Hey, welcome to the Methodist Voice. The purpose of our time together is to grow in the knowledge of God revealed in the pages of scripture. 2 Corinthians chapter 3 tells us that when we contemplate the God revealed in scripture, it transforms us into His image. That transformation beautifies our minds and hearts and we then beautify the world together. We think that's time well spent. Thanks for joining us. I hope you enjoy today's episode.
I am so glad that you are joining us on this first episode of the Methodist Voice. The reason we're doing this podcast is because we want to grow in the knowledge of God by growing in our understanding of scripture. We kind of alluded to that in the intro, but I wanted to develop the intro just a little bit reading the scripture that it is based upon because really it sets the tone for the whole series. In the intro, we cited 2 Corinthians chapter 3.
I'm going to start reading at verse 14 because it explains what is happening when we grow in our knowledge of God, when we contemplate God through what is revealed in scripture. It says in verse 14, but their minds, speaking of Old Testament Israel, the Jewish people were hardened for to this day when they read the old covenant, the same veil remains unlifted because only through Christ is it taken away.
In other words, because their hearts are hardened, they have not been enlightened by the Holy Spirit through faith in Jesus Christ. They cannot see the meaning of the text and therefore they can't see the God who was revealed through the text. Here's what it says in verse 15. Yes, to this day, whenever Moses is read, the books of the Old Testament, specifically the Pentateuch, the first 5 books of the Old Testament, but this would apply to all of scripture.
To this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts. Verse 16, but when one turns to the Lord, the veil is removed. Now the Lord is the spirit and where the spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. I'm now free to gaze upon the God who is revealed there without shrinking back, without getting confused. Verse 18, and we all with unveiled faces, I'm able to look directly at the God who's revealed there and it says, beholding the glory of the Lord.
We're being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another. So as we gaze upon the glory of God revealed in the pages of scripture with unveiled faces, we're being changed, we're being transformed into that same image that we're looking at. For this comes from the Lord who is the spirit. The Holy Spirit is the one, His power is what makes it effective. So that's what we're about in this series.
We're trusting that God is going to be working in this way specifically in our minds and hearts as we submit them to growing in our understanding of the pages of scripture. We're going to be influenced, we're going to be changed and we are going to not only have our minds and hearts beautified by this transformation, we're going to be able to beautify the world around us as we take that transformative grace out there wherever we go.
So with that being said, we're going to kind of set the tone for our study. We're going to be studying Genesis chapters one through 11. It's an important block of scripture because it is the foundation upon which a supernatural worldview is built. Genesis chapters one through 11 are a block of scripture within the larger corpus of the books of the Old Testament referred to as primeval history.
So the word primeval is used because it refers to events that occurred long before history was ever written down. Preval history means prehistory. So in these chapters you'll find information that covers large swaths of history in only a few simple stories. That's what mythology functions to do. To communicate larger than life truths in simplified stories that are compelling and easy to remember and can be transmitted through storytelling to future generations.
Now some people cringe when you use that word mythology or myths in reference to the Bible because they think it renders it untrue. It's just made up stories. But that's not how we're using the word. I'm going to quote to you from C.S. Lewis from his book God in the Dock. Very good description of what we mean when we use the word mythology because we have when we're covering what Genesis one through 11 covers thousands of years of history and we're just telling a few stories.
You know you're not getting all of the details. So there's a lot of room for the imagination to take hold of this and really discover what God is trying to reveal to us. Not only about himself but about ourselves. So here's what C.S. Lewis said from his book God in the Dock. Now as myth transcends thought, incarnation transcends myth. The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact.
The old myth of the dying God, there were many myths, pause this is just Kendall speaking now, there were many myths throughout antiquity that posited a dying God or many of the basic precepts of the story of Jesus Christ are found in antiquity. And so the old myth of the dying God without ceasing to be myth comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens at a particular date in a particular place followed by definable historical consequences.
We pass from a Balder or an Osiris, gods of antiquity, dying nobody knows when or where to a historical person crucified. It is all in order under Pontius Pilate. By becoming fact it does not cease to be myth, that is the miracle. We must not be ashamed of the mythical radiance resting on our theology, resting on our stories. We must not be nervous about parallels and pagan Christs, they ought to be there. It would be a stumbling block if they weren't.
Those stories paved the way for ancient peoples to receive the truths that God would eventually reveal in the facts of history. Carrying on with CS Lewis here, we must not in false spirituality withhold our imaginative welcome. If God chooses to be mythopoetic and is not the sky itself a myth, should we refuse to be mythopathic?
For this is the marriage of heaven and earth, perfect myth and perfect fact, claiming not only our love and our obedience but also our wonder and delight, addressed to the savage, the child, and the poet, in each one of us no less than to the moralist, the scholar, and the philosopher. I also wanted to read to you from an author, Justin Wiggins, from Christianity.com, and he's commenting further on what Lewis says here in the topic of myth.
To an ancient mind, a myth was a story that conveyed an important universal truth about what it means to be human. This is rather difficult for a modern person to understand. Our culture has been heavily influenced by what Lewis calls chronological snobbery. If it doesn't fit how we think about things today, it can't be true. Our culture has fallen prey to assuming that only the things we can prove are true. The fact is we constantly learn how little we know.
Now listen, that's the end of the quote. But if the past three years hasn't taught us anything, it's that we know really very little, not only about the natural world, but about the ancient world. How much have we debated the science in the past three years? The facts the past three years? We really know very little. And myths can communicate truths way more profound than facts ever could.
And so when we think about things like genealogies in the book of Genesis, or whether or not creation happened in seven literal days, it's not clear that those are intended to give us a timeline of human history or how many days it took God to create the earth. They're just ancient peoples packaging a story in a way that was easy to remember and communicated really transcendent truths.
So because of the enigmatic nature of Genesis 1 through 11, we're often left with more questions about the world than we have answers. And so sometimes that's exactly the point of biblical revelation. It intends to arouse in us a sense of the mystery of God, a concept the New Testament calls Mysterion. And so I wanted to read to you from a Wikipedia article about that word, Mysterion.
Although the term is not usually used equally by all Christian traditions, many of the basic aspects of Christian theology require a supernatural explanation. To name a few key examples, these include the nature of the Trinity, the virgin birth of Jesus, and the resurrection of Jesus. These are mysteries in the sense that they cannot be explained or apprehended by reason alone. The word Mysterion is used 27 times in the New Testament.
It denotes not so much the meaning of the modern English term mystery, but rather something that is mystical. In the biblical Greek, the term refers to that which awaits disclosure or interpretation. In the Catholic Church, the Latin term is Mysterium Fidei, mystery of faith. It is defined in the Catechism of the Catholic Church 1997 to mean a mystery hidden in God, which can never be known unless revealed by God himself.
In the Roman Catholic Church, the First Vatican Council reaffirmed the existence of mysteries as a doctrine of Catholic faith as follows. If anyone say that in divine revelation there are contained no mysteries, properly so called, but that through reason rightly developed, all the dogmas of the faith can be understood and demonstrated from natural principles, let him be anathema, or cut off from the faith.
The position, if not the terminology, of other Christian churches is essentially the same. So the mysteries of God are intended to arouse in us a sense of wonder, awe, curiosity, delight, fascination, all of that ultimately leading to ever increasing pleasure found in worship of the uncreated being disclosed in the pages of scripture. In Proverbs 25 2 it says, it is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.
So as we go through this study, we're going to be using our imagination to explore the meaning and the implications of these passages. And in the process, our aim is to discover more about God. We're going to allow our imaginations to be informed by knowledge derived from the natural world as well as other writings both inside and outside of scripture and that's okay.
Nobody's going to be tempted to worship demons because we read some ancient Near Eastern text even if we're considering what's true about them. So the information found in Genesis 1 through 11 is not unique. Most of these stories have their parallels in the ancient Near Eastern world. They were written down long before the stories found in the book of Genesis were written down.
And so many times this has led people to assume that the early Jewish people copied from other sources and that's not necessarily the case because if the events were real, if there really was a flood and I believe all of these events were, then various cultures would have retained memories of these events and the lessons they believed they were to have learned from them.
So it would only be natural if the events really happened more than just the Jewish culture would have a record of these events, right? So what's unique about Genesis isn't the events that are recorded, but the unique interpretation of the same events documented even in places like South America. Isn't that crazy?
So before humans were ever thought to have crossed the ocean or the continents from more advanced civilizations over to the Americas, they already had a record of these events in South America. It's difficult to explain, right? So it might be helpful at this point to share my view of scripture as we move forward. My view is the larger Methodist view. I was originally ordained in the United Methodist Church, but now I'm a part of the Global Methodist Church.
So most of us in those circles don't use words like inerrant or infallible because the scripture doesn't use those words. We prefer words like truthful, trustworthy, authoritative, divine revelation, words like inerrant we don't find useful because they're imprecise and even misleading. So every manuscript of the books of the Bible that we possess contains errors from innumerable scribal copies. Scribes would copy the text over and over and over again.
Inevitably they would make mistakes, maybe small spelling errors. Maybe they would repeat something that wasn't supposed to be repeated. So there are lots of human errors that are made in the process of copying the manuscripts of scripture. So that's why people who insist on applying terms like inerrant to the scripture always apply the qualifier inerrant in their original manuscripts.
Well we don't have any original manuscripts to know whether Moses or whoever made a spelling error in the original copy or not. So what if they did? Let me ask you a question. What if Moses had made a spelling error in the original manuscript of scripture? Would that make them any less true? Or any less useful in revealing God to us? Of course not. Would it make them any less authoritative?
No. Furthermore, you do have events described in scripture that we know according to modern science are not described precisely and accurately. I'll give you an example. Let's look at Joshua chapter 10, the story of the Jewish people entering the promised land and they're engaging in warfare to take over the land. Here's what it says in Joshua chapter 10 verse 12, starting in verse 12. At that time Joshua spoke to the Lord in the day when the Lord gave the Amorites over to the sons of Israel.
And he said in the sight of Israel, sun stand still at Gibeon and moon in the valley of Aijalon. And the sun stood still and the moon stopped until the nation took vengeance on their enemies. Is it not written in the book of Jasher? The sun stopped in the midst of heaven and did not hurry to set for about a whole day. There has been no day like it before or since when the Lord heeded the voice of a man for the Lord fought for Israel. Did you catch the error?
Modern science proves irrefutably that this passage couldn't possibly be inerrant because the sun doesn't move. We know it's the earth that is moving. The sun just appeared to be moving from a pre-scientific ancient perspective of early humans. That's how they saw it. But that doesn't mean the testimony of the text is any less reliable or trustworthy. Just because it's described imprecisely doesn't mean that something like that didn't really happen.
And we shouldn't expect ancient humans to have advanced scientific information to faithfully communicate the acts of God in history according to the knowledge that they had. So yes, there are mistakes found in the manuscripts of scripture. There are conflicting accounts of events in scripture. There are probably even other inaccuracies in some other details, but that doesn't render them any less authoritative or trustworthy in what they bear witness to happening.
God has faithfully revealed His acts in history and enough of His nature to us through what's recorded in scripture that we can come into a proper relationship with God. And that's what the scripture intends to do. That's the intent of all of scripture is to reveal to human beings who God is, what He is like, and how to come into a relationship with Him. The scripture does not intend to teach us science in modern 21st century scientific precision like that even exists.
So as we approach Genesis, if that is true of scripture recorded in Joshua's day, how much more would that also be true of what is described by the stories found in Genesis one through 11, which would have been transmitted orally for thousands of years before they were ever written down. Scientific and historical precision like that attempted to be imposed on the text by words like inerrant are not the goal of the stories in Genesis.
The stories in Genesis seek to explain to the entire world that their interpretation of the events found there are correct. You've got lots of different versions of these stories found all over the ancient near east, all over the world, but the interpretation found in the pages of Genesis is the correct interpretation. It's a right take. And that their one God is the only God truly worthy of the title God.
So the purpose of scripture is to disclose supernatural truths, not pinpoint natural truths. We can discover natural truths all on our own through research and experimentation, but we can only know God in the supernatural realm if God reveals God by revealing Himself first to men in history, both directly and indirectly, then by sovereignly and supernaturally guiding them to faithfully record what they have seen and heard and witnessed.
That's why scripture is not only authoritative and truthful in everything it proclaims, but it is unique. It stands unique in all of history. There's nothing else like it. It is the only trustworthy means by which we can know and grow a relationship with this God in eternity. He's ultimately a God who is unknowable. So that's the beauty of it. God is infinite. We are finite. We will never, we will never know all of God. But there are things found in scripture that are going to reveal Him to us.
There are things about God that can be known in scripture and there are unknown things that can be disclosed by the assistance of the Holy Spirit in our imaginations. And we'll even be open to that. So as we prepare to go through Genesis 1 through 11, I wanted to give you kind of an overview of how we approach scripture, how we think about scripture. And I wanted to end with this. It's a message of encouragement from Proverbs chapter 2 verse 1 about what we've been talking about.
So I'm just going to read through this as we close. My son, if you receive my words and treasure up my commandments with you, making your ear attentive to wisdom and inclining your heart to understanding, yes, if you call out for insight and raise your voice for understanding, if you seek it like silver and search for it as hidden treasures, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.
There's knowledge that's been revealed and there's knowledge that's been hidden and it's the joy of God to conceal a thing and it's the joy of Kings to search it out. Let's keep reading in verse 6. For the Lord gives wisdom from his mouth come knowledge and understanding. He stores up sound wisdom for the upright. He is a shield to those who walk in integrity, guarding the paths of justice, watching over the way of his saints.
Then you will understand righteousness and justice and equity, every good path. You will be beautified for wisdom will come into your heart and knowledge will be pleasant to your soul. You'll experience the pleasures of knowing and understanding God himself. And I would say that is the highest pleasure a human being can experience. It's being obedient to the first commandment, you are to love the Lord your God with all of your heart, with all of your mind, with all of your strength.
This is your highest purpose. It is your highest pleasure to grow in your ability to love God with all of your heart, mind and strength. That's what we're submitting ourselves to do as we go through this series. I want to end with a quick prayer and then we'll go about our day. Father, thank you for the power of your Holy Spirit that rests upon an authentic pursuit of truth, an authentic pursuit of the knowledge of God.
We ask you Holy Spirit, as we submit our minds and hearts to your word, impart the knowledge of God, reveal the God, both known and unknown, reveal the God to us as we seek him in the pages of scripture. We ask this together in Jesus name. Amen. Well, thanks for joining us today. We will dig in to Genesis chapter one, starting in verse one in our next episode. Hope you choose to join us. Have a good day. Bye.