The gifts had been collected over centuries from the time of the prophet Daniel. In obedience they waited for the star, a task they felt privileged to perform, knowing it could appear any night now. When it did they hastened toward Jerusalem to worship the King and deliver the gifts.
They regretted the attention, especially from Herod, that they drew to themselves in Jerusalem by asking for directions and so they left for home right after they found the Child. After they left at nightfall Joseph, awakened by a dream, quickly rose to take Mary with her Child to Egypt using the gifts the wise men left as means of support.
The next morning Herod went into such a rage upon hearing from his spies that the wise men were not coming back that, instead of just one Child Whom they couldn’t find anymore, he had all of the male children in Bethlehem and the surrounding area under the age of two killed.
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Denise offers the prompt word “task” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories. For what really happened see Matthew 2.
A woman walked up to Brian and told him, Sometimes all you’re asked to do is something small. Brian thought the message odd, but he heard a voice inside him say, Thank her. So, he thanked her.
After she walked away Brian wondered what just happened.
Was the unexpected jingle of joy ringing inside him because he obeyed that inner voice and thanked her? How could something so insignificant as common courtesy have such a profound effect?
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Denise offers the prompt word “jingle” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
Thinking of himself as a miniscule speck on a miniscule planet lost in a non-miniscule universe challenged Brian’s mind. He hoped aliens from a galaxy far far away would come with their advanced technology to tell the world what life was all about. Only they could save him and the world he lived in.
Passing a church Brian heard people singing songs of joy because the Lord had come. He complained to the wind about deluded people who thought there was a God out there working miracles on their behalf.
At least that’s what he did until the miracle occurred which allows me to end this meaningless tale that was going nowhere as Brian suddenly stopped running his mouth and wept for joy.
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Denise offers the word “challenge” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
“Simply because the Bible has a different view of origins to those put forth in human philosophy, there is a period of conflict whenever the church comes under the influence of a human philosophical system. Thus, any defender of neo Platonism in Augustine’s day or of Aristotelianism in the late Middle Ages found himself in trouble with Genesis.” Noel K. Weeks, The Hermeneutical Problem of Genesis 1-11, originally published Themelios 4, no. 1 (September 1978): 12–19
There’s a lot of historical information in Genesis that one would not have imagined could have happened especially in the first eleven chapters, such as, the Lord’s creation in six days of everything from nothing, mankind made male and female in His image, the fall of mankind and its consequences for the world, the global flood that reworked everything, and the creation of language families as a response to disobedience.
Much of this is offensive to non-Christian philosophers whether they are promoting evolution, neo Platonism, Aristotelianism or whatever other rationalized treasure they have gilded with fool’s gold for our consumption. In Genesis the Lord gets so messy through His personal interactions with the material world and mankind that He becomes intolerable to philosophers hoping to be guided solely by the authority of logical deduction from a minimal set of axioms of their own choosing.
Admittedly, in perhaps the only defense of these philosophers, without being told any of these events most people would likely start just as they have done with simple axioms. If we didn’t know better, we would likely also have imagined a clean, transcendent deity removed from material interactions with the world except for occasional mental connections through psychic fields or forest faeries. Our philosophies would rely on uniformitarian processes based on patterns of material change we observed in the world without getting a deity involved rather than messy events we had no control over or, worse, were our own fault.
That’s what we would have done. The problem is, we’ve been told what happened. We don’t have to make those mistakes.
Genesis As a Test
Because of this potential conflict, a Christian could use Genesis as a quick test for philosophical error. Genesis could also be used to test whether a professed Christian has capitulated to some erroneous philosophy. If the Christian reinterprets or rejects what is in Genesis to make it conform with what is in some philosophy, then capitulation has occurred.
Here are some tests. 1. Has “day” been reinterpreted to mean “billions of years”? (Genesis 1) 2. Can the philosophy correctly count how many genders there are? (Genesis 1-2) 3. Has mankind, a special kind of creature made in the image of God, been replaced with talk about a human animal species evolving with other animals from primordial pond scum? (Genesis 1-2) 4. Does evil originate with a fall of mankind or does the finger get pointed elsewhere? (Genesis 3) 5. Was there a global flood that completely churned the face of the earth, set tectonic plates in motion, destroyed radioactivity as a clock, flipped the geomagnetic poles multiple times, raised mountains, allowed glaciers to form, filled the oceans, buried fossils, dug canyons, and left, since then, only about 5,000 years of non-biblical history or are there allegedly archeological sites still around dating from before the time of this catastrophic event? (Genesis 6-9) 6. Does the diversity of languages have a miraculous origin with the intent to disperse a rebellious population or did languages evolve over tens of thousands of years coming from pond scum which came from some explosion which ultimately came from what precisely? (Genesis 11)
Why Is the Test Important?
The historical events in Genesis are the context in which the death and resurrection of Jesus the Messiah and the prophecies of His return make sense. They are part of the revealed plan of salvation. The messy, but wondrously miraculous, events throughout this plan of salvation (past, present and prophesied future) characterize the Lord of the Bible as personal and powerful unlike any other deity ever offered by philosophy including New Age pantheistic projections of the human mind.
Without Genesis Christian salvation history would have no justification since there would be no need (no fall) nor way (no promised miraculous intervention) to redeem mankind. If Genesis were false as history, then Christian history and its prophetic future would be false as well. If one removed Genesis as history, the plan of salvation would unravel into a New Age philosophy of sentimentality and self-help where death, not life, dominated all available future outcomes.
The Guidance from the Authority of Scripture
From a philosophical perspective one might as well accept the history in Genesis as true no matter how messy it is. It does account for the world we see around us. Since the alternatives to it lead to death there is no point in wasting one’s brief lifetime in philosophical investigations at all if any of those alternatives were true.
However, once we accept Genesis as the history of what actually happened it becomes authoritative for our philosophy. If there is any conflict between our philosophy and Genesis, it is our philosophy that must change, not Genesis. The authority of Genesis guides the construction of our philosophy.
One way to make sure Genesis is that authoritative guide is to explicitly insert the authority of the entire Bible (which includes Genesis) as the First Axiom of any philosophical system or scientific theory we attempt to construct. Then as an axiom it would guide our intellectual system building by steering us away from error through the threat of derivable contradiction with that first axiom which is all that would survive such a logical collapse.
Circumventing the Authority of Scripture
One would think this would be an obvious thing for Christians to do. However, as Noel K. Weeks notes conflict can arise if the church comes under the influence of a human philosophical system. When under the influence of a human philosophical system such as atheistic evolution, neo Platonism or Aristotelianism a Christian philosopher would try to tweak Genesis to suit his needs rather than modify or reject his own philosophy.
For example, if the authority of Scripture were really guiding Alvin Plantinga, who was busy assigning God the task of guiding alleged evolutionary processes that don’t exist, he would never have written, Christian belief just as such doesn’t include the thought that the universe is young. As another example, if the authority of Scripture were really guiding William Lane Craig he would never have jumped into the pit of big bang mythology turning the personal Lord of Genesis into an impersonal first cause.
In both of these examples, Christian philosophers circumvented the authority of Scripture as a first axiom. They rejected the guidance that Scripture could have provided them in their philosophies to help them avoid error.
However, I doubt that either of them think they committed any error. In their minds they likely imagine themselves innocently coming under the influence of a human philosophical system that just happened to be offended by Genesis. They would likely see themselves as having nothing to repent of even if that philosophical system were later acknowledged as wrong since philosophy is little more than a hypothetical mind-game where no one gets hurt by false teaching. All such a defense would show is that capitulation to human philosophical systems results in delusion.
The Midianites loved to cross the Jordan during harvest time to raid their Israelite neighbors like a swarm of locusts. On the other hand, to the discredit of the Israelites many of them had set up altars to Baal forgetting the Lord in proud times of prosperity while expecting the Lord not to forget them when trouble came.
With the Midianites camped nearby preparing to raid, Gideon threshed wheat by his winepress trying to harvest something discretely before they trod across the land demanding all. That’s when the angel of the Lord appeared to him to tell him that he was sent to save his people and the Lord would be with him.
Gideon reminded the angel that he was a nobody, a nothing, and that his subsistence farm, thanks to those Midianites whom the Lord has done nothing about, was well below subsistence levels. The angel of the Lord knew all of that, but, considering the lesson that needed to be learnt, the weakness of Gideon’s position was one of the main reasons why he was chosen.
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Denise offers the prompt word “farm” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories. To read what really happened to Gideon (Jerubbaal) and his family especially his sons, Abimelech and Jotham, see Judges 6-9.
The angel, shining with the glory of the Lord and fearful to behold, gave glad tidings of great joy. The joy was without limit. Look for the babe wrapped in swaddling clothes lying in a manger.
Then the heavenly hosts praised God, saying, Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.
In Bethlehem we found the child.
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Denise offers the prompt word “limit” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories. For what really happened see Luke 2.
I woke up in the middle of the night with an idea for a great story. I take no credit for the idea. It suddenly manifested, but I was tired. It was like I found a shiny treasure on the ground and all I had to do was pick it up, but I was tired.
Since it was a great story and it kept repeating, I eventually did get out of bed and started typing. I wrote the following sentence.
Then Timothy said something else as if it all depended on his words, but it didn’t all depend on his words.
I knew I should have written more before I went back to bed, but I was tired. Since I knew what I should have done, but didn’t do it, I disobeyed. When I finally woke up and read that sentence, the bare bones of the great story, I realized I lost it. I am left with a reminder that disobedience brings consequences. Sure God loves me and all, but if I don’t want to receive a great story by waking up long enough to write it down how can I receive what I have chosen not to receive?
Here’s the point of this essay: Can I get that story back with my own mental abilities?
I don’t think I can, but that is because I don’t think these things come from my own mental abilities in the first place. I’m not a materialist. That noodle on top of my head can only do so much. All this applies to you as well, of course. Even if we pooled our heads together and used our best efforts we could not come up with that great story again.
Hopefully I finally learnt my lesson because this was not the first time I was too tired to receive a blessing. Knowing my tendency to get tired, I have even kept a notebook by the side of the bed so I have less excuse not to write what comes from dreams or even from thoughts upon awakening, but I still get tired.
I’ve got to stop letting my body tell me what to do.
If you really understand that you can’t get there from here you will not waste any time trying to do so. In the case of my story, I will wait for fresh inspiration and stay awake next time.
Inspiration comes from God. If you don’t believe in God, it doesn’t matter. Inspiration still comes from Him. However, those who deny God lose a Way Maker. He’s still there but they have to delude themselves by inflating their own abilities or the abilities of nature to pretend to get stuff done without Him. There’s nothing like delusion to help one come up with ways to go from there to here or here to there forgetting that without God, most of the time, you can’t get there from here or you’d wish you hadn’t if you did. Without God we get lost.
There are many ways people try to get there from here without God. Here are a few that come to mind.
You can’t get a starry universe from a big bang
Since an orderly universe exists those seeking to explain how it got here without God have a lot of explaining to do. Some think a big bang might work. If you are trying to get order out of chaos an explosion has to be the worst starting point.
To make a star after the big bang makes a mess you need a cloud of gas. Gravity brings the gas together, but only if it can overcome the pressure to expand by somehow staying cool. Assuming you do get enough gas compressed that it becomes a thermonuclear accident waiting to happen, you then need a star to come along and blow itself up to ignite that “protostar” so it can blow itself up as well.
At least that is how I understand the alleged process which suggests to some that the laws of physics can’t explain star formation.
You can’t get reality from simulations
The whole point of artificial “intelligence” is to reduce human intelligence to machine-executable instructions. Then human beings could be thought of as made in the image of a machine, rather than made in the image of God.
A simulation takes this further and reduces reality itself to computer code. For me a simulation nightmare would start with the thought of a teenager in his basement in a galaxy far far away deciding to simulate a universe and suddenly I find myself in it.
That’s when I’d wake up.
You can’t get a diversity of creatures from mutations
It is amazing how often those who want to get where they’re going without God rely on decay processes to do so.
In the case of biological evolution, if you want a new kind of creature without God creating that creature you start with a creature and hope random mutations will turn the creature into something else before the mutations decay the creature to the point that it can no longer reproduce.
Mutations are decay processes. They don’t add information; they destroy it. On the way to extinction one may get a large variety of the same kind of creature, mutated, for sure, but one doesn’t get a new kind of creature with a lot of fresh information for mutations to destroy.
One is always racing against the clock when one relies on decay processes or has to counter them. Having a gazillion years to get it all done doesn’t really help. All it does is give those decay processes more time to decay stuff.
Conclusion
Face it: you can’t get where you want to go without God’s assistance. Without God, you can’t get there from here. With God, you have a Way Maker. Without Him, why bother?
Just because I wake up with an idea, a gift from the Holy Spirit, for a great story does not mean I can go back to sleep and come up with that story again later on my own when I am awake. I didn’t get that story in the first place on my own. All I could do on my own is write it down, that is, receive it.
I will have to wait for the Holy Spirit to offer something new, perhaps, something like this essay as a kind of repentance for my disobedience.
Neil recalculated using a different ratio of aligned nuclei in his controversial water-hydrogen model. Fifteen minutes later the results gave him the number he was looking for, 7576.3, with intermediate computations validating the steps, but with an uncertainty of 21.2. He wanted a tighter uncertainty before submitting his paper to the Institute, but the main result, regardless of the uncertainty detail, was well below Hardy’s upper bound of 7670.
Neil’s wife called from downstairs, Earth to Daddy, pizza’s ready!
His daughter also called, Earth to Daddy, pizza, pizza, pizza!
Neil walked down the stairs, picked up his giggling daughter, kissed his smiling wife and led a prayer of thanksgiving over the food knowing that, whatever the uncertainty, his family had much to rejoice over.
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Denise offers the prompt word “detail” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
George listened to Anton say, Those in Hell want to be there. This convinced George that Anton hung onto reality by only a looney link since why would anyone ever want to be in a place like that?
When George died and went to Hell he became a prominent commander in Satan’s army commissioned to nuke the daylights out of Heaven. By contrast when Anton died he went to Heaven.
George exhausted himself throughout his eternity attacking Heaven in every which way he could imagine with extreme prejudice. However, Heaven being what it is, Anton noticed none of it.
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Denise offers the prompt word “link” to be used in this week’s Six Sentence Stories.
I got the idea that I put in Anton’s mouth that those in Hell wanted to be there from the following passage in The Great Divorce.
There are only two kinds of people in the end: those who say to God, “Thy will be done,” and those to whom God says, “Thy will be done.” All that are in Hell, choose it. Without that self-choice there could be no Hell. (C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce, page 75)
The Fairy Tale Bible has the same words in it as the Real Bible. What makes it different from the Real Bible is that the words in the Fairy Tale Bible mean something different from what they mean in the Real Bible.
It is easy to get started with a Fairy Tale Bible. Go online and find any popular bible offered. To transform it into a Fairy Tale Bible rather than a Real Bible, don’t read any more of the book than you have to. This is the first rule regarding the Fairy Tale Bible. The second rule is to fake-read this bible by listening to New Age or atheist leaning commentators who will tell us what the text says since we aren’t going to be reading it ourselves anyway.
We can then babble about “evolution” or write poetic nonsense about “the universe” and pretend that we are just as “biblical” as the next guy.
Examples of Fake-Reading
Genesis 1
For example, if we were reading about the six days of creation in the Real Bible, we would understandably think of six 24-hour days because they have an evening and a morning and we know how to read.
To fake-read this in the Authorized Atheist Version of the Fairy Tale Bible we would let some commentator tell us that the word “day” means a gazillion number of years over which an unscientific process called “evolution” turned a random explosion called the “big bang” into stars, galaxies and people through chance events. The commentator may, or may not depending on how supposedly Christian he is, graciously give God permission to “guide” that unscientific process (which doesn’t actually exist) so God has something useless to do.
Admittedly fake-reading is a pathetic alternative to actually reading the Real Bible, but I suspect, indeed from my own personal experience I am convinced, that is how some people read the bible.
Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts – the whole NT
As another example, if we read about the death, resurrection and ascension of Jesus in the Real Bible we would see these as real historical events with significance for ourselves and our families regarding repentance and salvation.
However, if we were fake-reading the Lalaland Edition of the Fairy Tale Bible we would read a commentator who’d compare what happened to Jesus to what happens in near-death experiences. Then we would listen to a commentator claim someone found the very box in which the very bones of Jesus were stored. And then we’d watch a movie based on a novel that showed us how Jesus and Mary Magdalen had children who became royalty in Lalaland.
Genesis 6-9
It doesn’t get any better when reading about Noah’s flood. In the Real Bible we would think of a global catastrophe which ultimately formed the mountains, glaciers, canyons and oceans that we see around us. Our praise and gratitude to God would be immense for His mercy in protecting those eight people along with two of each kind of breathing creature so they could have survived that event and we could be here.
Should we want to switch over to the Fairy Tale Bible all we’d have to do is pretend that flood catastrophe never happened or at least wasn’t global. We would see it as one of those goofy things primitive people without any brains make up. We’d blindly believe that “scientists” one day would be able to explain, or at least convince each other, how those mountains, glaciers, canyons and oceans got there.
Real Life Example of a Fairy Tale Bible Commentator
Consider what the philosopher and supposed Christian apologist William Lane Craig said about Genesis: There are hints in the text itself that a seven day twenty-four hour day Creation week is not contemplated by the author. (1:44)
In case you didn’t notice, Craig is reading “hints” which aren’t actually there, in spite of him saying “in the text itself”, rather than the actual words which are, indeed, in the text itself. Although I’ve been plenty gullible in the past, today, as soon as I hear words like “hint” about a bible verse I anticipate that I will be led down a rabbit hole the commentator himself can’t find his way out of.
It is also worth noting for those not familiar with fairy tale thought patterns that Craig said contemplated by the author, but not contemplated by Moses whom most people would recognize as the author of Genesis. This omission of the name “Moses” was likely deliberate. The point of the Fairy Tale Bible is to discredit the Real Bible as an historical document. One way to do that is to fictionalize the people mentioned in it. Here Craig is subliminally suggesting that someone other than Moses might have written Genesis to raise our suspicion about the truth of anything else in that book or in any other book in the bible.
If the Real Bible is history we would have to take it seriously. That is why historicity is attacked by those promoting the Fairy Tale Bible. Fairy tale commentators do not want us to take the Real Bible seriously.
Craig excuses his position in advance by saying, I think that the book of Genesis is open to a wide range of legitimate interpretations. (1:19)
That he has to make this excuse at all is a sign that he’s aware that his position is not what his audience is ready to accept. He wants to disarm any hostile reaction from them. Some of them may even see him as a heretic. To avoid such a charge up front he asserts on his own authority that the book of Genesis is “open” to “wide” interpretation.
Since Craig is a philosopher, it’s a fair question to ask him what it means philosophically for him to call his interpretation “legitimate”? Unless he’s an atheistic humanist believing that man is the standard of all things, it doesn’t really matter what he thinks. What matters is: Does God think his interpretation is legitimate? What evidence does he have that God agrees with him?
If Craig is honest, he would not be able to answer that question and so he would likely throw it back at me. He would demand to know: What evidence do I have that God agrees with me? My response would be that I am a reader of the Real Bible. My “interpretation” is neither more nor less than accepting God’s Word as it was written. Given his searching for hints that contradict the actual words in the text that would be a response Craig could no longer honestly give.
Craig also said, There is a very tiny minority of Christians today who believe that the world was created some ten to twenty thousand years ago. (0:45)
And he proudly proclaimed that he’s not one of them. Oddly, this analytic philosopher doesn’t seem to know that truth does not depend on a majority vote. His reference to “a very tiny minority” does sound like an underestimation to make his own position look better than it is.
However, even if his poll numbers were correct (which I doubt), being part of a remnant is not necessarily a bad thing especially if one considers the remnant entering by the narrow way in Matthew 7:13-14. You would have to be reading the Real Bible to even know those verses. So, just in case you aren’t, let me quote them. (The red emphasis, however, is mine.)
Matthew 7:13-14 (KJV) 13 Enter ye in at the strait gate: for wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: 14 Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.
Admittedly, anyone who persists in fake-reading the Fairy Tale Bible will start thinking in fairy tale English, but the quantity of people suffering from a delusion does not make that delusion true.
Confession
The reason all of this bothers me is because I used to read, talk and think fairy tale English just as fluently as the next deluded babbler. I even tried to make sense out of atheistic big bang mythology using Craig’s Kalam cosmological argument.
But then I broke the first fake-reading rule. I actually read the Real Bible. Although I still listened to commentators, I didn’t just listen to questionable ones talk about it. I noticed that there was a history in the Real Bible that I do remember people, long ago, having mentioned but which I had forgotten. Then I became very suspicious of those commentators leading me into either an atheistic or New Age direction.
However, I can’t take full credit for this change of heart. If it were up to me alone it would not have happened, because I would not have had an experiential base for trusting what I read in the Real Bible. The Holy Spirit had to smack me around a bit.
It is helpful to realize that fairy tale English has two overlapping dialects: atheist and New Age. These dialects seem contradictory, but they actually complement each other. Each dialect contains its own blend of pseudoscientific speculation and magical witchcraft. That is, each dialect contains a different blend of Star Wars and Harry Potter, but otherwise they are pretty much the same delusion. What I have come to realize is that the Holy Spirit has nothing to do with either of them.
With results coming from the James Webb Space Telescope even atheists today are smartening up. Some of them now think that the big bang either didn’t happen (which leaves them with what?) or the mythical bang has to be pushed back another gazillion years to place it outside the falsifying reach of modern technology. Although they don’t appreciate it, they are at a fortunate crossroads where they have to start thinking and make better choices.
Craig thought he saw a crack in atheism because they hypothesized a beginning to the universe. He bought into their fairy tale of deep time and imaginary chance processes just to keep this hypothetical beginning afloat. Unfortunately he had to throw Genesis under the bus to do that.
When the big bang reaches the status of a falsified hypothesis (because it really makes no sense in any self-respecting atheistic, closed universe constrained by increasing entropy) I wonder how these compromising Christians will respond? May they repent as well as I did and may they start using their academic training to do real apologetics work in support of the Real Bible.
Poetry, Short Prose and Walking 