And is thus mendacious.
Really, “earth” should be the go-to for adamah, and “land” for eretz; those leave less confusion.
It ignores the normal use of kol and the common use of eretz, which to me is the worse offense.
But the YEC demand is that the Holy Spirit has to talk in ways that make sense to the modern time and culture. They can’t actually wrap their minds around the fact that other cultures and times and worldviews are real.
Yes, the comparison is about people being oblivious despite the signs and warnings given. Interestingly, that’s not a detail found in Genesis. (God warns Noah, but Noah doesn’t speak a word in Genesis.)
The global scale part is what you’ve read in, not what it says. 2 Peter references both the flood and the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah as examples of how God did not spare the ancient world yet knows how to rescue the godly from trials. You’ve claimed the flood is about scale and Sodom is about the method of destruction, but while there’s explicit wording about “reducing them to ashes as an example of what is coming on the ungodly,” there’s no corresponding phrase that says the flood is an example of the scale of judgement. The passage mentions the rescue of both Noah’s family and Lot, showing that both are used as examples of God preserving the godly while removing the rest. Neither are about scale; apparently regional disasters sufficed for what the author wants to discuss.
Weirdly my mind made this connection–
Posting that isn’t actually (completely) frivolous, there’s a point: a lot of history was remembered through songs – but not all songs are history. Likewise, a lot of history has been recorded using narrative – but not all narrative is history.
When history has been remembered through song, use of mild hyperbole is common. Since song was used to make remembering oral history (and other material) better, and since Genesis was transmitted orally for at least some centuries, we shouldn’t be surprised at the mildly hyperbolic use of “all”.
The trouble is that to YECers anything that doesn’t agree with them has to mean the person thinks the Bible is wrong. It’s like every YECer has appointed himself or herself a little infallible pope who mustn’t be contradicted.
Dear Marshall,
well I would have thought that the word ‘all’ as in “swept them all away,” and “destroyed all of them” was clear enough for anyone throughout the history of mankind to understand when it is used in the context of ‘all’ the Earth under Heaven.
As for Sodom, the use of the word ‘all’ there obviously means every human being in Sodom.
But it is grasping at straws to even attempt to use that as somehow in a convoluted way means that the flood was limited to a local area, instead of what the Holy Bible clearly tells us that it covered ‘all’ Earth under Heaven.
Do you really believe there are places on Earth that are NOT under Heaven?
Please, please get a grip on reality here.
Although some here accuse me of telling lies, of being deceptive, of forcing a modern scientific worldview onto Scripture, I refute all those accusations and appeal to your common sense if nothing else to please think about what is actually written in seventy translations of the Holy Scriptures.
When the Holy Bible tells me that Noah was 600 years old when he entered the Ark at the commencement of the flood, I believe and respect the Holy Scriptures.
I certainly don’t try to force a modern scientific view onto the Holy Scriptures, that science tells us that couldn’t be correct, and so then introduce yet another accommodating fantasy to sanitise the text to what you and those who believe as you do think Noah’s real age was when he entered the Ark, or that the Flood was only local when it is written ever so clearly that ALL the Earth was destroyed by the Flood, and ALL flesh in whose nostrils was the breath of life perished.
It is my Bible believing beliefs that are being relentlessly attacked on this site, yet in actual Truth, it is the perpetrators doing the attacking that are guilty themselves of what they accuse me of!
Roy, this is sadly yet another accusation that is yet another absolute falsity.
Tell that to the translators of the seventy Bible translations that I have, as you are accusing them of being wrong. I am amazed that you appear incapable of seeing that simple but real Truth.
I do not believe anything different to what the seventy Bible translations say. And some of those translations include Hebrew texts.
I have heard your arguments, I have considered what you have stated, I understand where you are coming from, but I do not agree with the conclusions that you reach.
God bless,
jon
How many of the seventy write “all the Earth” with a capital ‘E’ as you do?
Just wanted to note that the epic of Gilgamesh is not just a story about a flood. That’s one of the plots in the story but there are tons of others. Like a snake that tricks people. Fruit that gives you immortality. Giant Demi-god like beings. Two halves coming together to form one. A woman causing a man to lose his special connection to the natural world. Not that you said this, but it’s also unrelated to the hypothesis theory.
It goes without saying that every myth and folktale in ANE was part of the greater ANE myth building.
Dear Marshall,
thanks for your question, I haven’t counted, but nor do I think it is as overly important as you seem to think.
It appears that you and others here, ignore the many clear obvious words, and then justify the belief that the Bible is errant with what are frankly relatively obscure and dubious interpretations that support an agenda that doesn’t hold the Bible in inerrant reverence.
Of course, I expect that you and others will vehemently deny that your understanding the Holy Scriptures is obscure, but that is precisely as it appears to me. But please remember Who is behind every word in the Holy Scriptures.
.
John 10:35
35 If he called them gods, unto whom the word of God came, and the scripture cannot be broken;
.
Consider the first few sentences in the first Chapter of the Holy Scriptures, i.e., Genesis 1: KJV
"1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
In the King James Version above, there is a little ‘e’ for earth, but I do not, for one quadrillionth of a femtosecond, think that the word earth with a little ‘e’ means a limited area on the planet, it obviously means the entire Earth, the Globe, the planet, the whole entire place that God created for mankind.
Surely, you would agree that just because the word ‘earth’ in the above Scripture, starts with a little ‘e’, it doesn’t mean a discrete local area somewhere, (of say roughly around 100,000² kilometres or so, or whatever area a local flood was), it is obviously ever so clearly meaning the entire planet, that is just the same totality as we know it is today, or do you?
Just because I choose to use a capital ‘E’ for Earth does not in any way justify what appears to be an immediate knee-jerk reaction of shouts from some of the folks here, “your are forcing your modern western scientific worldview onto the Bible”, or words to that effect; that is just plain silly.
My own personal belief is that the early people right from the first person created, Adam and in the pre Flood world would have been far more intelligent than we are today.
For people thoroughly indoctrinated into belief in the evolution/deep time paradigm, that probably seems counter intuitive, but so be it. In support of that view, the very construction of such an enormous vessel as the Ark would have taken massive intelligence to coordinate and execute.
The year right now is 2024 AD and we know the Earth is a sphere, as we have seen it from the frame of reference of a camera in space. I see no reason to bow to the pedantic self appointed text police here who jump up and down upon anything written that they think is outside their chosen meaning by some of us folks here who actually believe in faith the Bible as it is written to mean what it clearly states. After all, (and although they like to play this down), ultimately, the Bible is written by God through the hand of a righteous person whom God chose for this important work.
God is omniscient, He knows all things, the belief the Bible has errors is a dangerous belief that may be the start of a slide into unbelief.
Once a person starts down that road, where do they stop? The precedent is set, other parts of the Bible that don’t neatly fit your worldview may be treated as error and ignored. The Bible lays down Gods Law for humanity. God is a moral, righteous and Just Loving God who abhors sin.
The writers were inspired by God, that is, they recorded what God wanted them to record; please realise that He can do all things, how little a thing is it to have His message to humanity that He Loves precisely recorded without error.
Compared to the awesome creation of the the trillions upon Trillions of Galaxies, the ensuring His message to humanity is accurately recorded is miniscule in comparison.
Why do you join with the enemies of Christ and atheist sceptics in denigrating the righteous, trustworthy, accuracy of the Holy Scriptures the Bible, and insist on promoting the false and utterly refuted view that the Bible teaches a faulty cosmology when it plainly doesn’t, and the nonsense about a flat earth and sky dome etc… that do not come from the text itself, but are forced onto it.
If you read the Bible believing the flat Earth, solid sky dome myth, then that is certainly what you will believe and interpret, but you are ignoring that God is behind the text and He left the detail out; terms used are purposefully equivocal and the description brief, and to the point, so we know that God created the Heavens and the Earth, and God brought the Flood upon all the Earth under Heaven.
If you read the Bible believing the Earth is a sphere, as I think the original authors would probably have known from observing the moon and the sun, then that is certainly equally as valid as the sky dome myth and perhaps more valid because God is not a God of confusion and error, He is the Living God of order and Truth.
Therefore, if you read the Bible with the knowledge we have today, which is perfectly legitimate and correct, the Genesis historical accounts of creation and the flood make perfect sense within today’s understanding just as it would have to the original author all those thousands of years ago.
The people of God kept themselves apart from other cultures in that part of the world, they remained separate to the Egyptians and did not adopt Egyptian cosmology.
The ANE nation stories that parallel the Biblical account are derived from the Biblical historical accounts, and NOT the other way around as many folks here would have us all believe if they had their way.
It’s possible you may find the interpretation of a flat earth is unjustified by reading the article at:
Excerpt from the above paper:
“Seely appears to be assuming that ‘scientific knowledge’, i.e. the conclusions of modern science, is the only source of true knowledge. And, amazingly for an author in a Reformed theological journal, Seely seems to be forgetting that Scripture is propositional revelation from God and therefore is also a source of true knowledge—in fact, it is the ultimate and final source of such knowledge!”
AND
“This argument is very weak indeed. The patriarchs worshiped God and believed His Word, not Mesopotamian myths. There is absolutely no indication in Scripture that they held any such beliefs. Seely must demonstrate this, not simply assert it. Also, it is highly unlikely that Moses and the Israelites were influenced by Egyptian concepts. Although Moses was educated as an Egyptian, he was also the recipient of divine revelation which stands in stark contrast to any Egyptian teaching. Furthermore, the Israelites lived separately from the Egyptians (in the land of Goshen) and apparently maintained their culture and customs and did not intermarry with the Egyptians. Therefore, it is highly unlikely that they would have been educated alongside the Egyptians — and even more so when they became the Egyptians’ slaves.”
END OF EXCERPT
and regarding the concept of a solid dome, you may learn that the view you appear to hold is not at all as cut and dried as some here would have us believe by reading the article at:
which is also available as a PDF paper at:
Excerpt from the above paper:
“Theologians of a liberal persuasion have often claimed that the idea of special or propositional revelation is ‘nonsense’ because human language is inadequate to the task of communicating divine truths. This argument is deeply flawed, but it does contain a kernel of truth. Concepts of which human beings are thoroughly ignorant, and would require several steps of scientific exploration to understand, are merely simple matters in the mind of God. To the Hebrews and other ‘scientifically naive’ peoples, basic cosmology was still in this realm. But it was not beyond God’s ability to present the truth without any mix of error. Equivocal language, terms left precisely undefined, served until such time as our own understanding was sufficient to comprehend the wonders of God’s creation. It is singularly unfortunate that men of ancient times and even up unto the present day have imposed their own concepts of what is true upon the Word of God.”
END OF EXCERPT
And regarding the shape of the Earth, this very short article is an honest treatment of this issue:
Excerpt from the above article:
"While most modern Bible versions translate khûg as ‘circle’, a good case can be made that ‘sphere’ was the sense intended by the original Hebrew. Historically, scholars have often taken this view, preferring the Latin words sphaera, globus and orbis. The recent preference for ‘circle’ may have arisen from the belief that people living in Isaiah’s time were too primitive to realise the true nature of the earth. This would seem unlikely, however, as Job 26:7, probably written several centuries before, states that God “hangs the earth on nothing,” indicating that the ancient Hebrews had quite a sophisticated understanding of cosmology.
Everyone is in agreement that khûg carries the sense of roundness, and common usage makes clear that this can refer to either a two or three dimensional geometry. Hence, it cannot be argued that Isaiah 40:22 clearly teaches the earth to be a disc. Moreover, even if khûg does refer to a circle here, this doesn’t necessarily indicate flatness as a globe appears as a circle from whatever direction it is viewed."
END OF EXCERPT
In my previous post to you, I asked you an honest straightforward question:
God bless,
jon
Here we hear it straight from you, Jon! So the importance of the ‘70 translations’ suddenly becomes “not as important as @Marshall may think” the very moment you might see something in them may not be as supportive to your speculation as you wish it would be! All other readers can here can see how this works for you: the bits of the Bible you feel you can enlist toward your cause are of immense importance. Anything else (even from the Bible) is “not as important as we might think.” That is straight from the YEC playbook.
Who here believes that?
We just don’t believe a definition of “inerrant” that can’t be sustained from the scriptures.
Just FYI, that isn’t about human beings.
Where do you get that from the text?
Answer: nowhere, you’re importing that meaning from modern science.
No – it means the flat earth-disk under the solid sky-dome that holds back the waters of the Great Deep that are above the dome.
It’s not silly, it’s honest: you don’t get to change the meanings of words to make them fit a modern worldview. “Planet” is a modern scientific term that has no match in Hebrew.
Your argument is like telling someone from Bristol that their car has a frilly woman’s headcovering as part of it because that’s what “bonnet” means in other parts of the world.
Science fiction – it’s not from the text.
Whose? You mean the meaning as explained by scholars Briggs, Brown, Cline, Driver, and others? the meaning found in HALOT and DCH?
But you don’t believe that, you believe that the Bible means what it appears to do to you in a modern English translation and under the influence of a modern scientific worldview.
It was written in Hebrew, in different types of ancient literature, and what it clearly states is what is does in those, not in a translation that carries with it a worldview alien to the text.
There’s something else you add to the text – nowhere do the scriptures make such a claim.
You look at the text from a worldview that is alien to is and from a theology that contains a large number of ideas added to the text, but you are blind to these.
Yes, we know – in my case, that’s why I stick to the text and don’t add or change or twist as YEC requires. See, since the opening Creation story is an edited version of the Egyptian creation story (that’s a fact), then treating it as historical narrative is an error that will inevitably lead to other errors.
That may be the way that YEC thinks, but it is false. This has nothing to do with anyone’s worldview but that of the writers and their intended audiences – it can’t, or you are reading the scriptures but reading into them.
Show me a lexicon that gives this meaning. TDNT doesn’t, BAGD doesn’t, Thayer doesn’t – have you got one that does?
The Bible doesn’t teach any cosmology because it doesn’t teach any science; there is nothing in the text that would give the impression that we should expect scientific accuracy. But it speaks from within a certain cosmology that must be recognized because it was a major part of the ancient worldview – and reading any literature through the lens of a worldview other than the one within which it was composed leads to error.
But that’s not what YEC does – it demands that the Bible must operate within the MSWV, as evidenced by every attempt to change the meanings of words such as “earth/land”.
Where do you get that from the text?
What is the textual and archaeological evidence for that claim?
There is none, and so it falls into the class of “pious imagining”.
In fact the literary types and structures of the opening Creation account are based on the Israelites having fallen into the common ANE worldview, since that account serves in three ways as a (devastating) corrective to that worldview; it is Moses doing something Christ did later more explicitly: he is effectively doing a “You have heard… but I tell you…” thing, demolishing the Egyptian (and most of the ANE) theomythology.
What’s your evidence?
See, the thing is that when you make statements without evidence behind them it makes Christians look stupid and contributes to the conclusion that Christians can’t be trusted – the latter being reinforced by the efforts of various Christian groups to try to get their societal preferences imposed by law.
I can’t stop laughing because that is exactly what YEC is all about, “impos[ing] their own concepts of what is true upon the Word of God”. They believe the Earth is a planet, so they stuff that meaning into the text. They believe the Flood was worldwide, so they stuff that into the text. They believe that ancient Hebrew genealogies were the same as today, so they stuff that into the text. And then to try to make those changed meanings work they invent volumes of (bad) science fiction
that ignores easily available data, makes up impossible scenarios, and lies whenever that’s useful.
That article is deceptive and exhibits a high-school level of understanding of language – if that. It brings in irrelevant material in an effort to skip over actual scholarship. In short, it’s a joke.
More deception since it involves the assumption that ancient peoples could view the world from far enough away to recognize that it is a globe. This isn’t biblical commentary, it’s thin justification of trying to force the scriptures to fit modern science.
Again: where in the Bible are we told to expect it to be scientifically accurate? what shows that such a concept was part of the ancient worldview?
The question itself is deceptive – and indeed involves circular reasoning – because it assumes a model that has not been demonstrated from the text in order to support that model.
Heck, it’s right from “Propaganda 201: Deception by Misdirection”.
Dear Mervin,
please calm down mate!
Why don’t you understand that attacking anything, that you feel threatens your worldview, is not helpful, and in this, is also illogical.
All I have ever said, is that I believe in faith, the Bible to be trustworthy and true.
The immutable Truth is plain for all to see, in Genesis 1:1 let alone in other places in the Bible.
Our omniscient Loving Living God made it that way, knowing that people will come and attempt to deny that the flood was indeed over ALL the Earth (earth) and will trust in their own interpretations instead of what the Holy Scriptures tell us “and the Scriptures cannot be broken”.
Know this fact that the Flood was a REAL event and the Ark was a REAL vessel and Noah was a real man. If you deny that, you deny the Truth given to us by God, in the Holy Scriptures.
But Mervin again, don’t you see that is utter nonsense?
I believe ALL the Bible just as I believe what the Bible plainly tells us.
It is NOT I, that cherry picks the low hanging fruit, and adds the whole false paradigm of evolution and its corollary ‘deep time’ to make the Holy Scriptures mean the opposite of the Truth.
Sorry, but it’s unclear to me here as to what you mean.
All I can say is the Holy Bible is of the utmost importance, for everyone.
Genesis 1:1 exposes the deception about the letter ‘e’ for earth (Earth) clearly showing it means the entirety of the created Earth. It is unjustified special pleading to claim anything else.
What in the world are you talking about?
There is NO playbook! But yet another false accusation.
The common practice here of branding fellow Christians who believe the Bible in faith with the acronym (YEC), that I clearly expect is regarded as derogatory on this site, is a poor attitude indeed to have towards your fellow brothers and sisters in the Lord Jesus Christ.
God bless,
jon
So? That has nothing to do with your claim that the text makes the Flood global – a claim that requires changing the meaning of the Hebrew word “אֶרֶץ” and ignoring the normal use of “כֹּל” (“all”).
Right – you just disregard what isn’t convenient and cling to what is, but you believe it all. Sure.
That you can say that about anyone here is disgusting – it’s on the list that Paul calls “works of the flesh”.
It’s pride that makes someone blithely make an accusation like that in reference to people who plainly do trust the scriptures. A fair amount of the opposition to you her is because people do believe and trust the scriptures, which should make any usual person do what Paul admonishes: examine themself.
As opposed to your common practice of branding fellow Christians as not believing the Bible.
It has become derogatory because of evidence – lots and lots of evidence. People here have been dealing with YEC for years and trying to be generous. But repeated examination of the sources has shown that YEC writers cannot be trusted to do actual science, to be honest about the data, or even to tell the truth. Since Biologos is about honest science, the people here who have a grasp of science have followed the data, the evidence, because that’s what honest science does.
Then there’s me, who come from the perspective of the text of the scriptures, with training to stick to the text, neither adding nor subtracting, neither changing the meanings of words not deviating from the grammar. I have no problem with the science of evolution because nothing about it is contrary to scripture, which is my thing; sure, I’ll delve into the science sometimes when it’s something I actually studied. but mostly when I talk about science I’m insisting that people not misrepresent things and also that they understand what the theory says.
Pretty much everyone recognizes that to understand the Hebrew scriptures, the historical-grammatical method is the minimum needed – except YECers who come here ignore both history, including context, and ignore grammar when convenient. And that is where the problem lies, because an essential element of YEC is maintaining that it isn’t necessary to actually do one’s homework to understand ancient literature, that reading it in English is enough.
There are other views -
Gen 6:2 the sons of God saw that the daughters of man were attractive. And they took as their wives any they chose.
Gen 6:3 Then the LORD said, “My Spirit shall not abide in man forever, for he is flesh: his days shall be 120 years.”
Gen 6:4 The Nephilim were on the earth in those days, and also afterward, when the sons of God came in to the daughters of man and they bore children to them. These were the mighty men who were of old, the men of renown.
Gen 6:5 The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
I am not making this up, early church fathers believed the sons of God were angels who fell from grace and became demons in Satan’s service in an attempt to destroy God’s creation even further and contaminate the bloodline of Christ mixing satanic seed with human seed. BTW, in the OT the sons of God are always creatures created by God, not by man. The result of this mixture of humans and fallen angels is the reason God finally said - The LORD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.
And so God decided to clean the Earth from the demonic and save only Noah and family and making a new fresh start killing all the demonic.
Even Paul believed it else I can’t explain that little sentence of his in 1 Cor 11:10 - That is why a wife ought to have a symbol of authority on her head, because of the angels.
Context of Paul Gen 6.
It’s a different way to look at the Flood.
I do think that changing “earth” to “Earth” – a common noun to a proper noun – is a significant change. “Let me be frank” isn’t the same as “Let me be Frank.” I could describe how during a dust storm “earth blew up,” but “Earth blew up” can only mean a rogue Death Star is on the loose.
The name of our planet, Earth, is a different word than “earth.” While “earth” has some overlap with the Hebrew word erets, “Earth” is foreign to it. For one thing, erets is about dry ground or land, whereas oceans are just as much a part of planet Earth as continents. If you translate erets as “Earth” in the flood account, you increase the contradictions: now even more verses state that the flood made an end of all flesh on the planet, not just on dry land. You’ve also increased the animals that need to be on the ark, since creeping things on planet Earth would include everything that creeps in the oceans. Obviously this is not what the text intends to communicate!
This is why translators tend to use “earth” uncapitalized, if they use that word at all. (One exception would be Genesis 1:10 where “God called the dry land Earth,” since this is a name. But it’s a name for dry land, not the planet.) I checked the translations I have in my Bible software, and The Message was the only one to use “Earth” aside from in names (e.g. Gen. 1:10; Isa. 54:5; Lam. 2:15; Rev. 17:5) or personifications (Job 16:18 in GNT; Exod. 15:12, Prov. 30:16 and Isa. 45:8 in YLT; Jer. 4:28 in DRB). What remains to be seen is if your 70 translations are any different.
Using lowercase-e “earth” is a deception? This is quite a change from earlier when you said, “I do not believe anything different to what the seventy Bible translations say.” Now, it appears you see yourself as qualified to correct their work.
If you truly believe lowercase-e “earth” is a deception, perhaps you should…
But first, please finish your investigation of just how many of them follow that deception of using a lowercase-e for earth. You identified the KJV. One down, sixty-nine to go!
That’s forcing a modern level of precision on texts that weren’t aiming for it, no different than asking if there are seeds smaller than mustard. In the Bible, “everywhere under heaven” refers to a wide area of land, such as all the nations around the Israelites who began to fear them (Deut. 2:25). I’m not going to call that verse in error if the dread didn’t spread to China or Antarctica. The expression basically means everywhere you can see, from horizon to horizon. It shouldn’t be pressed into being a scientific term.
There’s a quite similar phrasing after the flood. God tells Noah, “The fear and dread of you shall rest on every animal of the earth and on every bird of the air, on everything that creeps on the ground and on all the fish of the sea; into your hand they are delivered” (Gen. 9:2). Again, taking this as an absolute scientific statement just makes it wrong. The Galapagos Islands, for instance, are noted for how the animals don’t see humans as a threat. Other islands isolated from humans for millennia or more are similar. The dread of humans comes from many generations of interactions with humans; it wasn’t universally added to every kind after the flood. Just like rainbows, the flood account gives origin stories for things that scientifically have other explanations.
Dear Roy,
then unfortunately, it appears the immutable Truth that is plain for all to see, in Genesis 1:1 let alone in other places in the Bible is lost on you.
Didn’t I write the following:
Consider the first few sentences in the first Chapter of the Holy Scriptures, i.e., Genesis 1: KJV
"1 In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.
2 And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters.
In the King James Version above, there is a little ‘e’ for earth, but I do not, for one quadrillionth of a femtosecond, think that the word earth with a little ‘e’ means a limited area on the planet, it obviously means the entire Earth, the Globe, the planet, the whole entire place that God created for mankind.
The word ‘earth’ in the above Scripture, starts with a little ‘e’, but it does NOT mean a discrete local area somewhere, of say roughly around 100,000² kilometres or so, or whatever area a local flood was.
It should be obvious to you that the meaning here is the Earth that was created by God, that is, ALL OF IT!
And honestly in Truth, that is exactly the same totality as we know the Earth to be today, that is, the entire planet, or if you prefer, the Globe, the WHOLE planet, the EARTH!
It is most certainly not I that is the one here attempting to make the Bible mean something entirely different to the plainly written Truth.
Your endless claims of scholarship and the claims that you’re an authority who reads the Bible in four languages, flies in the face of the true meaning of what God’s important message to mankind ever so plainly is in the Holy Scriptures.
Are you actually insisting that ‘earth’ in Genesis 1:1 does not mean the entire earth?
Again you attempt to misconstrue what I have plainly stated.
Again, I believe ALL the Bible as faithful and trustworthy and True.
Once again, the accusations fly.
I was merely stating the reality of what is occurring here.
I accept the Bible to be trustworthy and True.
When the Bible tells me the flood covered ALL the Earth under Heaven, I believe it!
The devices you employ to justify that ALL the Earth under Heaven is just a finite local area somewhere on Earth is what is deceptive.
I freely admit that I have many faults, my Lord has made that plain to me, the battle we all wrestle with is the flesh against the spirit.
But pride is not my motivation here, nor is winning a point in the discussion.
I yearn for all the people here to understand the reality that Adam and Eve are real people, the Flood of Noah was a real event that destroyed the Earth (earth), and extinguished the life of ALL Flesh in whose nostrils was the breath of life, except for those upon the Ark.
My motivation here is that the Holy Bible be trusted to say what is so clearly says.
Why oh why, don’t you understand that having billions of years of pain, sorrow,suffering and death is NOT the ‘VERY GOOD’ creation that God made, and why do you NOT understand that having those billions of years of DEATH before Adam ever sinned damages the redemptive Gospel message of why our Loving Lord allowed Himself to be crucified as a substitute for all of our sins?
Let me get this straight; you’re claiming Genesis 1:1 doesn’t mean the whole earth (Earth)?
I haven’t branded anyone, I have asked what people here believe.
For example, in Genesis 7:19
19 And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered.
****do you truly believe that there are hills that aren’t under Heaven?
God bless,
jon
and Peter and James and the ethiopian coptic church today and…
Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance define them as: “From an unused root meaning to lie waste; a desolation (of surface), that is, desert; figuratively a worthless thing; adverbially in vain: - confusion, empty place, without form, nothing, (thing of) nought, vain, vanity, waste, wilderness. From an unused root (meaning to be empty); a vacuity, that is, (superficially) an undistinguishable ruin: - emptiness, void. The dark; hence (literally) darkness; figuratively misery, Destruction, Death, ignorance, sorrow, wickedness: darkness, Night, Obscurity.”
Did God say this was good? No
This is describing the death of Jesus.
The earth (christ) under the waters of death like Jonah. What day did the earth rise from the water?..fascinating
“but in these last days he has spoken to us by his Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, through whom also he created the cosmos.” (Hebrews 1:2)
GENESIS AND REVELATION ARE ALL ABOUT CHRIST, It’s Hyper real. more real than science. Alpha and Omega.
“Let your conversation be always full of grace, seasoned with salt, so that you may know how to answer everyone.” -Colossians 4:6
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