Investigating the Bible: Age doesn't matter
Two older women were in line for movie tickets and requested the senior citizen discount. When they started to look in their purses for their driver’s licenses, the cashier, a young woman, said, “Oh, that’s alright. I don’t have to see your ID.”
As they left, one woman complained to the other, “Wouldn’t you think she’d at least have the courtesy to doubt us?”
The Bible has stories of God using people of all ages, even the very old. Noah was 600 years old when he and his sons built the ark. Abraham was a centenarian and his wife Sarah 90 years old, when she conceived and gave birth to Isaac. Both demonstrated two essential components of faith.
Walk with God. Noah’s world compares in many ways to ours. “The Lord saw the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of his heart was only evil continually.” (Genesis 6:5, English Standard Version used throughout.). However, “…Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord…Noah was a righteous man, blameless in his generation. Noah walked with God.” (Genesis 6:8-9). The Bible is silent on how Noah had this daily interaction with God. It’s a heartwarming image of two people walking side by side, conversing, the older sage teaching the student. Noah followed God’s instructions, built the ark and animals came. Author Ravi Zacharias noted that the huge ship had no rudder. God guided them.
In Kentucky, there is a full-sized, land-based Noah’s ark. In the Netherlands, floating in a river harbor, is Johan’s Ark, also a full-sized replica. Contractor Johan Huiber said he built his to “…spread God’s word in the Netherlands. I believe we are living in the end times. We’re not conscious of it. People never are.”
Have faith to believe in the impossible. Being beyond the age of childbirth, Abraham “…believed against hope, that he should become the father of many nations, as he had been told …”. (Romans 4:18). And so, “… he grew strong in his faith as he gave glory to God, fully convinced that God was able to do what he had promised. That is why his faith was counted to him as righteousness.” (Romans 4:20-22). After the birth of his son Isaac, God tested Abraham, telling him to sacrifice his child to God on an altar. Abraham obeyed because he knew that God could “…raise him from the dead.” (Hebrews 11:19). God provided another sacrifice, a ram caught in thicket. “And Abraham went and took the ram and offered it up as a burnt offering instead of his son. So Abraham called the name of that place, ‘The Lord will provide’”. (Genesis 22:13-14).
Art Berg lived an impossible life. At the age of 20, he was in top physical condition, a competitive water and snow skier, and a highly skilled athlete. He had started a business and was engaged. Then his life radically changed. He was asleep in a car his friend was driving. The friend drifted into sleep and crashed into a concrete road abutment. Art was paralyzed, losing most muscle control and feeling from his neck down. In the hospital bed he remembered his mother whispering to him, “Art, while the difficult takes time, the impossible just takes a little longer.” In the next 20 years of his life he married, learned to drive, became a father of two children, and was an award-winning professional speaker. Sadly, he passed away in 2002 from a reaction to medication. He lived what he said: “Never forget that God has given every single one of us the most astonishing uniqueness. There’s no one in the world who can do what you can do…”
“If you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matthew 17:20).
David Carlson Pastor (yes, that is his last name, not his profession) is a Polk County resident and graduate of Bethel Theological Seminary in Minnesota (M.Div., M.Th.)
Comments
fiddler
Part I
Christianity, and thus the NT, is learned from an early age through a theological, confessional, or devotional perspective. But is that teaching truth? There’s another way to learn about Christianity and the NT; from a historical point of view.
What does this mean?
We don’t know who the authors of the NT were. The language is not Aramaic, what the lower classes spoke, including the disciples. However, many sayings in the NT attributed to Jesus can be found in the documents recording what Titus said.
The NT appears to present historical accounts of Jesus’ life, much of the material in the Gospels aren’t historical at all.
The Gospels present very different portrayals of who Jesus was, what he stood for, and what he preached. The NT tales of Jesus are full of wide discrepancies.
Sources point to ample evidence that Jesus was a Jewish teacher of 1st Century Roman Palestine, he was he was crucified under Pontius Pilate, but ‘ample’ is not synonymous with ‘conclusive’, and the sources are not ample enough to tell us what Jesus actually said, did and experienced. The Gospels differ one from another in one detail after another and their overall portrayals of Jesus differ from one to another, sometimes radically.
fiddler
Part II
What have scholars AGREED on, in the past?
• Jesus was a Jew who came from northern Palestine.
• He lived as an adult in the 20s CE.
• He once followed John the Baptist in the rural areas of Galilee.
• He preached a message about the “kingdom of God” by telling parables.
• He gathered disciples, healed the sick, cast out demons.
• He went to Jerusalem around 30 CE for Passover and roused the ire of local Jewish leaders, who put him on trial before Pontius Pilate.
• He was crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews.
What have scholars DISAGREED on, in the past?
• Some say he was a 1st Century Jewish rabbi who taught his followers how best to follow the Law of Moses.
• Others say he was a Jewish holy man, a kind of shaman, who did spectacular deeds because he had spectacular powers.
• And others say he was a political revolutionary who preached armed rebellion against the Roman Empire.
• Still others say he was a social reformer who urged Jews to adopt a different lifestyle, e.g., a new economic principle, a different social relationship, e.g., proto-feminist.
• Yet others say he was a Jewish version of the ancient Greek Cynic philosophers who urged followers to abandon their attachments to material things and live a life of poverty.
• Also, some say he was a magician—he knew he could do magic tricks but he knew how to manipulate the laws of nature like other workers of magic in his day.
These views do not reflect the views of the majority of scholars today!
What do scholars agree on, today?
• He was a Jewish preacher who preached the apocalypse.
• He anticipated that God was to soon intervene in history to overthrow the powers of evil and bring in a new order, a rule of peace and justice.
[Assuming he in fact existed, something no one can agree on due to the lack of evidence and written records.]
fiddler
Part III
[This should have preceded what the agree on]
What have scholars AGREED on in the past?
• Jesus was a Jew who came from northern Palestine.
• He lived as an adult in the 20s CE.
• He once followed John the Baptist in the rural areas of Galilee.
• He preached a message about the “kingdom of God” by telling parables.
• He gathered disciples, healed the sick, cast out demons.
• He went to Jerusalem around 30 CE for Passover and roused the ire of local Jewish leaders, who put him on trial before Pontius Pilate.
• He was crucified for calling himself the king of the Jews.
Lulu
Your "hero" Ravi Zacharias was a serial sexual abuser and a deviant. You might want to exercise more caution over whom you celebrate and quote. Look him up.
Otis
Thank goodness our oligarchs have already built arcs....for themselves.