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.