This past Saturday I was discussing the Bible and how it changed my life with some relatively new Christians and one of them asked me if I really believed that God managed to get two of every species of every animal on this planet loaded onto Noah’s relatively small ark.
My answer was that certainly a God that was powerful enough to create our vast Universe and everything of which we are aware by simply speaking it into existence is without question powerful enough to pull off that relatively insignificant feat.
What is a miracle anyway? According to the dictionary it is an event that appears to be contrary to the laws of nature and is regarded as an act of God. Jesus proved demonstrably that mighty miracles were within His grasp and He performed a number of them in front of thousands of witnesses including feeding 5000 people with a few fish and loaves of bread…
So perhaps God miraculously got them all on the ark, or perhaps it was just a metaphor. I don’t know and I really don’t care if a fleet of aircraft carriers were used. The important thing about the story of Noah is that God is a God of love but is also a God of wrath and there is a price that must be paid for sin. Noah preached for 120 years without a single convert and then one day God told Noah, his family, and all the animals to load up, and then He destroyed everything else in the entire world. To me that is the message of this Bible story and not how God pulled it off.
Those of us who have ears should listen, because the same God today is watching over us, this nation, and this world…. Pray that our nation and the world will turn to God.
I had a similar conversation recently with an agnostic fellow in the Florida Keys. He was all hung up on how someone, (Jonah), could be housed in a whale’s belly for three days and still survive. He said it was a ridiculous notion.
Hmmm… Which is the more incredulous? Curing a leper, making the blind see, feeding 5000, calming the raging storm and sea, making a paralytic walk, raising the dead, or letting old Jonah ride in a whale’s belly for three days and then be spit back up?
Here again the real message is not the wonder of the miracle of the whale’s belly, but that it was analogous to an event that was coming in the future; Jesus dying and then spending three days in the bowels of the earth preaching the word of God only to be resurrected.
Jesus came up with a simple but effective answer to this line of questioning in Mark 10:27 “Jesus looked at them and said, “With man this is impossible, but not with God; all things are possible with God.”
The heart broken venerable old prophet Jeremiah who preached 40 years with a message that if the people of Judah and its wicked kings did not return to their God then impending doom would (and did) descend upon them.
Jeremiah said: “Ah, Sovereign LORD, you have made the heavens and the earth by your great power and outstretched arm. Nothing is too hard for you.
One of Jesus’ disciples said, if all of the things that Jesus said and did during the short three years of His ministry were recorded in books, the entire world could not contain them all. Imagine if God expanded the Bible to explain every detail of the creation, the flood, the miracles, why there must be suffering, DNA, is their other life on other planets, how prophecy works, the beginning of time
OOPS! Wait a minute….With God there is no “beginning” or end….How does He, the great “I AM”, exist beyond a time dimension?
My head’s spinning…
Even if we could understand some of this stuff, (which with our limited intellects is impossible), the entire universe couldn’t contain even a smidgen of all of the necessary books that would need to be written to explain it all. Even if the books were written, it would take trillions of years to read them all. It’s mind boggling really, it would take longer to read them than the trillions in debt Obama and his democratic cronies have run up since his presidency began.
Yikes! Talk about a miracle!
Better to content ourselves with trying to understand some of the mysteries that God has chosen to reveal and that we can strive to understand as He opens our minds.
Consider God’s mighty word the Holy Bible. Okay it is not a book as many seem to believe. It is a collection of 66 books that were canonized into the Holy Bible. It was written by 40 different authors, (shepherds, fishermen, doctors, kings, prophets, a former Pharisee and others, and many of these authors never knew one another personally). When they wrote their respective books, they lived on 3 different continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Bible was written over a period of 1500 years and in 3 different languages, Aramaic, Hebrew, and Greek.
Yet when we read it, the Bible it isn’t a confused dysfunctional collection of illogical cultural, lingual and historical dissimilarities; no it gently flows with a Living stream of knowledge that cuts through to the very inner depths of our souls, minds, and spirits as a double edged sword…
Consider the nature of how the Bible was written and recorded and yet it has no credible historical errors or contradictions. It fits together with such precision and with such commonality of its message and theme that absent the unfathomable intelligence of a single Majestic Author: God Himself, it cannot be explained or replicated.
Unconvinced? Scour the libraries of the ancient or modern world. In fact go ahead and Google it! You will never find any other literary work that is remotely like it that has been written over any time span, much less 1500 years. In the end it must be attributed to being written by our Sovereign God by all but the illogical.
All things are possible with Jesus Christ. He is the Word who has always existed and always will. (I don’t understand that, but I have faith…)
One really exciting thing that will be available to all us who have accepted Jesus Christ is that one day we will know FULLY –
Until then we must accept by faith what we know in part.
Keep the faith my friends – Keep the faith!
1 Cor.13:12
Now we see but a poor reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.