Tuesday, May 20, 2014
Life's Stories
Today I'm having a hard time focusing at work. If I were a senior back in high school or college I'd call it a case of Sennioritis... it's one of those, I wish I could play all day moments. At work that means that things like Facebook, Twitter, the internet, all become seriously easy distractions. I open the web to go to a specific website and I'm off on a 20 minute tangent.
So I stopped, said a quick prayer for focus, and clearly heard a "have a quick quiet time" message from The Lord. So here I am. Making a quick note, to get me kicked back on focus for the rest of the day.
And the message I was taken to in my daily devotional was on Matthew 24:32-44 and Jonah 1:17. In my devotional, the author of today's entry marks how Jesus referenced the old testament stories of Noah and Jonah, which she claims gives those stories prescient for being 100% verbatim accounts of unquestionable historical events.
Today I have to differ with the author of the entry.
There is no denying that Jesus taught in allegory, that he used fables and imagery to deliver the point of his message in a way that his disciples could understand and comprehend. If the purpose of the Bible was to provide history lessons it wouldn't be as important a book as it is. For if we wanted true historical accounts of events, we would search out records from every source of the time. The Word, the remains, the legends, the archeology. The Noah story alone is found in many accounts, lending both empirical evidence to the histrionic occurrence of a great flood, and equal importance to the reason the story was passed along.
We know that the Biblical stories of old were verbally passed down from generation to generation until God told Moses to make a written account of them all. You can take that as God's decision to write history, but one can easily argue that if God had wanted that he'd have made sure that Adam & Eve, in all of their knowledge gained from eating of the tree of Knowledge would have learned penmanship and created a means of writing things down. But they did not - for thousands, or millions, of years the stories were told, and changed, and modified... until God deemed that Moses would scribe them in just the way he wanted. Moses had the ability to tell the stories in such a way that God knew he was the right one to put it down, to put down the words that would convey the meaning of them for generations to come.
And that's truly the point isn't it? It's WHY Jesus tells the tale of the fig tree, of WHY he returns to the story of Noah, of WHY we learn that Adam & Eve were kicked out of the garden for not doing what they were told... and it's why study and contemplation of the word is so crucial to our spiritual growth.
Our lives are impacted by the stories when we discover what they mean to us. The word is "living and breathing" not because the paper, the ink, and the binding have animate value, but because we pull those words into us, contemplate, generate, and bring them to life in the day to day.
If we miss that, if we don't do that, then the stories of the Bible are no more than history lessons, like a list of battles from an ancient king in a kingdom far far away.
So I stopped, said a quick prayer for focus, and clearly heard a "have a quick quiet time" message from The Lord. So here I am. Making a quick note, to get me kicked back on focus for the rest of the day.
And the message I was taken to in my daily devotional was on Matthew 24:32-44 and Jonah 1:17. In my devotional, the author of today's entry marks how Jesus referenced the old testament stories of Noah and Jonah, which she claims gives those stories prescient for being 100% verbatim accounts of unquestionable historical events.
Today I have to differ with the author of the entry.
There is no denying that Jesus taught in allegory, that he used fables and imagery to deliver the point of his message in a way that his disciples could understand and comprehend. If the purpose of the Bible was to provide history lessons it wouldn't be as important a book as it is. For if we wanted true historical accounts of events, we would search out records from every source of the time. The Word, the remains, the legends, the archeology. The Noah story alone is found in many accounts, lending both empirical evidence to the histrionic occurrence of a great flood, and equal importance to the reason the story was passed along.
We know that the Biblical stories of old were verbally passed down from generation to generation until God told Moses to make a written account of them all. You can take that as God's decision to write history, but one can easily argue that if God had wanted that he'd have made sure that Adam & Eve, in all of their knowledge gained from eating of the tree of Knowledge would have learned penmanship and created a means of writing things down. But they did not - for thousands, or millions, of years the stories were told, and changed, and modified... until God deemed that Moses would scribe them in just the way he wanted. Moses had the ability to tell the stories in such a way that God knew he was the right one to put it down, to put down the words that would convey the meaning of them for generations to come.
And that's truly the point isn't it? It's WHY Jesus tells the tale of the fig tree, of WHY he returns to the story of Noah, of WHY we learn that Adam & Eve were kicked out of the garden for not doing what they were told... and it's why study and contemplation of the word is so crucial to our spiritual growth.
Our lives are impacted by the stories when we discover what they mean to us. The word is "living and breathing" not because the paper, the ink, and the binding have animate value, but because we pull those words into us, contemplate, generate, and bring them to life in the day to day.
If we miss that, if we don't do that, then the stories of the Bible are no more than history lessons, like a list of battles from an ancient king in a kingdom far far away.
