nomosendero,
As to your first paragraph. You believe what you want to believe, but the truth is there if you want to research it. There was no way at that time in history to guarantee stories being passed down to be completely accurate considering most were passed orally or on tablets and scrolls that been discovered in parts and pieces.
Heather
The truth is indeed there if you want to research it. However, the assertion that there was "no way at that time in history to guarantee stories being passed to to be completely accurate" is false, though I can fully understand how someone who either engages in or has only been exposed to the most shallow and superficial exigesis might hold the same view as the quoted poster does.
II Timothy 3:16 "All Scpriture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness, that the man of God may be complete, throughly equipped for every good work."
In the Book of Genesis, God (as in the God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob) makes a very bold claim. He claims to transcend time and space as we know it. This is significant because all other religious books assume three spatial diminsions and time. Ancient Hebrew sages recognized that the cannon of Scripture as they knew it described a universe of 10 diminsions, with four being knowable and six assumed to be unknowable. Of interest to us in our modern era is that particle physics imples a universe of 10 diminsons, with six being discernable only by indirect means. The cannon of Scripture that we call the bible has withstood attacks of all kinds, throughout history. It is disputed by the uninformed.
He claimed to have pre-existed the material universe. This is a vastly different claim than that of the typical "god with a small g" as in the gods of Greek pantheisim, which sprang forth from a pre-eixisting universe. The God of Abraham, Issac, and Jacob also claimed to have created the material universe and the method used isn't exactly insignificant. Those familiar with the biblical account know that God claims to have
spoken the world into existance. The significance of this, for those who believe on Him, as I do, is that God's Word has power.
If the idea of using language to create something seems a little far fetched, it becomes less so when you consider that humankind, possessed of finite wisdom, can currently create "virtual worlds" in much the same way, using language to do the creating, as is done in making popular games played on the same device you're reading this message with.
If we can stipulate for a moment that God really does have the technology to create the material universe, then it is not illogical to assume that He has he technology to get a message to us here in time.
The first five books of the Bible were penned by Moses, who was schooled in the arts and sciences of the Egyptian empire as it existed in his day. Those Egyptians were hardly backwards people devoid of the ability to communicate with written language. So much for having to rely solely upon the oral tradition.
The Bible isn't just some quaint collection of 66 books penned by 40 authors over the span of thousands of years. It is, in point of fact, an
integrated message system -a concept very familiar to those in information sciences.
It authticates itself by telling history in advance. Because it does this, it is more than just an integrated message system, but one
with supernatural origins outside of our time domain.
What about this history that it fortells in advance? In theological circles, we call this prophecy. In it, we have the history of the Jew -his times of favor, his times of distress, his dispersion throughout the world for centuries, his regathering into the land of Israel, all of which were told in prophecy before they happened -sometimes hundereds of years before.
And you can find a stellar example of this in Genesis, Chapter 5. This is also an example of the integrated nature of the message system, and a reminder of the truth found in II Timothy 3:16.
In Genesis, Chapter 5, we have a whole lot of "begattin'" going on, which is hardly surprising, given that the popular name for this passage of Scripture is The Geneology of Adam Through Noah.
"Okay, so what's in a geneology?" You ask......
Let's see.......
We have, in order, Adam, Seth, Enosh, Kennan, Mahalalel, Jared, Enoch, Methuselah, Lamech, and, finally, Noah.
These names aren't there by accident. They have
meaning. But before you take my word for it, turn in your Bible to Acts 17:11 and take that passage, which basically tells you to not believe a single thing I write, but to do your homework to see if these things be so, to heart.....
Let's translate these names. (I am so glad I stayed awake in "Introduction to Hebrew" in pastoral ministry school!)
Adam=Man
Seth=Appointed
Enosh=Mortal
Kennan=Sorrow
Mahalalel=The Blessed God
Jared=stems from a verb form meaning Shall Come Down
Enoch=Teahcing -fitting since he was the first of four generations of preachers
Methuselah=from Muth, which means death, and shalak, which means "to bring"
Lamech=despairing (Imagine what it must have been like to go through life with a name like that!)
Noah=rest
So, in the fifth chapter of Genesis, just when the story is getting good, we have: Man appointed mortal sorrow. The blessed God shall come down teaching. (His) death shall bring the despairing rest.
In other words, we have the Gospel Message, in a nutshell -and in the fifth chapter of Genesis. An accident or contrivence?
Methinks, perhaps, not.
Nor is it an accident that Jesus in Revelation uses first centruy Jewish wedding customs to offer insight into prophecy yet to be fulfilled.
You are, of course, free to draw your own conclusions.
But before you do, you might want want to hold the peanut butter -particuarly if you believe in the fiction of biogenesis. Here's why.....
Biogenesis is the root of the Darwinian Evolutionist's belief system. It claims that life can spring forth spontaneously,or to put it another way, that somehow, millions of years ago, chemicals were activated somehow to produce the various structures and interactions to bring about simple living creatures, which, in turn, evolved into the variety of life forms now existing. This is simplified as: "From the goo, to the zoo, to you."
There is one huge and glaring problem with this conjecture. It comes to us in the form of an invariable law of nature known as the Entropy Law. Everywhere, in all sciences, we see this Entropy Law in action as we observe that things always tend to go from
order to
disorderand not the other way 'round. Things break down from the complex to the simple.
When you go to the market and buy a jar of peanut butter, what you have in your hands is an open thermodynamic system. In other words, energy can enter the jar (we can make it hotter) and leave it (it gets cooler). If it happened to be clear glass, we could have optical energy enter it as well. This gives us the chance to put the therory of biogenesis to the test. We have matter (the stuff inside) in an open thermodynamic system (where energy can be applied or lost) and we therefore should, with the application of energy, expect to get some new, exciting life form.
Yet how often to we open a jar of peanut butter to find some new, formerly undiscovered life form oozing out from the goo?
Not too often, because the entire food service industry operates on the idea that the second law of thermodynamics is an invariable law of nature and that Darwin got it wrong.
It takes more than matter and energy to create life. It also takes
information. One would think that the discovery of the DNA molecule by microbiologists would have caused some macrobiology types to re-think their spontaneous, godless version of creation, but it remains with us.
Here, I will challenge you with a question: Which requires more faith -the Biblical account of creation or fanciful theroies of humankind that defy the invariable laws of nature?
Back to Genesis..........
The truth of the matter is that if we did not have access to the other 65 books of the cannon of Scripture, you'd have all you need to know to understand who God is, why God created humankind, how humankind fell from grace through sin, how God had a plan in place to redeem humankind from sin all along, how that plan involved the shedding of innocent blood, and how the completed work of Christ at Calvary paid our sin debt in full. As with all of the other books of the Old Testiment, Genesis points to the Cross.
I would submit that the contrary to the assertion of the poster I quoted, the Bible isn't the thing with the problem. It has been taken to task throughout the span of history, and it has generally been written off as irrelevant by people who don't really know as much about it as they think they do.
The purpose of the Bible isn't really to give you greater understanding of how God does what He does with every single thing he does, has done, or will do. He is sovereign, after all. Its ultimate aim is to express God's heartfelt desire to enjoy fellowship with humankind for eternity, to demonstrate that all humankind sins and falls short of the glory of God, and to point to the completed work of Christ on the Cross as the mechanism by which the sins of man are redeemed, thus bringing humankind back into the fold of God.
In other words, the Bible is a kind of love story, written in blood on a wooden cross in Jerusalem, over 2,000 years ago.
It is a lot of things. But a mere accidental contrivance of humankind it most definitely is not. This is something that becomes clear when a serious, learned study of it is undertaken with the illumination promised to those who believe. Embark on that study, and you'll come to realize, as many have and do, that the fundamental question isn't how or why God did, does, or will do certain things, or whether there is such as thing as eternity in store for you, but where you will spend it. In other words, the Bible seeks to help you answer the question as to whether or not you're in Christ, and if not, why not, and if not now, when? And it does this because it is not God's will that any perish, but that whosoever will come to Him will inherit eternal life.
-JP
