Tag: the bible

The Lost River of Eden

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The Bible preserves the memory of an ancient river that flowed across Arabia many thousands of years ago.

God speaks to us in many ways.

I was raised in a close-knit Christian family, but came out of four years of college with the kind of precious know-it-all attitude for which the university is the ultimate greenhouse. And in that wilderness I wandered for 30 years or so, until the Good Shepherd brought me back.

One of His tools was an article in Biblical Archaeological Review, Vol. 22 No. 4, July/August 1996, “The River Runs Dry.” This told of the discovery, via satellite photo analysis, of a long-vanished river that ran across Arabia into Mesopotamia. (I can’t figure out how to navigate the BAR site, but this will help you, http://kata-aletheia.blogspot.com/2007/01/ancient-geography-lost-river-of-eden.html )

The Bible preserves much ancient knowledge which would otherwise be lost. In Genesis 2, the “four rivers of Eden” are described. Two we know today as the Tigris and the Euphrates, in Iraq. But in verse 11 we read, “The name of the first is Pison [or Pishon]; that is it which compasseth the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold…”

“Havilah” refers to what is now the western part of Saudi Arabia. Geologists for years wondered about the presence of certain kinds of pebbles and stones in Kuwait which were not original to that country. But as satellite photos revealed the bed of a mighty river now buried under the Arabian desert, it became clear that these stones and pebbles came from far away, carried there by a river which dried up and disappeared thousands of years ago.

So there is information in that chapter of Genesis that has no business being there unless it is an accurate record of truly ancient things. Never mind the Reputable Bible Scholars Inc. who say the whole Bible is just a bunch of fables and stories invented by priests in Babylon after 500 B.C. to wile away the time spent in captivity.

Geologists estimate that the Kuwait/Pison River ceased to exist by, at the latest, 2,000 B.C. So then they talked about it for 1,500 years?

Reading about this lost river of Eden, now found again, shocked me deeply: shocked me with the revelation that Genesis is true. It got me started back on the road to the Bible. It continues to fascinate me 20 years later.

It’s God’s Word, it’s true, and we can trust it.

Is the Bible Just Stories?

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A liberal friend, who professes to be a Christian, often chides me for believing “Bible stories” that simply aren’t true–Adam and Eve, Noah and the Flood, Moses and the Exodus, and more. The stories aren’t true, he says, because Science says they can’t be and Science is always true.

It doesn’t seem to him that he recognizes Science as an authority superior to the word of God. I’m sure he would deny the charge. I know he would say the Bible is “essential truth”–just minus those embarrassing details involving miracles, etc. Like, we all know the witch of Endor didn’t call up Samuel’s ghost for Saul! We all know the walls of Jericho didn’t fall the way it says so in the Bible. Don’t we?

If the Bible is not God’s word, then we don’t have God’s word. Period.

Does the Bible ever use poetic language, or figures of speech, or verbal formulae that are not meant to be taken literally (such as the formula “forty days,” repeated so often in both Testaments)? Yes, it does. The Bible uses every literary device known. When God says “The cattle on a thousand hills are mine,” He doesn’t mean that the rest of the hills, starting with Hill No. 1,001, are none of His concern.

As for Noah’s Flood, I think we are at liberty to interpret that in more than one way. Mockers and scoffers like to demand, “Well, if the Ark landed on Mt. Ararat, how did the kangaroos and the koalas and the emus make it all the way back to Australia? Huh? Huh?”

God’s word does not lie. Neither is it ridiculous. The people living at Noah’s time, somewhere in the Near East, didn’t know from Australia. As far as they were concerned, the Flood truly did cover every land and wipe out all the life upon the earth.

It is not incumbent upon me, or you, to “prove” that the Great Flood actually drowned Australia, Antarctica, or the Americas.

If the choice is only to believe everything the Bible says, taking every word of it with a robotic literal-mindedness, or else to believe everything I’m told by scientists in the name of the great idol, Science–well, that would be an easy choice to make. It would be the Bible, every time.

But God does not demand that we make such a choice.

Only liberals do.

I’ve Got My Books!

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It’s always a big day for me when I get my author’s copies of my book. Today I got my copies of The Temple. That cover looks good! My wife is already hunkered down to read it.

You may have noticed that I’m blogging more, of late. That’s because I’m between books, and that always makes me antsy. But I know I’ll have to wait months before the Lord starts me on the next story that He wants me to tell. He knows I need that time to rest and renew my resources.

The Temple is Book No. 8 in my Bell Mountain series, and the themes remain the same throughout: God’s sovereignty over all Creation; His power to intervene in history–without abrogating our free will; how He draws individuals and nations to Himself; and how the characters learn to know and love God through obedience, through sacrifice, hard work, enduring hardship, taking risks, and loving one another.

In all of this, whether I’m writing or not writing, my one indispensable tool is God’s own word, the Bible. I want my stories to be steeped in the Bible: it’s the only way to make them valid.

If you’re new to this blog, welcome. And if all of this is new to you, a lot more information is available just by clicking “Books” at the top of this page.

Are Americans Ignorant of the Bible?

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One of the more popular substitutes for an understanding of the Bible–a ouija board.

Consider this statement:

“Shockingly, just 4 percent of children surveyed in 2001 were considered familiar with the Bible, compared to 70 percent in 1950.”

It comes from How to Succeed in Hollywood (Without Losing Your Soul), a 2011 book by Ted Baehr, the founder and publisher of movieguide.org and chairman of the Christian Film & Television Commission, on page xxviii of the Introduction. Unfortunately, there’s so footnote, so I don’t know who did the survey or how they did it.

Near-total ignorance of the Bible would certainly explain most of the cultural trends afflicting us today, though.

This is what comes of farming out your children to strangers to be “educated.” And thinking you’ve seen to their religious education just by shipping them off to Sunday school for an hour a week–well, that doesn’t walk the dog, either.

I consider Ted Baehr a reliable source. And without a huge dose of Biblical illiteracy, I can’t even begin to explain our present cultural mish-mosh of sodomy and transgender-worship, Obamaism, the idolatry of Global Warming, Political Correctness, animal spirit guides, and all the rest.

It takes a family, not a village, to raise a child. It is up to the family–not only parents, but aunts and uncles and grandparents, too–to make a child familiar with the Bible, and to teach the child to resort to God’s Word as the ultimate authority. God is not a man, that He should lie. Without the family, there is no meaningful religious education.

Hey, our Western civilization is currently going round and round and round on its way down the drain. The Gospel can save it. Jesus Christ, the King of Kings and Lord of Lords, can save it.

But the catch is this: our civilization needs God, but God doesn’t need our civilization. He has seen them all come and go. Ours has no special dispensation. If we humble ourselves before Him, and hear Him, He will heal our land. If not…

Well, then we’ll wind up living in some other kind of civilization that maybe we won’t like so much.

Liquid Water Found on Mars… Maybe

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As you can see by these book covers, Edgar Rice Burroughs didn’t need to wait for NASA to tell him all about life on Mars.

To hear the noozies and the left-wing “comics” tell it, liquid water has been found on Mars, you bet, absolutely, no doubt about it, and that just proves once again that Science and Liberals are always right about everything. And so on.

What has actually been found is indications or evidence that liquid water sometimes exists on the surface of Mars, probably in some form (containing certain minerals or chemicals, for instance) that would allow it to remain liquid at much lower temperatures than water can remain liquid here on Earth ( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/liquid-water-mars_5608c70be4b0768126fdfd44 ).

Please note all the qualifiers, in italics. What it boils down to is there might be liquid water on Mars, sometimes, when conditions permit.

But of course people are already making the jump from that to the you-know-it’s-gotta-happen-soon discovery, on Mars, of living microbes and fossils of more complex creatures–which, to the humanist mind, proves that God did not create life on Earth, the Bible is wrong about everything, and it’s okay for us to be fornicating bastards.

If any trace of life is ever found on Mars, it is guaranteed to be presented to us–by noozies, academics, comedians, and Democrat politicians–as proof that God does not exist.

Liberals don’t like the idea of a Power higher than that of the omnivorous State. And they really, really don’t like the idea of any kind of Judgment after death.

So their humanist religion rejects those concepts.

And demands that life be found throughout the universe, erasing the uniqueness of Earth.

The universe is God’s, and He can create life wherever He pleases. The Bible is concerned with human life on Earth, how we should live it, and how we should come to know, love, and obey God. There is no reason for the subject of life on other planets to come up in the Bible.

It would be cool if life were found on Mars. I’d love to see the fossils. And I would know that, living or extinct, there could only be life on Mars if God had created it there.

When to be Scared of Cucumbers

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Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers. And the daughter of Zion is left as a cottage in a vineyard, as a lodge in a garden of cucumbers, as a besieged city.  Isaiah 1:7-8

A lodge in a garden of cucumbers?

There are images in the Bible that stay with you forever, even if you don’t know what they mean. This is an image that has stayed with me. It’s night-time, and I see the black silhouette of a broken-down building surrounded by a measureless expanse of tangled, rioting cucumber vines…

“Lodge,” by the way, doesn’t mean a fancy building that charges you an arm and a leg to stay there. According to Strong’s Concordance, the actual Hebrew word is more accurately rendered “hut.” Maybe even something as rude and as temporary as a lean-to.

Okay, now, go ahead, tell me those verses of Isaiah don’t apply to our own country, here and now. They are a warning–a warning which Jerusalem chose not to heed, and so brought about destruction. And they did it without staging homosexual parodies of marriage, mutilating a man and insisting he’s been made a woman, forcing good people to pay for abortions, or having a national leader stand up and say “God bless Planned Parenthood!”–the folks who cut up babies while they’re still alive and sell their parts.

The Western world today, which once was known as Christendom, has wallowed in sins which ancient Jerusalem never even thought of.

God has warned us, but we haven’t listened.

Here comes trouble.

Lawsuit Seeks to Abolish Bible-Reading in Church

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Don’t even think about asking me where I got this information, because I am not at liberty to tell.

A lawsuit is about to be filed before the 9th Circuit Court demanding that all Bible-reading, except for “secret private readings that the authorities are unable to monitor as yet,” be banned on the grounds that it violates the Separation of Church and State. The plaintiffs are a coalition of atheists and liberal churchmen, Americans for American Values and Other Good Things.

“Bible-reading must not be allowed, not even in the churches,” said law professor J. Wadsworth Polyp, a known idiot. “Churches are located in the state, therefore they are subject to Separation of Church and State.”

“Our church never opens the Bible,” said Priestess the Rev. Judi Kazooty, Presbyterian Church USA. “That’s because the Bible is, like, the most un-inclusive book ever. It breaks, like, every hate speech law. So we read Saul Alinsky and Al Gore instead.”

Polyp and Kazooty are respectively the chair-being and the also chair-being of Americans for American Values and Other Good Things. Their group, they say, represents “lots of people.”

“We are not asking the court to curtail freedom of worship,” Professor Polyp added. “You will still be allowed to go to church. You just won’t be allowed to say or read or write anything that goes against the State.”

Copies of the lawsuit can be obtained by stealing them from the professor’s office. He keeps them right under the copies of the final exams.

Did Dinosaurs Really Exist? Really?

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It came up in the conversation: “We sent our son to a Christian camp, and they taught him there were no dinosaurs–that unbelievers just made them up. He was confused about it for years.”

I’m always surprised when I hear anyone deny that there was ever any such thing as a dinosaur. True, dinosaurs aren’t mentioned in the Holy Scriptures. Neither are ancient China, the polar regions of the earth, or volcanoes, and Spain is the westernmost country mentioned in the Bible (did you know that?). Furthermore, although dinosaur fossils have been found all over the world, the Middle East–the region where most of the action in the Bible takes place– is singularly impoverished in that respect.

It’s also true that a lot of the things we used to “know” about dinosaurs have turned out to be wrong. When all you’ve got to go on is bones and tracks, it leaves a lot of room for error. Compared to what I was brought up on, some of these feathered monstrosities that are today’s representations of dinosaurs look altogether screwy.

And then we’ve got “behemoth,” in Job 40:15-24–a big, fearsome, awe-inspiring animal described as eating grass and having a tail like a cedar, as in a cedar tree. Whatever it was, behemoth was a herbivore–and can you think of any herbivorous land animal today whose tail would remind you of a cedar tree?

What do you suppose God was talking about, when He spoke to Job and used behemoth as an example to teach Job about His divine sovereignty?

Whether behemoth was a dinosaur or not, one thing we do know is that its like is on the earth no more.

Believing that dinosaurs existed should not threaten anyone’s Christian faith. We don’t want to put ourselves into the position of claiming that the bones–say, a Tyrannosaurus skull, or a brontosaur skeleton–were manufactured by the thousands and thousands and seeded all over the earth by some powerful and fiendishly clever conspiracy formed by persons who otherwise can hardly find their way out of a rest room. [Note: It turns out there really is a conspiracy theory that says the government, or “corporations,” or even God just made up dinosaurs as means of either spreading disbelief or, in God’s case, testing our faith.]

Yes, they are not discussed in the Bible. So what? Does anyone know all there is to know about God and His ways? Like, isn’t that what they were trying to teach poor Job?

Christians are at liberty to enjoy dinosaurs as the work of God’s hands, and to be richly amused by the endless revisions necessary to the scientific study of dinosaurs–and even, if so moved, to jump into that study themselves and lend a hand.