I want to begin this blog series because I have felt so convicted by God to write about all the things He has taught me lately. I wanted to be able to capture in words why I am a Christian and why spreading the Gospel with love is so important. Hopefully, if you are not saved, then you will find my humor and often child-like awe relaxing from a strict formal church setting.
If you do not have a Bible with you as you read this, I will do my best to link all passage references to BibleGateway.com in New International Version translation. I encourage you, to read not only the verse I write about, but the whole chapter that it relates to (unless I'm trying to cover the whole chapter in that post). If you are reading this and using the BibleGateway links, there is a button both on top and bottom of the verse that has 3 horizontal lines. Click that, and it'll show you the whole chapter that the verse comes from. Also, footnotes are so very important and there is a very good reason why theologians over time wrote those in. Often, they help explain the culture of the day or what the word or phrase in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin originally meant. The largest reason why there are so many misconceptions and misinterpretations about the Bible is because people pick and choose what part of the Bible they want to read, they pick and choose which parts they want to apply to their life. But EACH word was carefully chosen by God for a reason and the things that are said should not be taken lightly.
If you do not have a Bible with you as you read this, I will do my best to link all passage references to BibleGateway.com in New International Version translation. I encourage you, to read not only the verse I write about, but the whole chapter that it relates to (unless I'm trying to cover the whole chapter in that post). If you are reading this and using the BibleGateway links, there is a button both on top and bottom of the verse that has 3 horizontal lines. Click that, and it'll show you the whole chapter that the verse comes from. Also, footnotes are so very important and there is a very good reason why theologians over time wrote those in. Often, they help explain the culture of the day or what the word or phrase in Hebrew, Greek, or Latin originally meant. The largest reason why there are so many misconceptions and misinterpretations about the Bible is because people pick and choose what part of the Bible they want to read, they pick and choose which parts they want to apply to their life. But EACH word was carefully chosen by God for a reason and the things that are said should not be taken lightly.
This first post, I want to dedicate to the Bible itself. If there's anyone reading this who has never read more than John 3:16, or who doesn't know why the Bible was written, that is the purpose of today.
The Bible is the book for everyone. It was written for every type of person, every personality, and it was written (6000-2000 years ago!) with each individual person in mind who would ever read the words.
Not just that the message is for everyone, but it is written for every type of reader. It is a love story, there are scandals, there is action and adventure, it has history, there is even talk of amazing and terrible creatures like a fantasy novel and visions of the future like science fiction novels. The difference is that the Bible is not fiction. People have debated for ages whether or not the Bible is truth, and I don’t want to get into that and turn this into a debating blog. The fact is that historical records match what the Bible says.
You have to look at the Bible from 2 perspectives: God’s perspective, and man’s perspective. (lets not get into PC things about how man is mentioned, but woman is not because man means human. The culture didn’t value women, but God values women. Do not think you are any less than a man)
From man’s perspective, the Bible is filled with guidelines and laws. It is filled with history and knowledge. It is filled with stories of redemption and power and grace. BIBLE - Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth. That's not really why it is called the Bible, but it a pretty accurate sum-up of how we see the purpose of the Bible.
From God’s perspective, the Bible is His plan laid out as proof of His love for us.
Love: we throw around the word. Love can be a term of endearment. Love can mean that you love ice cream. You can love your mother and love your child, a very different love, but a love just as powerful. You can love your brother and you can love your husband, a very different love, but a love just as powerful.
God’s love is unexplainable. Imagine the love you have for your child and multiply it tenfold, multiply it exponentially. When someone says they/you are a child of God, remember what kind of love He has for you.
Imagine the love you have for a friend: the conversations you enjoy, the time you enjoy spending together, the common interests, the laughter, and the things you like to do together. Multiply that love for your friend and multiply it exponentially. That was God’s original intention for mankind, to be side-by-side with Him and spend time with Him. It probably was one of the reasons He chose the way He did to redeem us from our sin: come in the form of a human and be with us. His name, Emmanuel, means “God with us”. He longs to be our friend.
Now imagine the love your have for your spouse. The longing of closeness: physical, emotional, and spiritual. The intimacy of knowing yet constantly learning every detail about that person, both their inner self and their outer visible self. I, myself, am not married (yet) so I can only imagine this kind of love from those around me. Take that love and again, multiply it exponentially. God knows every detail about you. Sometimes that’s a scary thing, but he knows the number of hairs on your head, he knows the crinkle of every line of every inch of your skin. He knows every breath you take. He knows your every thought so perfectly. He knows YOU better than anyone on Earth ever could.
Lastly, think of how you love something you created. It could be a piece of art, a song, a good grade, a science fair project. You feel proud because you made it. You accomplished it. It is yours. God has a loving pride for us too because we are his creation. Your mother and father may have made the genetic combination to make you and they may have raised you, but your life came from God. You breathe because God loves you so much that he wants you to keep breathing until your purpose on Earth is completed. Not only does He know every detail about you, but he also LOVES every detail about you. He loves your imperfections and called you perfect because he crated you exactly that way.
Ok, now that we have a brief and basic glimpse of what His love is, now we can look at how that applies to the Bible.
At the beginning of time, God created everything. Everything was good. Everything was perfect. One of the things He created were the heavenly hosts (angels). One of those angels was named Lucifer and he was jealous of power and he questioned God’s authority over everything. Lucifer wanted power. He wanted to be beside God instead of beneath Him. Other lesser angels wanted Lucifer in power. For going against His plan, God banished Lucifer from Heaven. If there are any evolutionists or scientists out there reading this right now, and if you believe that the Earth is billions of years old, this is the part of the story you can have the billions of years in existence. Man was created on the sixth day of time. So to believe that God created everything in 6 days does not seem ridiculous to me because I KNOW that God is omnipotent (all powerful) and can do anything and everything He wishes to do. POOF: light. POOF: stars. POOF: earth. POOF: all the animals. He did all of this incredibly fast, yet didn’t forget a single detail that he wanted. But to believe that in 8 days' time (from when angels were created until sin entered the world) Lucifer was created and had his rebellion is a little far-fetched for me. Hypothetically speaking, if I was Lucifer, I would've enjoyed watching God create everything. But then over time, I might become jealous. I would begin to bottle up and stew my jealousy. I would plot and devise what to do in order to have the power I desired. The Bible does not say how much time was between the 7th day, in which God rested, and the day that Satan tempted Eve with the apple. But now I'm getting ahead of myself.
Adam was given the job of naming all the animals. Mind you, how long could it have taken Adam to name each species? We are STILL naming species we are just learning about (because his job got interrupted by sin) and theoretically speaking, as I did in the paragraph above, Adam could have been alive for billions of years naming all the plants and animals. We humans were created to be perfect, eternal beings. We were meant to live forever. But even surrounded by all the animal friends, Adam was still lonely, so God created woman from the flesh of man. They were happy together. God gave them a utopia, a paradise, to live in forever. Their ONE rule was to not eat of one particular tree. They can eat of everything and anything else, but just not that one tree. Who knows why God picked that as the one rule, but it was the only law of the day.
In comes Lucifer, disguised as a snake, and he told Eve that the fruit from that tree would make her wise and would give her the power of God. Together, she and Adam ate of the fruit, breaking the ONE rule and sin entered the picture. (They had ONE JOB!!) According to the dictionary, sin is ANYTHING that is against religious or moral law. Even if a man is without religion, he still have a moral compass, he still can tell the difference between right and wrong. Our conscious, our Jiminy Cricket, tells us if a decision falls on the right or wrong side of the moral-o-meter. Sin is a fault. Sin is imperfection. We sin constantly because thanks to Adam and Eve, it is in our blood. We are all descendants of Adam and Eve, therefore, sin is in our blood. In that instant, taking that one bite, when the rush of sin flooding them, the emotions of shame and guilt and self-consciousness came into existence. They realized they were naked and wanted to be modest. They hid from God because they felt guilty of what they had done. But since God knows ALL, there is no hiding from Him. He knew what had happened and He cursed the snake for his deception.
He cursed the snake to crawl on his belly. (so then what did a snake look like before sin? Did it just look like a lizard? Was it like a kimodo dragon? Was a dragon or a dinosaur the deceiver and he became a snake? Just speculation here) He cursed the snake greater than all the other animals. He cursed that woman and snake would be enemies, and so would their descendants, that the woman would cut the head off of a snake and the snake would bite her foot. (so, ladies, it is perfectly logical to fear and hate snakes because God cursed your relationship with them)
After cursing the snake, He then cursed Eve, that giving birth would bring great pain. (imagine that if sin was not in the picture, childbearing and giving birth would cause no pain) He also cursed her that she would long for her husband (meaning they would never fully have the relationship that marriage had intended) and that he would rule over her. (which means that before sin, man and woman were truly equal. But because sin is in the world, we will NEVER be equal, as much as we fight for it in our society. We won’t see equality until we are in heaven where everything is perfect again.)
Finally, He cursed man. He cursed the ground he walked upon. With that curse, man would have to work for the crops and weeds were invented. Because of this curse, we are stuck in this endless cycle of birth, school, work, work, work, retire, die, and somewhere along the line teach your children how to do the same. God had planned to have everything provided. Rain = water. Plants that grow themselves = food. Bread falling from the sky = food. But now, mankind had to work for their necessities. God took away their eternal life and cast them out of paradise.
When He cast out mankind from paradise, it cut of His interactive relationship with them because mankind could now die; mankind was no longer immortal. So God had to come up with a plan to restore His relationship with His people. Since His people now had sin, they had to pay for their sins. He taught them to sacrifice their best animals and crops in order to make up for sins they had committed. But God did not want his people to always be sacrificing. He planned to make Himself human and die. Imagine an immortal being choosing to die because you love someone so much, you don’t want them to die. God did that, but He didn’t just do it for someone, he did it for everyone. So all of the Old Testament is the story leading up to Jesus taking on human flesh and saving mankind. I’ll go more into detail on this in another post, but scattered through the Old Testament, it shows the bloodline, the genealogy, the family tree from Adam all the way to Joseph, who was the husband of Mary who bore Jesus. The story of the New Testament is the life of Jesus Christ and His power to save, redeem, and liberate all who are a slave to sin. Anyone who would believe that He IS God, would be saved. At the end of the New Testament is a vision of the future. My church’s head pastor is currently in the middle of a 9 month long series on Revelation, the last book of the Bible. It is breathtaking to see how Revelation ties together the whole Bible. God’s plan for the end of days, judgment day, Armageddon is to restore the Earth to the way it was originally intended: perfection, paradise, sinless, and filled with eternal and immortal beings.
It is in Revelation that I find this quote ever-so-applicable:
We are not human beings having a spiritual experience, rather, we are spiritual beings having a human experience. ~Priscilla Shirer.
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