not know and cannot even guess, though many have put forward such guesses as if they were scientific facts. We do, however, know from Isaiah 14:12 and Ezekiel 28:11-19 that it was pride in his success and ability in his position as Governor that turned Lucifer, the bringer of Light, into Satan the lying slanderer, maybe millions of years after he was created; and finally, again perhaps after Ages of Time, brought the earth to the ruin described in Genesis 1:2 and Jeremiah 4:23-26. We may well remember that Noah's Flood was preceded by the production of giants, that is, outsize men, fierce and cruel, by the angels of Satan (Genesis 6:4). This forced the Almighty to wipe out the whole race of earth-dwellers, except Noah, who believed in God, and his family. So, since it seems impossible to imagine God as the Creator of the fierce creatures of the Pre-Adamic world, the pterodactyls, brontosauri, dinosaurs, etc. whose remains lie buried in the earth, we may well believe that they too were the loathsome work of Satan and his fellow angels, who despised, then, as later, the creation of God, and set about providing something stronger, fiercer, more like themselves; for by this time the war between Michael's angels and Satan's had already begun (Revelation 12:7-10; cf. Daniel 10:13). Already Satan had conceived that relentless antagonism to the Son, the angels and the people of God, that is to end in his final captivity in Hell (Revelation 20:1-10).

4. The Destruction of the Earth

In Job 38:12-15 is a description of the sudden catastrophic calamity which overtook the first earth, and sank it with all its inhabitants, human and animal, beneath the dark and frozen waters of Genesis 1:2 (without form and void, i.e. "an empty wreck"). And in Ezekiel 28:12-18 we see the first of a long line of Satanic empires which, passing later through Egypt, Babylon, Rome, India, China etc. will