Thank you Dr. McGee from today's Through the Bible broadcast at TTB.org for talking about the sons of God sleeping with the daughters of men.
There are so many Bible readers who want to explore the first chapters of Genesis. But if you read the first chapters of Genesis through the rest of the Pentateuch you really need to reach one conclusion. God is more concerned about what you ate for breakfast today then in telling us the whole history of the world. If that sounds crazy to you, try putting the creation of the world into its context within the Hexateuch. If you still haven't figured that out, read the Tanakh (should be TNK I think) and tell me how you can't agree. If you still can't agree, consider the Gospels that spend more time and words on one week in so many ways and compare it to the first week in Chapter One of Genesis.
This is so obvious that it's been forgotten.
It's kind of like why are Americans so fat? Well, we eat too much.
The phrase "Son or sons of God" and the phrase "son or sons of Man" are used throughout the scriptures. You can think of either of them as a baby, a person, God Incarnate or whatever else you want to, and I'm not saying the Bible isn't full of mystery. If you want to open it up and find a mystery you certainly can. But let's start with the idea that maybe sons of God and daughters of men are people. Is that such a stretch, since we already know that daughters and sons are boys and girls and boys and girls grow up to have people? Look at that.
Genesis 6 mentions that there were giants back then. It's written as looking back. Somebody writing then wanted people to know that back in the day there were giants. Well, giant can mean many things. And giant isn't really that mysterious of a word. If you want to think there were 40 foot men back then I suppose you can. If you want to think that it's a big Book full of crap, you certainly won't get much argument from many people. But why take a normal word and make it mean something crazy? Do you have an agenda upon which you want to superimpose ridiculousness? Does it make you feel better to think that the culture from which you spring is built on fairy tales? Yes, you can find miracles in the Bible and you can pretend like your life right now isn't a miracle. But why are you doing that?
Today we have giant shrimp. We have giant-size colas. We have until recently been blessed with the presence of Andre the Giant. What is so strange about a word being used today that was also used in the Bible- from which a huge portion of our English words derive?
Nothing.
It's nothing. The Bible says that people used to be bigger. If you want to think that it says that people used to be 100 feet tall I'm not going to touch that with a 39 1/2 foot pole.
Science says that people used to be shorter. I don't disagree with that. The doors inside Mount Vernon were not built by idiots but they didn't need to be that high. What happened before that? Well, I guess you could read Genesis to find out. You could also find older skeletons. I'm fitting my facts into a framework upon which Western Civilization was built. Is this crazy? There were problems with Western Civilization now and then. There are problems with Western Civilization now- people think they get to choose whether or not they should have male or female plumbing- and there are problems then. There were many problems then. And there will always be problems.
If you want to think that Western Civilization was white and that white is bad, you can. But neither of those things is true. Civilization is a group of people. People are more complex than good or bad. I'm sorry that every fictional story you've read tries to tell you something simpler. I'm sorry if you think it's a bad story if you don't know who to root for. I'm sorry if you think movies that end with weddings are happy and movies that end with deaths are sad.
All lives end in death.
Are all lives sad?
Don't throw the baby out with the bathwater. You can think that humanity is getting better because in some ways it is. You can also think that humanity is getting worse. I think we're getting taller. I don't think taller is better.
I also think that at some point in the past, people were bigger. They were giants.
You're a giant if you let yourself.
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