At a recent meeting of “God Talk” (which just yesterday I agreed to lead indefinitely!), resident Antoinette, a big-time animal lover with two goldfish, Nemo and Stormy, mentioned how she liked that God was Dog spelled backwards. Like many of our elderly, she hopes she will be reunited with her deceased pets in heaven.

Dogs are mentioned 41 times in the King James Bible but none of the references are positive.

Jordan says, “Dogs in the Bible are not fuzzy little snarly snouts that you like to cuddle and coochy-coo and say, ‘Come here Fido and bring me my slippers,’ and that kind of thing. You remember in Luke 16 where it talks about the rich man? He fared sumptuously while Lazarus ‘laid at his gate, full of sores.’ It says ‘the dogs came and licked his sores.’ That’s the kind of dogs you get; you’re talking about scavengers, ones that run in packs and seek to tear and devour.

“In the Old Testament, Elijah told Jezebel the dogs would lick her blood in the streets. Well, those weren’t household pets; they were scavengers. That’s the reason this term dogs is often used for the Gentiles. It’s a strong word that’s not a compliment.”

As Paul warns in Philippians 3, “Beware of dogs, beware of evil workers, beware of the concision.”

Jordan explains, “Paul’s saying these religious people are like dogs; they’re ravenous and run in packs. They’re evil workers—workers of iniquity, as Jesus calls them.

“Do you see the word incision in the word concision? Mutilators is what he’s talking about. Some of you have never been around those type of religions but you see them in a movie like the DaVinci Code. The guys got that contraption and he’s flogging himself; it’s religious mutilation. He’s talking about people so caught up in religion.”

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Making headlines around the world the other day was the claim from a Hong Kong filmmaker that he and his crew had found remains of Noah’s ark on a snowy Mt. Ararat in Turkey at an elevation of about 12,000 feet.

“They filmed inside the structure and took wood samples that were later analyzed in Iran,” reports The Christian Science Monitor. “He claims the wood was carbon-dated to around the reputed time of Noah's flood, which would be remarkable since organic material should have long since disintegrated in the last 5,000 years. Yeung Wing-Cheung said that he is ‘99 percent certain that it is Noah's Ark based on historical accounts, including the Bible and local beliefs of the people in the area, as well as carbon dating.’ ”

Anybody who studies archaeology knows that every ancient civilization has a flood account involving watercraft. The details match the particular culture and its traditions. For example, an American Indian might be taught it was in canoes, not a ship, that survivors waited out the deluge.

Jordan says, “Noah wasn’t on the Queen Mary; he was just in a big old black tar-pitch box. People say that’s not much of a ship. It wasn’t a ship, though—it was an ark! It wasn’t going anywhere. You don’t make the Queen Mary to just float. You make that to sail, cruise and dine sumptuously.

“They just needed a box with square corners to maximize the use of space. It was ‘pitch without and within’ so it didn’t leak. It didn’t have to have a certain kind of hull to it.

“It didn’t have to get up on the water to be pushed along by a 350cc GM engine or Caterpillar diesel or something. It was just bobbing in the water and the most stable thing you can do like that was the way it was built.”

(Editor’s Note: I’m working on several new pieces focusing on Cain, Nimrod and Noah’s three sons. Stay tuned . . . )