How to serve Jesus – Matthew 25:40 | 2-minute meditation (Bible verse)
No place for arrogance in evangelism – 1 Peter 3:15 | 2-minute meditation (Bible verse)
It’s okay to be heavenly minded! – Colossians 3:2 | 2-minute meditation (Bible verse)
Do you feel weak? – Isaiah 40:31 | 2-minute meditation (Bible verse)
Jeremiah 29:11 – a verse out of context?
When it comes to singling out and “claiming” verses of scripture, proponents of the Word of Faith movement don’t have a monopoly. From Conservative to Charismatic, Evangelical to Eastern Orthodox, Christians love clinging onto comforting extracts from the Word of God. And this is right and commendable. Continue reading “Jeremiah 29:11 – a verse out of context?”
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[PODCAST] The Ten Commandments: Introduction
The first in a series of sermons I’m preaching at my local church, Northgate. This is the introductory sermon, in which I set the scene for the Ten Commandments and describe their relevance for the church (and society) today.
Listen here: 00.The Ten Commandments – Introduction
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Why did Noah curse Canaan?
In Genesis 9 we read the story of Noah being found drunk and naked, by his son Ham. Ham went to tell his brothers about this and their reaction was to cover their father discreetly. When Noah wakes up and hear of Ham’s behaviour, he curses Ham’s son Canaan (verses 18-27).
It’s not easy to read the story with a “ancient mind” – in other words, we don’t precisely understand the social issues associated to this story. If a friend became drunk and took his clothes off today, we’d probably laugh about it, but in ancient Hebrew times, nakedness was still strongly associated to shame (see Genesis 3:7 & 21). Maybe a good comparison today would be uploading a video of your wife, naked, drunk and swearing, to YouTube and sending the link to all the church elders. Ham has said to his brothers, “Oy! Lads! Look at this! *guffaw guffaw*.” The brothers are shocked and treat Noah with appropriate respect where Ham has dishonoured his father greatly. So this is the context for Noah’s reaction.
Next, it seems that Noah’s reaction is borne out of anger. The bible reports a lot of things that it does not condone, David’s adultery being a classic example. Noah cursed Canaan, but we should not necessarily infer that this was an appropriate or proportionate response to the offence. In fact we already know that Noah is in a bad place, because the bible explicitly discourages drunkenness (perhaps for this very reason). So we can try to understand why Noah cursed Canaan without this then instructing us that we ought to behave similarly.
Generational angst might have been on Noah’s mind. We know that God later said (in Exodus 20:5-6), “I… am a jealous God, punishing the children for the sin of the fathers to the third and fourth generation of those who hate me, but showing love to a thousand generations of those who love me and keep my commandments.” The emphasis here is not that God is in any way vindictive, but that successive generations live with the consequences of the sin (or righteousness) of previous generations. Although what Noah says may be read as a curse, to me it reads more like a prophecy: i.e. If this is the kind of man that Ham is, then these are the inevitable consequences for his children. You reap what you sow. Ironically by bypassing Ham, Noah has avoided the embarrassment of indirectly blaming himself for his own son’s (Ham’s) sin. Then when Noah goes on to bless his other sons, he is by analogy giving himself a pat on the back!
Scripture taken from the HOLY BIBLE, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 Biblica. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
The “NIV” and “New International Version” trademarks are registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica. Use of either trademark requires the permission of Biblica.
Noah image copyright © Fr Lawrence Lew, O.P., licensed under Creative Commons. Used with permission.
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What about dinosaurs?
Question
What do Christians have to say about the existence of dinosaurs?
Answer
There are quite a few differing views within the Christian community, ranging from those who believe the fossil records were placed there by God as a test of our faith, to those who believe that the bible must be reinterpreted in the light of the findings of science.
I suppose the biggest perceived hurdle is the assumption that the bible insists the earth is no more than a few thousand years old whereas science insists that dinosaurs became extinct many millions of years ago. I deal with this separately in my How Old is the Earth article. Suffice it to say here that the bible has several references to large and otherwise unidentified creatures such as “leviathan” (e.g. Job 41:1, Psalm 74:14). I do not have a strong view on the time scales within which these creatures existed, but I do not find their existence incompatible with a belief in the truth of the bible.
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How old is the Earth?
Question
The bible seems to indicate that the earth and the universe are less than a few tens of thousands of years old. Science talks in terms of billions of years. Which is right?
Answer
For reasons that escape me, “science” is perceived as having fixed, reliable and universally agreed views on the age of the earth and the universe. This does not reflect the reality that science is always a developing field of knowledge and enquiry; we frequently see today’s “facts” becoming tomorrow’s jokes (cf. flat earthism). Moreover, although there may appear to be a general consensus within the scientific community, we should never equate consensus with knowledge. Nor should we suppose that any one particular scientist holds the same view as all other scientists, nor that those views have in all cases been arrived at by personal impartial examination of the primary evidence.
Although this is merely scraping the surface of the body of knowledge on dating methods, it too often appears that (for example) the geological method is used to confirm the radiocarbon method and vice versa. Such circular proof is no proof at all and certainly demands closer scrutiny. Furthermore, the fact that a particular dating method appears to hold good over a period of a few hundred years cannot give us an assurance that it can also hold true over many millennia. This gigantic extrapolation involves what I can only describe as a breathtaking leap of faith.
We know that the speed of light appears to be a constant and that we can observe stars that appear to be millions of light years away. The contemporary view of most astronomers would be that the light reaching us (from a supernova for example) shows us a picture millions of years old. To this, a young earth creationist might respond that the point of creation involved such a massive injection of divine power that these supernovae occurred rapidly, while the universe expanded rapidly (say to its present size within a matter of hours) making it appear as though those events occurred long ago.
It is clear to see that these widely differing viewpoints both rely on baseline assumptions: “today’s science has got it right” versus “the bible tells us that the earth is very young”.
For my own part, I hold neither view. It is not really an important question for me, since my faith is based on a personal relationship with someone who I know and whose influence on my life I have witnessed first hand. It is necessary for me to have source scriptures that are reliable, but I will be the first to admit that I do not always understand what they are saying and that they can easily be misinterpreted, not the least because we English speakers receive them by way of translation. That said, it was recently pointed out to me that there is a particular interpretation of Genesis that may shed some light on the apparent age discrepancy between science’s view and young earth creationism’s. Interestingly, it comes down in favour of science.
At the very beginning of the bible, we read that in the beginning, God created “the heavens” and “the earth”. The next verse has traditionally been translated “The earth was formless and empty” or words to that effect. But it can also validly be translated “the earth became formless and empty”, perhaps implying a cataclysmic event immediately preceding the “re-making” of the earth and the creation of man. Thus the universe could have pre-existed the creation story by an undefined period of time.
Additionally, note that in the first verse of Genesis 1 attention is fixed on “the heavens and the earth”, a Hebrew idiom for everything, i.e. the universe. But in verse 2, the focus of the narrative dramatically narrows to concentrate merely on earth and its immediate environs. This too may explain why there appears to be a discrepancy in timing.
In truth, no one knows the true age of the universe for sure. No one now living was present at the moment of creation, whether that was a Big Bang or some other impressive manifestation. We would do well to choke down our arrogance and admit that it is not possible to know all things beyond a shadow of doubt. Unless, of course, you’re God.
NASA Earth from Space image from gnews pics’, licensed under Creative Commons. Used with permission.
