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GENESIS 4 – THE BIBLE: THE WORD OF GOD?
Genesis/Session Title
Adam & Eve
Good evening. Tonight’s topic is the Bible. This is the Genesis course, and the Bible starts with the Book of Genesis, so let’s start with a joke about Adam and Eve!
How do we know Adam and Eve were not Chinese?
- If they were Chinese, they would have eaten the snake and left the apple!
The Bible
Our title for tonight’s session asks a question: Is the Bible the Word of God?
You might think the answer is obvious. And you would be right.
The answer is, of course, yes. The Bible is the Word of God.
So let’s finish early tonight and all go home!
But although we’ve answered that question, we now have to address another, deeper question.
What do we mean when we say that the Bible is the Word of God? Let’s start with a comparison.
Koran
Here’s another Holy Book. It’s not the bible, it’s the Koran, the Moslem Holy Book. Moslems believe that the Koran was dictated to the Prophet Mohammed by the Angel Gabriel, while Mohammed was in a cave on a mountain, and that Mohammed wrote this down word for word, and this is the Koran as it exists today. Since it came from Gabriel who came straight from God, Moslems believe that what is written in the Koran is literally the Word of God. Strictly speaking, a Koran in English or any other language is not the Koran, because the Koran itself is written in Arabic. A Koran in another language can only be an interpretation of the Koran. The Koran, written in Arabic, contains the actual words of God.
Christians believe that the bible is the Word of God – but not in the same way that Moslems believe that the Koran is the Word of God. Christians don’t believe that God spoke the words of the bible. But we do believe that the bible is inspired by God.
Book of Kells
The earliest bibles were written by hand, copied by scribes at a time when most people couldn’t write. The oldest surviving complete bibles today come from many hundreds of years after Jesus. Here’s the Book of Kells. It’s a bible, over 1300 years old. It’s in Latin, the common written language of Europe at that time. It’s in the library of Trinity College Dublin, in Ireland, and it’s one of the great national treasures of Ireland.
So, what is the Bible? Let’s take a look.
Bible contents page
For a start, although it’s all in one cover, it’s not just one single book. The Bible is a collection of books, almost a library of books. It includes 39 books of the Old Testament, also known as the Hebrew Scriptures. And 27 books and letters preserved from the first Christian communities – the New Testament, which tells us about Jesus and the early church.
In a bible you will always find the Old Testament books at the front, followed by the New Testament towards the back. That’s because the books of the Old Testament were written first, many hundreds of years before the birth of Jesus. The New Testament books were all written in 1st century AD, in the decades after the life and death of Jesus.
The books of the bible were written over a period of more than 1000 years, by many different authors, from vastly different cultures, in different languages. The Old Testament, the Hebrew Scriptures, is written in Hebrew, while the New Testament is written in Greek. That reflects the different times and cultures of its writing.
Today the bible is available in hundreds of different versions, in hundreds of languages. This reflects the idea that God’s word can be spoken in different ways - and indeed, that God’s Word must be told in different ways so that it can speak to different people in different cultures.
Let’s take a closer look. What kind of books are in the bible?
Library
In the bible, like a library, you will find different kinds of books. In the Old Testament there is
· Mythology and History , including Genesis, Exodus, Kings and Chronicles
· Law, including Leviticus and Deuteronomy
· The Books of the Prophets. The Prophets gave something like a social commentary on their times. They said ‘If you behave badly, disaster will result’. Or, ‘Because you behaved badly, disaster will result or has resulted.’ But they also said that God would not abandon or destroy his people. And they encouraged people to put things right by turning back to God.
· And there are books of Wisdom, like Proverbs, and the Book of Job, and the Psalms, which are songs sometimes praising God, at other times questioning God or complaining against God.
Then we come to the New Testament, and first we find the Four Gospels, Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, each telling the story of Jesus in their own way.
Next is the Book of Acts, full name The Acts of the Apostles, which tells how the Church started to spread from Jerusalem into other lands and cities around the Mediterranean Sea in the years after Jesus.
Then come a number of Letters, written in the years after Jesus by St Paul and others, giving encouragement and advice, and sometimes criticism, about the Christian faith and how to live a Christian life.
Finally there’s the Book of Revelation, which is not an easy book to understand, and should not be approached lightly. It includes descriptions of disasters leading up to the end of the world and a vision of the heavenly Jerusalem. Some people use Revelation to claim that they know about the end of the world, and so they aim to gain power over others. But if you look carefully you’ll find that what they are saying is always very far away from the teaching of Jesus.
With all these different parts of the bible, and different kinds of books, what’s most important?
Jesus
Christians would agree that the most important books of the bible are the Four Gospels. From them we learn about Jesus – his birth, his life, his teaching, what he said and what he did, and how people responded. And it’s in the gospels that we read about his death and his resurrection. If we didn’t have the gospels, we would know very little about Jesus. So if we want to know more about Jesus, if we want to try to understand who he was and what he was really about, we must first read the Gospels.
Some people are puzzled by the fact that the gospels give different and sometimes contradictory details about what Jesus said and did. I don’t see this as a real problem. They were all written several decades after he died, and it’s like having four different biographies of someone. They all tell the story in slightly different ways, and by reading them all, we can get a more complete picture of Jesus – even if they don’t always agree on the details.
Old Testament God
What about the Old Testament? Some people reading the bible find that the God portrayed in the Old Testament is a vengeful, destructive kind of God. The kind of God who kills his enemies and destroys people who don’t obey him. It sometimes makes you wonder whether Jesus was talking about the same God. This is an issue we have to face.
First, remember that Jesus was a Jew. He must have been educated in the Hebrew Scriptures, the Old Testament, because he was always quoting from the scriptures in his teaching. Jesus believed in the God that his people had always worshipped. Jesus not only believed in God, he felt incredibly close to God, in an intimate relationship that could best be described as being like Father and Son. Where did Jesus get this idea that God could be not just a God of vengeance and war, but a God of kindness, mercy and forgiveness?
The answer is, it’s there in the Old Testament.
‘What does God require of us, but to do justice, love mercy, and walk humbly with God?’ wrote the prophet Micah, hundreds of years before Jesus was born.
The truth is that the bible is like a journey. It’s the unfolding story of people’s developing relationship with God. Unlike the Koran, it’s not all written at one time, in one place. As I mentioned earlier, it was written over a period of a thousand years and more. The people who wrote about how God helped the Israelites destroy the tribes living in the Promised Land, that’s how they understood God.
But over time the Israelites came to understand and experience God in different ways. That’s how we have Micah talking about how God wants us to do justice and love mercy. And that’s how we get to Jesus and his understanding of God.
Christians believe that Jesus is the ultimate revelation of God. St Paul says that when we look at Jesus, we see the fullness of God. So Christians see the Old Testament as leading up to Jesus.
The Old Testament is the story of how people grew to understand and experience God in different ways, in different situations. And we are inheritors of that story. Like all history, it helps us to make sense of where we came from, and how we got to where we are now.
Since Jesus was always quoting the Old Testament, we need to understand something about the Old Testament so that we can understand Jesus more fully.
Can we trust the bible?
Two weeks ago in the first session on Jesus, we asked the question, can you trust the bible?
Many well-known bible stories tell of things that are incredible or even in ordinary terms impossible. In the Old Testament, God parts the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to walk through, but then lets the water come back to drown Pharaoh’s pursuing army. Jonah is swallowed by a whale, and three days later the whale spits him out alive. In the gospels, Jesus does miracles. He changes water into wine, heals people without medicine, walks on water, and even brings dead people back to life.
So, is it really true?
· Did God really create the world in six days?
· Was there a great flood, survived by Noah and his family and the animals in the Ark?
· Did the Israelites really walk through the Red Sea to escape from slavery in Egypt?
· Did Jesus really perform miracles?
Some Christians believe that everything written in the Bible is literally true, it all really happened just like it says. This reading of the bible soon brings Christianity into conflict with Science.
Creation
Take the story of Creation. The Book of Genesis says that God created the world in six days, with the sun, moon and stars, seas and dry land, plants, animals and people. But Science says that the world gradually took shape over billions of years, plants and animals have evolved over millions of years, and human beings have only been around for a faction of time compared with the life of the earth.
So which one is right? Do we have to choose between Science and Christianity? They can’t both be right, can they?
Well, no, if you read the bible literally, they can’t both be right. However, I want to suggest to you that there’s another way of reading the bible.
The writers of the Creation stories in the Book of Genesis (there are two creation stories in fact in the first two chapters of Genesis, and they both tell it differently) can’t be telling the literal truth about how the world began, because according to their accounts, there were no human beings around to witness what happened before human beings were created.
Either we can decide that the Creation story in Genesis is literal God-given truth, and in that case the fact that people weren’t around to observe what happened doesn’t matter;
or we can say that the Creation story in Genesis is a myth, a story that pre-Scientific people told to explain how the world came into existence. It’s not a factual account of what happened on the first six days in history. It’s a story about God calling creation into existence, creating order out of chaos, and seeing that it was good. It’s more like poetry than history. And doesn’t poetry often contain truth, even though it may not be factual? We’re used to judging everything according to the facts. But Truth can sometimes go deeper than facts.
Jonah
Or what about Jonah, the man who was swallowed by a whale and survived for three days in its stomach before being spat out onto dry land?
There’s a story about an old woman who said that if the bible said Jonah swallowed the whale, she would believe it!
But again, we don’t have to believe that the whale swallowed Jonah. Jonah may never have existed. In that way the story may not be factually true. But the story of Jonah tells a much deeper truth about human selfishness and God’s forgiveness.
Jesus healing
I can’t go through every example I mentioned, let alone all the bible stories I didn’t mention. But let’s take one more example – the miracles of Jesus. Many of the miracles recorded in the gospels are stories of Jesus healing people who were sick, blind, or lame. Did these things really happen?
We have the stories in the bible to tell us they happened, and in some cases there is archaeological evidence to show where that healing miracle happened in Jerusalem. But the honest answer is, we can’t be absolutely certain that all these things happened. But people believed Jesus could heal them. Very often in the healing stories recorded in the bible, Jesus tells the sick person, ‘Your faith has made you well.’ He doesn’t say ‘I have made you well’, he says ‘Your faith has made you well.’ This is important, and it points to an important truth.
Doctors today are well aware that curing sick people isn’t always just about giving them the right medical treatment. Sometimes the effectiveness of the cure depends on the state of mind of the patient. Or, to put it another way, it can often be that ‘Your faith has made you well.’
And in my own experience as a priest, I have often found that people who are deeply distressed or troubled, and whose deep problems may result in physical symptoms, such people can find in faith, a comfort and a hope that leads to healing.