Dr. Jobe Martin: The Chuckwalla Lizard A Marvel of God’s Creation

 

Many of us love to salt out food, but have you ever wondered what it might be like to have a live salt shaker right in your own home? The Chuckwalla lizard would definitely fill that spot! Our Creator, the Lord Jesus, created this special lizard to live in the southwestern deserts of the United States where it gets very little real water and has to eat plants for most of its water and nutrition. Due to the desert conditions, the plants in its diet give the chuckwalla quite a bit of salt, enough to kill an ordinary creature; however, the Lord created it with very specialized salt-removing glands in its nostrils! As the salt builds up in its blood, the glands filter it, and all this little creature has to do is sneeze and pure salt crystals come out! If evolution is true then the chuckwalla would have died of a salt overdose long before its system figured out that it needed to develop something to fix its problem, and we all know that dead animals can’t solve any problems.

 

Another fascinating design feature of this lizard is its baggy skin. You see, the Creator made it with all that extra skin so that when it gets threatened, it can run to a crack in the rock and fill its body with air like a balloon. This makes the lizard fit its space very tightly and its predator cannot pull it out. How could that have evolved? If you get scared and run to a small place to hide, can you fill up your skin and lungs with enough air to stay tightly anchored in your hiding spot (probably not because the Lord has given us other ways to protect ourselves)? Many evolutionists would believe that random, chance processes caused this lizard to evolve these special features but if even one little part of the evolutionary process failed, the lizard would die and a dying lizard is not going to ask itself what it needed to do so that it didn’t always die every time a new mutation occurred! Dead things do not produce new and more highly complex life forms.

One of the other unique features that the Creator has given the chuckwalla is that it has dark colored skin. This enables it to absorb the hot desert sun long before the chilly air begins to get hot. But that isn’t all! As it gets sunnier and hotter during the day, the chuckwalla’s skin is again a protection as it will turn lighter to reflect the sun and thus, keep it from over-heating on a hot afternoon. This is definite evidence that we have a Designer who has intelligence and can create things with beauty, order, and symmetry.

Belief in the Genesis creation account as the Bible teaches is the only answer for the specifically detailed way that the entire universe fits together. All of the information our universe holds had to be created by a source, just as a building needs a builder, a painting needs a painter, or a fine meal needs a cook. Information cannot create itself nor can it come from a mindless, random, chance process such as evolution. Information is non-material. It cannot be captured and taken from one gene and put into another. Therefore, God had to specifically create information for each genome. As we study God’s universe, we should be driven to praise and glorify Him for the unimaginable ways He has supplied and cared for the needs of His creatures and mankind. Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory and honour and power: for thou hast created all things, and for thy pleasure they are and were created (Rev. 4:11).