Parables and the Creation

Several days ago, I mentioned that the Holy Spirit started pushing me to focus on pieces related to just two subjects: salvation and eschatology, the study of End Times prophecy. And that came as a bit of a shock even to me: as an amateur eschatologist, I've been under the impression that we are well under two years from the end of the Age, the Rapture of the Believers to Heaven and the beginning of the Great Tribulation where those that remain are subjected to seven years of Hell on earth before being sent to the actual Hell which most of them don't believe in (or else they'd probably been picked up with the rest of us true Christians). But the implication of the Holy Spirit's command is that at the very least I'm right about the time frame of the End Times, and more likely we're staring at an even shorter window than I thought before Christ brings us actual Believers Home - as soon as any moment, literally, and no longer than my previous nineteen month guesstimate.

This was the very piece I was working on when He interrupted me.

But having printed an article about Australian footy the other day, it seems silly NOT to print articles like this as well, if I have them ready. So I will indeed focus on the topics God the Spirit has asked me to...but as other things come to mind, I'll write about them as well. 

Remember as you read this that nothing here is deal-breaking as a Christian. You're free to agree with me or disagree with me - it doesn't make either you OR me any less of a Believer. But I hope you'll read it and think about it. - Thanks! -gps

 

            “Then the disciples came and said to Him, ‘Why do you speak to them in parables?’ And He answered them, ‘To you it has been given to know the secrets of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been given.’”        - Matthew 13:10-11

            The Bible is filled with analogies, similes, parables, and metaphors from Genesis through Revelation; everything from the dream statue of King Nebuchadnezzar in Daniel 2 (made of clay, iron, bronze, silver and gold, it represented the dynasties of the pre-Christian world) to the beast coming out of the sea in Revelation 13 (with ten horns and seven heads, and yet ten crowns on its heads – representing the nations which will host the antichrist when he comes.) to the messages from the Lord that people like Nathan (David’s seer in the book of Samuel) to the many, many parables of our Lord, Jesus Christ: the parable of the Mustard Seed, the parable of the Sower, the parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Fool and the Lost Son, and so forth. The Almighty delights in hiding the truth – and especially the Truth – in plain sight.

            On the flip side, the Bible is also filled with historically accurate fact – in many cases, facts detailed to an amazing degree of accuracy. One of the mysteries of the Biblical world when I was young was the impossibility of the story of Noah and the Flood That Drowned The World. There was no way that story could have conceivably been true…until archaeologists started to connect the strata of flood plain evidence across the continents marking multiple cultures that matched the time of Noah, followed by the discovery of the actual remains of Noah’s Ark, right about where it should be, matching the dimensions and construction Scripture expected it to have (see Genesis 6:14-16 for a starting point). As we continue to learn more definitively about our past, we find striking evidence that culture, cities, events, royalty, all seeming to be exactly what God has told us it was, through the pens of Moses and his fellow God-guided writers.

            “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways My ways.

          As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways, and My thoughts than your thoughts.”                               - Isaiah 55:8 - 9

          It’s also clear (by Sherlock Holmes’ theory that once you’ve eliminated the impossible, whatever’s left – however improbable – must be the truth) that God does not view time the way we do. It becomes the only explanation that accounts for the prophecies He projects to Daniel, Isaiah, and indeed half the authors of the Old Testament; it’s why other Biblical writers can insert information they have no way of knowing in advance (such as the foreshadowing of Christ’s birth, life, and death that appear in virtually every book of the Old Testament); and it’s the only explanation how John can have “visited” (if, indeed, quotation marks are even appropriate) the End of Time and seen and heard all of the events of Revelation, which have already happened – except…wait, what about free will? But… if God knew what was going to happen and free will does exist (which it does, or else people wouldn’t have the choice between Heaven or Hell), then it must be because He not only has seen the future, He can constantly see the future, because He can see all of time simultaneously (if indeed “simultaneously”, which means “at the same time, can reasonably be used to describe the indescribable of God). I find that I picture God as having extra dimensions He exists in – more spatial directions, like someone from the book Flatland (don’t know the reference? Read it. You need your mind opened.) AND more temporal directions, like someone who can see the entire script of a play when the characters can only experience the “now” they happen to exist at…well, er,…now. You get the idea. [There’s more on this topic in an earlier essay of mine,“Free Will or Determinism”]     

          “But if he has a reddish-white sore on his bald head or forehead, it is a defiling disease breaking out on his head or forehead. The priest is to examine him, and if the swollen sore on his head or forehead is reddish-white like a defiling disease, the man is diseased and is unclean. The priest shall pronounce him unclean because of the sore on his head. Anyone with such a sore on his head must wear torn clothes, let their hair be unkempt, cover the lower part of their face and cry out, ‘Unclean! Unclean!’ As long as they have the disease they remain unclean. They must live alone; they must live outside of the camp.”

- Leviticus 13:42-46

            Finally, consider the motivation for the kosher laws and menstrual regulations of the Pentateuch, where His incredibly strict rulebook regarding such topics as dealing with leprous people, blood, and the like served a purpose that (curiously) apparently didn’t exist when Christ made the New Covenant with His people fifteen hundred years later. Is there anyone who seriously doesn’t think that those original rules were specifically designed for the primitive society which existed before man had the ability to practice sufficient or effective hygiene, store most foods safely for the long term, and who did not yet understand what you and I would consider basic germ theory or disease control? Jesus Christ replaced the animal and grain sacrifices with His own death and glorious resurrection, but He didn’t replace the Jewish kosher laws (or, frankly, half of Leviticus and Deuteronomy) with anything…because they had served their purpose. God’s people had succeeded in not accidentally extinguishing themselves, and they were no longer needed. In Moses’ time, mankind had a very primitive understanding of the way the world worked. That was to be expected: God knew He had created us to be learning creatures, in all fields of knowledge. Consider Paul’s explanation to the Corinthians in his first epistle to them: “And I, brethren, could not speak to you as to spiritual men, but as to men of flesh, as to infants in Christ. I gave you milk to drink, not solid food, for you were not yet able to receive it.” (First Corinthians 3:1-2) He understood (as we all do) that when we are fledgling learners in any area, we need to be spoon fed simple material at first, or we won’t learn at all.  As Peter says in his First Epistle, chapter 2, “Like newborn infants, long for the pure spiritual milk, that by it you may grow up into Salvation.”

†

          Are you with me so far?

        1)   The Bible uses analogies to both show and hide the truth.

        2)   God does not view time the way we do.

        3)   When we are fledgling learners, we need simple material at first.

If so, the next step is pretty short if you’ve paid attention.

            “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was over the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God was hovering over the face of the waters. And God said, ‘Let there be Light’, and there was light.”

- Genesis 1:1-3

            What does the first chapter of Genesis describe? Traditional doctrine – read, scholarly human kind – has long argued that it describes exactly 144 hours in the life of God, in which He “created the heavens and the earth”, in which He filled the waters with “swarms of living creatures, and let birds fly above the earth”, and then He “created Man in His own image.”

            Meanwhile, modern science, using the skills and tools which the Lord Almighty helped us develop over the course of millennia, developed proofs for so many of the truths that are detailed in God’s Word. They did, however, come up with a slight discrepancy from the exact timing that traditional doctrine demands for these miracles.

            Traditional doctrine says “six days”. Modern science says “13.7 billion years.”

            Unfortunately, that’s a bit large for us to consider it a rounding error, a “lost in translation”, or an “oops! Forgot to carry the five!” mistake.

            One answer or the other is off by a factor of 8,334,166,666,666,667%.

            However, the problem is that one of those numbers comes from the Bible, which is inerrant, and the other comes from independent calculations (verifiable in multiple ways) using the very same methods we rely on for determining other equally fundamental and ineffable measurements of His Creation (see the second paragraph of this very vignette, for example). Even the age of the Earth itself, 4.7 billion years, has been authenticated in so many different ways as to be beyond doubt. We can’t have it both ways – either all of our historical science is fatally flawed, in which case there isn’t any independent verification of the Bible, or the vast, vast majority of it holds true to the methods He guided us to develop, in which case….what?

            Here’s “what”.

            Return to the premises we accepted. Just because Daniel says “seventy weeks” doesn’t mean it’s 490 days! We know God does not view time the same way humans do: at the very least, given the apostle John’s temporal journey to the End Times he described in such detail in Revelation, Our Lord has complete and utter mastery of time as well as space, and most likely exists outside of time entirely except for when He chooses to go wading in the timestream with His children (us) here and there.

            So, “six days” could easily be a substitute for a much longer span of time – six months, six years, six decades. There’s absolutely no Biblical reason to presume 144 hours in this case; in fact, it’s almost unprecedented to assume that it would be exactly six days. If we refer to Moses’ own words in Psalm 90:4 (“For a thousand years in Your sight/Are but as yesterday when it is past/or as a watch in the night.”), six days could easily be six thousand years, or even far more. John MacArthur notes in his study Bible on the subject of time dilation, “God understands time much differently from man. From man’s viewpoint, Christ’s (second) coming seems like a long time away. From God’s viewpoint, it will not be long. This may not be a specific indication of the fact that there are actually one thousand years between the first phase of the ‘day of the Lord’ and the last phase a thousand years later at the end of the millennial kingdom.” We so blithely assume this thousand-or-more-to-one time dilation with regards to the End Times – why do we resist the obvious need to apply it at the front end, too?

            Unfortunately, even with that, we’re still well short of the scientific assessment – by a factor of two million or so.

            That’s where the realization of whom God was talking to in Genesis comes into play. While as Christians we acknowledge that all sixty-six books of the Bible were ghost-written by God (which I suppose makes them “Holy Ghost-written”!), the universal acknowledgment of human authorship of the Pentateuch is of Moses, a Hebrew by birth raised and educated in the Egyptian royal court of 1500 B.C. (forgive me – I can’t get used to saying “B.C.E.”!). Without question, Moses had firsthand knowledge and understanding of the events of Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and almost all of Deuteronomy – and was probably the only one who could have known much of what transpired on Mount Sinai, for example. The very end of Deuteronomy, where he dies, was presumably tacked on by Joshua or one of the Levite priests; and Genesis was assembled from eleven separate histories passed down orally and in writing, the assembly of which tradition ascribes to Moses. (Whether or not it was actually Moses is probably immaterial for our purposes: certainly the material of Genesis 1, for which the Trinity Itself were the only sentient witnesses, had to have been dictated to some human scribe of the same time period, in 1500 B.C.; Moses was probably as well-educated as any man in the world at the time, so for sake of argument let us take Mosaic authorship as given.)

So, Moses was as well-read and as well-schooled as any Hebrew – as far as that era goes. But three and a half millennia ago, even a man of Moses’ acumen was going to be well out of his depth if God started describing what current science believes He must have accomplished! Think about the Lord explaining this to Moses: Billions of light-years away, in an instant, a universe of matter and anti-matter exploded into existence from nothingness (and talk about an irrefutable proof of God! To me the Big Bang is a more definitive demonstration of His unimaginable Power than hovering over the face of the water and saying “Let there be light”!). From that point singularity, I set in motion an infinitely complex ballet of gases swirling into galaxies, into stars, into planetary systems, and so forth, finally reaching its pinnacle in a backwater arm of a galaxy, away from the deadly radiation of the galactic core, which I coddled protectively so that I could bring about Human Life on the planet I so carefully placed at precisely the correct location in orbit around the right class of star to sustain the climate I chose.

Can’t you just hear Moses (or anyone of that time!), who was probably still of the opinion that the earth was flat, asking, “Um, excuse me, Lord, but…what?!?” 
(“Yes, Moses? What part do you have a question about?”) 
“Um,… all of it, Sir! I don’t know what most of those words even mean.”

God knew that would be the problem, of course. That’s a safe bet. And even if He somehow made Moses understand the entire Creation set-up (which of course the Lord could make happen if need be), the readers of Genesis wouldn’t understand it, either. So, either He increases everyone’s scientific comprehension three thousand-plus years just to tell a scientifically accurate story (and who knows? Maybe we’re still too primitive and the real story is still outside our grasp!), or, much more likely, He would do what Jesus did in the parables – tell a story that gets the crucial message across with the essential pieces of truth.

“Let there be Light.” To me, this is the essential statement of Creation. Whatever else happened along the way, this is the critical moment of His handiwork: that moment when Creation itself burst into existence. Notice a couple of things –

1)    The phrase captures a suddenness that describes nothing else in the universe as succinctly or vividly as the Big Bang. Countless human writers have used that four-word phrase in various media forms of expression as punch lines for explosions – even mock-ups of the Big Bang itself. It doesn’t really describe whatever doctrine thinks happened in Genesis 1:3. Which, by the way…

2)    …was NOT the invention of the Sun, which doesn’t happen until later, in verses 14-16. “Then God said, ‘Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night…and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,’ and it was so. God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night.” So, if that light wasn’t the sun, which didn’t exist yet…and the light wasn’t God, who already existed – what WAS it?

Now, look at verse 4: “God saw that the light was good, and God separated the light from the darkness.” So, what were this light and darkness? Despite the claim of verse 5, it cannot be day and night the way we know it today, because the sun and the moon are still ten verses away from existence. One scholar says that God set up a second light source on one side so that He could start the Earth rotating and begin the process of day-and-night… but, you’d think he’d mention that. MacArthur himself suggests the same thing, except God is the light source on one side of the planet. So – why did He need to replace Himself? Not for the light, says MacArthur, but so the sun could provide “signs and seasons” to earth. Hmm.

There’s a better solution, and it’s staring us in the face. If verse four depicts the Big Bang, then as the initial explosion expands at the speed of light or just below (or if you buy into the current cosmological concept of ‘inflation’, just above!), the nucleus of that blast starts to separate – distinguishing the “light” (the nascent star systems) from the “darkness” (in between those star-system collections of glowing matter). The fact that we call the black of space “night” isn’t far from what we say today, since the only time we see into space is at night, that’s how we refer to it – “as black as night”. And it places the events in the proper order without making up details that aren’t there. We must take the Bible at its Word for what it actually says, not what we want it say. Even MacArthur is guilty of this sin as he describes his solution for this situation, desperately wanting to make a literal interpretation of “six days” stick. Here’s his explanation (from his Study Bible notes on Genesis 1:14) for the late appearance of the sun and moon in verse 14: “For three days there had been light in the day as though there was a sun, and lesser light at night as though there were the moon and stars. (Really? How do you figure that?) God could have left it that way, but did not. He created the “lights, sun, moon, and stars” not for light, but to serve as markers for signs, seasons, days, and years” – so, wait, we’d had no markers for days, but we’d had four days? And…how long were those days, if we had no markers for them, and so you had no possible measure of defining those days? (The underlines are mine for emphasis.) Those who continue to demand a literal “six days” for the Creation of the Universe while the moral compass of human society points more and more straight downwards are wasting their energy, as well as poisoning the public’s opinion on Christianity at a time when we can’t afford to be shoved out to the fringe any more than we already are.

So, when does Adam arrive on the scene? Well, there’s nothing in the Scripture that demands a particular timeframe, given the Big Bang understanding of Genesis 1:1-16. After He has created everything else, then (in Genesis 1:26) we read, “Then God said, “Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals and over all the creatures that move along the ground.” When does that have to happen? Eight thousand years ago? Four million years ago? 4.7 billion years ago? Does anything in Scripture really tell us? No – but it does have to be after the creation of a planet filled with creatures. So, cross out 4.7 billion years. 
But then, why not accept the initial appearance of humans as defined by modern science? Not “proto-humans”, if you take an evolutionary view, but the first human beings, created in God’s image – much more recent than four million years ago. There has always been a gap in our understanding of primitive humanity: where did Homo Sapiens come in, and how did the Neaderthals die out so suddenly? What advantage did Sapiens have? What if you presume that God created "man" - the Homo Sapiens - and because they were God's favored children, they overwhelmed the other proto-humanoid species and ruled the planet from thereon, as God intended for them to do. The Bible and the scientific record line up, and each side has to understand what it's looking at: the confirmation of its own records, with the correlation alongside the other side's evidence. 
(And it also solves one of those age-old conundrums: where did the extra DNA come from? How did we get humans married off to others to extend the species when God only started with Adam and Eve? There presumably was some incestuous relationships, approved by God when options were limited, but we also know that these early species interbred at times. If you can factor that in, then perhaps the tribes of Cain and others are accounted for, among other similar Genesis issues.)

As believers in Christ and in God’s infallibility, we do our faith a grave disservice by spitting into the wind on a topic that not only doesn’t have to be a “them-or-us” duel, but is actually one in which we are better served corroborating the scientific evidence that validates our Scriptures instead of fighting a vain battle based on our own ignorance and pride.


      Having said all of that... none of this is vital. It's one man's interpretation of God's Word, but as a human being, I cannot know its validity for certain. Believing this or not believing it is not critical to our salvation - it's not a fundamental part of our faith. I choose to think it's the most likely way of finding the truth concerning the correlation of God's Word with scientific discovery, but none of this changes the Gospel - we are sinners, and we need Christ for our salvation.