains its back legs for 20 million years.  One maybe loses its back legs and keeps its front legs—and we haven’t found that one yet.”  [End of quotes]

Fox News headline, July 24, 2015, “Unexpected Step: Snake ancestor had four feet.”  Two paragraphs follow:

The oldest snake fossil on record looks almost like a modern snake, except for one glaring difference: It has four feet, each with five digits, a new study finds. 

“We’ve found the ancestor of all snakes,” Martill told Live Science.  “We have found the missing link between four-legged lizards and snakes.” 

Headline of a July 26, 2015 feature published by BuisnessInsider.com reads, “This fossil helps explain how snakes lost their legs.”  Excerpts follow:

How did the snake get its slither?  Ever since the crafty serpent in Genesis tempted Eve into eating the forbidden fruit, we’ve been fascinated by snakes.  And, despite our interest in this animal, we have a poor understanding of how it actually evolved. 

But scientists have now released a new study of the fossil of a snake that appears to have lived between 100m and 146m years ago.  And what’s more, it had legs. 

Finally, from Inquisitr.com:

Fully developed snake feet have been found on the oldest snake fossil, a discovery which is said to have been “unexpected” and “stunning” to science.  But some creationists are already taking those snake legs and running with them, saying the discovery proves the Bible’s claim about snakes in the Garden of Eden. 

The controversy over the snake’s feet has some questioning whether the discovery form Brazil is, in fact, a snake. 

“I honestly do not think so,” says Michael Caldwell of the University of Alberta, according to National Geographic.  “I think the specimen is important, but I do not know what it is. I might be wrong, but that will require me to see the specimen first hand.” 

Others feel it is pretty obvious that Tetrapodophis amplectus is a snake. 

“Looks like a snake to me,” says Jacques Gauthier of the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University.  “The long body and reduced limbs, along with the bony supports in the pelvis for lymph hearts to pump blood back to the heart, are consistent with it being a snake.” 

Susan Evans studies reptile evolution for the University College London, and she is on the fence since “[o]pinions on snake evolution are highly polarized.” 

The odd part about the oldest snake fossil is how it appears in the fossil record next to samples like Eophis, Parviraptor, and Diablophis, which all had two legs, not four.  The two competing mainstream theories claim that snakes came from water-dwelling sea reptiles like the mosasaurs (remember the underwater predator in Jurassic World?), while other scientists say snake legs came from terrestrial burrowing monitor lizards.

The latter theory is now being given more weight, since the oldest snake fossil seems to give legs to the idea that snakes were land-based from the start.  In addition, some are already saying that both snakes and mosasaurs independently evolved from a land-based ancestor, which would have the fearsome creature from Jurassic World crawling onto land only to decide it’s less scary back in the water. 

For decades, skeptics questioned the Biblical account.  But when it comes to the snake, the only evolution is the evolving view of the evolutionists.  Now no one can deny the Biblical account: Snakes had legs.  According to them, the legs “disappeared” as a result of “natural selection” while the Bible says these legs disappeared because God cursed this creature for being possessed by Satan when he deceived Eve.  [End of quotes]

God’s Word is true and righteous altogether.  This is the place to build a life that will last forever. 

GOD SAID, Genesis 1:29-30:

29 And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat.

30 And to every beast of the earth, and to every fowl of the air, and to every thing that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat: and it was so.

GOD SAID, Genesis 3:14-15:

14 And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:

15 And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

MAN SAID: It’s just amazing how the earth and all its marvels and the finely-tuned wonders of the universe just exploded and evolved out of NOTHING!  It’s simply amazing!

Now you have THE RECORD.

 

References:

Authorized King James Version

“Oldest Snake Fossil Has Legs/Feet? Creationists Say Bible Trumps Evolution,” Inquisitr.com

“Phenomena: Not Exactly Rocket Science,” NationalGeographic.com, July 23, 2015

Dyke, G., “This fossil helps explain how snakes lost their legs,” BusinessInsider.com, July 26, 2015

Geggel, L., “Unexpected Step: Snake ancestor had four feet,” FoxNews.com, July 24, 2015

GodSaidManSaid, “All the World Was Once Vegetarian” 

GodSaidManSaid, “Snakes Had Legs”

 

 

• Go Further With Christ
• Email To a Friend
• Comments or Questions?