Is it just me or does it seem like a couple of accounts suddenly popped up in the last few weeks that were created earlier on and almost never used. Then suddenly they awaken and post a lot of content? I felt like this happened a few years ago too. Suddenly long dead accounts and new accounts popped up.
Are you referring to the Heliopolis creation story?
Just curious.
I’m just stuck on this thing called ‘truth’ - so I guess you’ll have to pardon my exciteability over it. I’ll try to live up to what you imagine of me anyway! I hope that truth remains an essential component of my worldview - and am only inviting you to also attend to it as well.
Speaking of which …
@Marshall continues to raise good points about the ‘Earth’ / ‘earth’ issue that you’ve still failed to address - other than to try just dismissing it as unimportant; very uncharaceristic of you, since you also claim that all scriptures are important.
But don’t let me distract you from seeing the point he continues to elaborate on. Spraying down a lot of long pastes of Bible text that we’ve all read many times before or links to other web sites is no substitute for engaging with an issue of why you think some parts of scriptural testimony are just ‘not as important’.
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Yes Troy, they are about Christ, but the mind blowingly amazing thing about our God is that He doesn’t do things in halves, they are also REAL events that happened in the past. In short they are both historical accounts of REAL events and have many parallels that point to Jesus.
God bless,
jon
Dear Mervin,
if that is so, and you respect the Truth, then why do you not believe the clear words of the Holy Bible?
The Truth is plain for all to see.
To me at least, the words of the text are ever so clear that:
God spoke creation into existence just as He did perform miracles incarnate on Earth that immediately happened at His command.
Don’t you see that the same God (Jesus the Son) commanded and it was so in both the creation account and the miracles He performed about 2,000 years ago? There is no need for billions of imagined years except to slip the naturalist philosophy of evolution into the Bible.
The whole of the earth (Earth) under Heaven was destroyed by the Flood.
Do you believe there are other areas on Earth that are NOT under Heaven?
Genesis 1:1 "In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the earth (Earth)…
Do you really believe that earth here means just a limited extent location somewhere, i.e., a limited local area and not the entirety of the Earth?
You say you’re stuck on Truth, yet expect me to believe that DEATH has been in the world for some imagined billions of years PRIOR to what the Bible tells us is the Truth, that Death entered into the world as the wages of sin.
Do you believe that when Adam sinned, Death entered into the world?
God bless,
jon
- Burrawang has used the closing sentence “We must agree to disagree” at least once in this forum.
- Oddly, IMO, he frequently continues to harangue folks who post things that he does not agree with. Why is that? Why the apparent desperation in what, more often than not, he posts once, twice, three times and more?
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I think you’ve made that disaster more localized than Genesis states. It wasn’t just Sodom – it was also Gomorrah and the whole circle of earth (kikkar) around those cities (Gen. 19:24–25).
You’ve probably localized it to Sodom because Jesus mentions that city. But he only says Lot left Sodom, not that the disaster only befell Sodom:
Likewise, just as it was in the days of Lot, they were eating and drinking, buying and selling, planting and building, but on the day that Lot left Sodom it rained fire and sulfur from heaven and destroyed all of them; it will be like that on the day that the Son of Man is revealed. (Luke 17:28–30)
So Jesus doesn’t qualify the “all of them” as only being those in Sodom. It’s “all of them” in “the days of Lot,” just as the previous example of the flood was “all of them” in “the days of Noah.” Jesus’ words don’t give any further information on the scope of each disaster – you’d have to look back to Genesis for that.
That’s why using Jesus’ statements about the flood to interpret Genesis is so circular. We’ll see in Jesus’ words about the flood what we already believe Genesis says. Just as we do for seeing Gomorrah destroyed alongside Sodom, but not the whole world.
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It would appear that the Apostle Paul got it right…“now we see through a glass darkly…”
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- I think something I came across in Megan Basham’s book “Shepherds For Sale: How Evangelical Leaders Traded The Truth For A Leftist Agenda” lends itself to an answer to my question above. The Epigraph at the beginning of Basham’s book includes a quote from J. Gresham Machen’s book, “Christianity and Liberalism”:
- “Presenting an issue sharply is indeed by no means a popular business at the present time; there are many who prefer to fight their intellectual battles in what [has been] called a “condition of low visibility.”. Clear-cut definition of terms in religious matters, bold facing [sic] of the logical implications of religious views, is by many persons regarded as an impious proceeding. . . . But with such persons we cannot possibly bring ourselves to agree. Light may seem at times to be an impertinent intruder, but it is always beneficial in the end. The type of religion which rejoices in the pious sound of traditional phrases,regardless of their meanings, or shrinks from “controversial” matters, will never stand amid the shocks of life. In the sphere of religion, as in other spheres, the thing about which men are agreed are apt to be the things that are least worth holding; the really important things are the things about which men will fight.”
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Then why do you insist on an interpretation of the Bible that makes it false? It’s like claiming the Bible is trustworthy and true while insisting that the Sun moves about the Earth despite all of the observable facts that indicate otherwise.
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There are around 6 million species of land animals. The only arc they could possibly have made is one which would handle the animals for a local flood. Even a modern ship of steel wouldn’t be enough for what you suggest.
Because the promise was about God not sending a flood to save humanity by destroying human civilization mired in corruption so it could start again, not about never allowing any natural floods let alone about destroying all life throughout the universe. God didn’t think we were worth the price as it was, let alone the price of doing so when human civilization had spread over the whole globe.
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More specifically, that they were the highest of all heavenly beings, members of God’s highest council, who were supposed to guide the nations in righteousness but who decided to set themselves up as gods instead, teaching the people everything destructive they could think of.
Not so much that as following his path; whether they actually served him or just copied him wasn’t all that plain. For second-Temple Judaism, it was that they followed the Enemy’s path but were no more obedient to him than they were to YHWH. In fact when Jesus refers to “a house divided against itself” that may be a reference to this lack of loyalty among the dark powers.
Yes – to second-Temple Jews and thus to first-century Christians, the whole Watchers & Nephilim incident was “Spiritual Rebellion #2” after Eden. In fact to some the real rebellion in Eden was that of the Deceiver while Adam and Eve were just dupes! So while today we think of Genesis 3 as what Christ had to fix, for the early church Genesis 6:1-5 was one as well.
With its corollary in John 1: But to as many as received him, he gave power to become the sons of God . . . born, not of blood nor of the will of the flesh nor of the will of man, but of God.
Which in Jewish lore was easy because the Watchers settled in Mesopotamia and thus were all in one area. So from the perspective of the opening of Genesis 6 it could be argued that there was no need for a mega-Flood, just one big enough to catch the mixed offspring and those they had misled.
A Lutheran pastor I met in St. Louis called women’s hats “nachos”, a pun on their meaning to angels: “Not yours”.
To a second-Temple Jew it was the obvious way to look at the Flood.
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Nice comparisons!
This is something a lot of people don’t recognize. English has a lot of homonyms, but it also has a fair number of homographs, words written the same but with different meanings that are thus actually different words. “Butt” and “butt” are one of my favorites since one is a noun and the other is a verb; “Earth” and “earth” are also a good example (and I’m a bit embarrassed at missing this).
That’s still a bad translation – the Hebrew doesn’t even have “land” at that point, it just has “the dry”, though “ground” is assumed in every OT usage I know of. An accurate translation would be, “God called the dry ground ‘land’” since it carries the significance of the passage – it isn’t “dry land” as after a flood recedes leaving mud behind, but the ground itself was dry, the waters having been thoroughly “separated” away.
Heh – “earth” there doesn’t really even qualify as a name, it is part of “heaven and earth” which was a phrase for “everything that exists”, indicating the non-material realm and the material realm.
I don’t know what his 70 translations are, but of the forty most commonly used English translation only one has “Earth”; one has “universe” and another has “all that is” in place of “heaven and earth” while another reads “sky and ground”, and the rest have “earth”.
Of the non-English versions I read, all have lower case for the word.
It is also not a stand-alone concept for the most part but a descriptor, i.e. “everywhere below the mountains” wouldn’t mean all the land that is lower than the mountains but all the land “in the shadow” of the mountains (to use a modern colloquial phrase) or perhaps all the land from which the mountains can be seen. So “all the land under heaven” may just be a descriptor of the land in question, noting that it is all “under heaven”. Alternatively, that clause may actually belong with “all flesh”, thus “all flesh with life in it from under heaven”, which could indicate the kind of life, i.e. that with its source “under heaven”.
And given the ancient Hebrew worldview that is most likely.
And not just isolated ones: in states in the U.S. where bears and mountain lions have been given protected status, it is not uncommon these days for these predators to enter towns and prey not just on pets but occasionally on children, and all the screaming or yelling or even pounding on metal pans to make noise is useless; the only way to inhibit them is to demonstrate that tangling with humans is dangerous and possibly deadly.
For that matter, even in areas where hunting is common young deer often will not run even if a hunter walks right up to them – if they’ve never met a human they have no fear.
= - = + = - = † = - = + = - =
Of course not – it doesn’t mean a planet at all, it means the flat earth-disk under the solid sky-dome.
Where in the text does it say that the entire earth was made for mankind?
No, you’re making that up – it means the whole flat earth-disk beneath the solid sky-dome.
What you’re doing is called eisegesis, reading into a text meaning that isn’t there. It’s because your worldview is a modern scientific one, so you automatically assign modern scientific meanings to words whether they belong there or not.
This is a very solid way of determining someone’s worldview: what meanings do they read into words written in other cultures? In the case of YEC, they read modern science into all the words they can, even inventing scientific meaning for words that plainly have none! This shows that the YEC worldview is not derived from the Bible but from a MSWV – if it was a biblical worldview, there would be no reason to put MSWV meanings into ancient words because the biblical worldview does not include science in its definition of truth.
You claim that, but your writing here betrays that claim: you reject scripture as not important when translations disagree with you, as you did above in this thread.
So do pretty much everyone you’re arguing with.
No, you assign MSWV meanings to words and ignore both grammar and the normal use of language. It has been demonstrated to you repeatedly that “all” in Genesis is commonly geographically limited, yet you reject that – which means that you reject the authority of scripture to interpret scripture.
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Except some, by imposing a modern worldview on the text, are looking at the smudges on the glass instead of trying to look through the glass.
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Well put, that!
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Hi Mitchell,
thanks for your thoughts.
I have no idea how many animal species existed when the Global Flood destroyed the pre flood world and reshaped the single land mass to what we see today, but I accept the Bible in faith as written; the Bible tells us that God brought all the land animals in whose nostrils was the breath of life, and that is good enough for me.
Ultimately it greatly depends upon what God classified as different animals.
It seems reasonable to me that what God classifies as a kind is broader than what we classify as a species today, thus the number of animals that God brought to Noah would have been less than the number of the man-made classification ‘species’ that we use today.
Again, the disparate worldviews that we each hold to, influence how we interpret this.
There have been countless floods that have killed millions of people over the past four thousand years, since the Flood of Noah, therefore, if the Flood of Noah’s day was merely a local flood,
1.) then why did God say the purpose of the Flood was to destroy all flesh, if there were people alive elsewhere that weren’t affected by the Flood?
2.) then why did He say He would never again send a Flood to destroy all flesh?
Surely you can see that 1 & 2 above make it clear the Flood was universal over the whole earth (Earth) and destroyed all life as the Holy Bible plainly tells us.
God bless,
jon
Dear Roy,
utter nonsense! I refute your baseless unedifying accusation outright.
I put these questions to Mervin yesterday:
God spoke creation into existence just as He performed miracles, (when He was incarnate on Earth), that immediately happened at His command.
Don’t you see that the same One (Jesus the Son) commanded and it was immediately so in both the creation account and the miracles He performed about 2,000 years ago? There is no need for billions of imagined years except to slip the naturalist philosophy of evolution into the Bible.
The whole of the earth (Earth) under Heaven was destroyed by the Flood.
Do you believe there are other areas on Earth that are NOT under Heaven?
Genesis 1:1 "In the Beginning God created the Heavens and the earth (Earth)…
Do you really believe that earth here means just a limited extent location somewhere, i.e., a limited local area and not the entirety of the Earth?
God bless,
jon
Dear T_aquaticus,
I am honestly flabbergasted that what is actually stated so absolutely clearly in the Holy Scriptures can be turned on its head by brothers in Christ who confess to be Christians.
Who are the ones here insisting that the Holy Bible must be viewed through a lens of billions of years of struggle and death of the weakest, that equates to evolution? … and which is found NOWHERE WHATSOEVER IN THE BIBLE?
*And yet you accuse me of having “an interpretation of the Bible that makes it false!”
God bless,
jon
To answer the last one there … yes! In some cases. I haven’t been replying directly to those since I think @Marshall has more articulately (and with more research) raised these points that I would love to see you address. But lest you think I’m ignoring you (I’m not) - my quick answer is that … Sure! In many cases in the Bible we may legitimately accommodate what the ancient writers thought or said to now mean “the entire globe as we now know it”, such as when the Psalmist praises God, speaking of God’s glory “filling all the earth”. Whatever they knew of “earth” back then, it’s fine to think such things still extend to “all the earth” such as we know it to be today too. But to insist that “earth” only and ever meant “entire globe” as we now know it is not a faithful interpretation of scripture (at least not as you are trying to apply it). Shoot - even in Genesis 8 - the very heart of the disputed text you are at such pains to think “so clearly” says what you insist it says - even there the text lets you down. When it says in Genesis 8:13 that “the waters dried up from off the earth…” (WEB), if we were to follow your insistence that earth always means the “entire globe”, then that verse means that no water is left on the earth at all … no oceans … no lakes. And since even young earthers don’t go that far, it shows that your “clear interpretation” of everything is more a circular argument originating from modern creationists than it is from any actual biblical scholars.
God bless.
-Merv
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They are insisting that interpretations of the Bible be consistent with reality.
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