God Among The gods

Today’s Reading:

• Micah 6:1-7:20; 2 Chronicles 32:1-8; 2 Kings 18:13-18; Isaiah 36:1-3; 2 Kings 18:19-37; Isaiah 36:4-22

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• “Don’t let Hezekiah mislead you by saying, ‘The LORD will rescue us!’ Have the gods of any other nations ever saved their people from the king of Assyria? What happened to the gods of Hamath and Arpad? And what about the gods of Sepharvaim? Did any god rescue Samaria from my power? What god of any nation has ever been able to save its people from my power? So what makes you think that the LORD can rescue Jerusalem from me?” – Isaiah 36:18-20, NLT

Thoughts:

• It’s easy to wonder if perhaps our God isn’t so unique.

Obviously, if you’ve read anything I have written so far, you know that I am a Christian. I believe in the God of the Bible—of the Old and New Testaments—and I believe specifically that we are set free from our sins and invited to know Him through His Son Jesus Christ, who lived and died and rose from the dead and lives forever as the eternal God who also became a man. I believe that I have a relationship with God, and that His Holy Spirit lives in me and changes me and reminds me to look to Jesus day by day.

As a Christian, I also believe that this is the only true God. I deny that the God of Islam is the same God. I deny that those who follow Judaism know the true God, even though they share more than half of my Bible with me, because Judaism without Jesus Christ knows something about the true God but refuses to know Him as He has fully revealed Himself to be. I deny the many gods of Hinduism to be real gods—perhaps demons, but not gods. I deny the gods of ancient Greece, the gods of ancient Rome, the gods of animism, the gods of the cults, the gods that were worshiped by ancient Israel’s neighbors, and any other god or gods that anyone might claim deserve mankind’s worship. There is only one true God. And I know Him.

There. Now I sound really arrogant.

But more than that, in today’s world, I might actually sound stupid. Because in today’s world, with a whole academic field devoted to comparative religions, scholars have discovered not only that different religions are different, but that different religions and deity-related mythologies are eerily similar. For instance, see this video on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljRKhZ81aqY. The argument in this video is similar to the argument made by Sennacherib’s “chief of staff” (NLT): “Gods are all pretty much the same. The LORD/Jesus is a God/god. Therefore, the LORD/Jesus is no more powerful or real than any other deity.”

How do we deal with this argument? In some ways, it seems to have merit. After all, even though we Christians call many beneficial events in our lives “miraculous,” most of the events we call miracles happen to unbelievers from other religions, and even to atheists. How many of our experiences have been brought to scientists and subjected to their thorough scrutiny to such an extent that even atheists have to deal with scientifically documented evidence of God’s work in our world? And even if we had a bunch of scientifically inexplicable stories, it may well be that people from other religions have some, too—stories which they would use to leverage people toward faith in their gods. And then we would have to deal with the reality that these stories are not the norm—even Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego admitted that God might not help them out of their fiery predicament (Daniel 3:17-18). Christians often go through experiences just as horrible as the experiences anybody else would go through.

I have a couple of suggestions for refuting this argument. First, we should examine (as I still need to do more thoroughly) similar stories to find out whether they were viewed as true earthly history or not. Second, we should examine what archaeology has revealed about our own God, in order to find out what kinds of evidence exist regarding His impact on earthly history. Third, perhaps we should take better notes on current miraculous events—scientists are doing studies to compare healings among prayed for people and unprayed for people, and those of us who have seen God’s wonders ought to be helping them explore the evidence we have experienced. Fourth, we need to turn back to the pages of our Scriptures to remember what the Bible says that God has done in space and time history—the list is very impressive, and we need to consider whether history could possibly have resulted in today’s world without God’s intervention.

Because the Bible’s claim is that God sometimes does intervene. In tomorrow’s reading (2 Kings 19) Hezekiah is saved from an army of 185,000 Assyrians in response to his prayers. If that’s just a myth, then don’t believe it. But if this really happened, don’t just call it a coincidence (even if God used some horrible earthly plague to defeat the huge army). If this is history, then God is not just one of the gods. He is exactly who He claims to be, the Creator and Sustainer of the universe who loves His people, who sent Jesus to save all who believe in Him, and who is making all things new in His time.

Even if others sometimes think of Jesus as just “one of the (false) gods,” the question still remains – Are they right or wrong? The benefits of knowing Him are nothing to sneeze at just because others claim He’s nonsense. Don’t miss out unless there’s nothing to miss out on. Pursue the truth.

For an overview of this year’s blog, please see http://threequartertank.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-believers-believe.html.

Linguistic Diversity

Today’s Reading:

• Genesis 11:1-26
• 1 Chronicles 1:24-27
• Genesis 11:27-31
• Genesis 12:1-14:24

Faith-Stretching Verse(s):

• That is why the city was called Babel, because that is where the LORD confused the people with different languages. In this way he scattered them all over the world. – Genesis 11:9, NLT

Thoughts:
In an interesting article/bulletin put out by the Linguistic Society of America, Stephen R. Anderson says that one source puts the number of languages in the world at 6,809, and these languages are broken into 250 families of languages. But from a biologist’s perspective, he says, the similarities of all these human languages far outweigh their differences and distinguish them as a class from any other organism’s communication patterns to the extent that a biologist could say that they’re really just one language (http://www.lsadc.org/info/pdf_files/howmany.pdf, pages 3 and 10).

This seems to me to make the best sense if the Bible’s account of the Tower of Babel is true.

As the Bible tells it, all mankind originally came from one couple, Adam and Eve. And then, after a while, there was a flood that wiped out all mankind except Noah, his wife, and their children. They were all speaking the same language. And that continued until the Tower of Babel.

Whether you believe in Creation or not, doesn’t it make sense that humanity would begin by all speaking the same language? I mean, no matter what theory you believe, how many humans would there have been at the beginning? 1? 5? 10? And they would have needed to exist in the same part of the world, or humanity would have died out within the first generation. So you would think that they would have to communicate with each other.

And the benefits of communicating with each other outweigh the advantages of being unable to understand one another by far. Just look at what’s happening to our world today. The biggest languages are growing stronger because people are finding that communication leads to mutual success and prosperity, so everyone wants in on the world’s most widespread and useful languages. And the smallest languages are dying out as fewer and fewer people find them to be worth spending the time to learn.

So why would humanity start off with a united language and then divide into so many individual languages, let alone dialects, when being unable to communicate leads to misunderstandings and mistrust and war rather than to prosperity?

It would be one thing if all these languages seemed to be clearly related to each other. You might then be able to argue that the original humans just split into different groups and spread apart, then developed different accents, and over time the accents got to be too strong for mutual understanding. But there are around 250 language families. They share the same basic underlying linguistic foundation, but the language families themselves are completely different and unrelated in their sounds and grammars. Within this common human linguistic capacity that makes it possible for any human baby to learn any human language as it grows up, there are very real differences that are completely unrelated to each other. How do you get so much unity and so much diversity at the same time?

The Tower of Babel. God created man, as the Bible says. They all shared one language. But then one day God saw that they were not filling the earth as He had commanded them to do (Genesis 9:1). Instead, they were banding together to keep from being scattered (Genesis 11:4). So God decided to make humans become foreigners to one another to force them apart. The result? A history filled with different languages and scattered throughout the earth by their differences. A modern day where humanity is abandoning linguistic differences and seeking linguistic unity for the sheer benefits that come from mutual understanding and cooperation. Considering how important the ability to communicate is, why else would humanity have ever given it up besides the events that took place at the Tower of Babel?

How can I believe it? It just makes sense to me. How about you?

For an overview of this year’s blog, please see http://threequartertank.blogspot.com/2011/01/why-do-believers-believe.html.