Something’s been bothering me since the seventh grade and now’s a good time to get it off my chest. It’s about God. About His abilities actually. Did He really do all those things the Bible claims He did?
It was in seventh grade that the question first came up. Until then I just assumed that God was capable of making the sun stand still and confusing men with different languages and flooding the entire earth. That’s what the Bible stories in my Sunday school class said; why should I doubt it?
I went to a Christian school. It’s kind of ironic that a kid would be taught to doubt God for the first time in a Christian school, but that’s where it happened. In Bible class we were learning about the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. After all the plagues Pharaoh lets the Israelites go and they all leave Egypt and start out across the desert to the Promised Land. A couple of days after they’re gone, Pharaoh changes his mind. It seems he misses the Israelites and all that free labor. He rounds up his war chariots and takes off into the desert to retrieve them.
I was just kind of half-consciously following along as our teacher recounted the story. I was a preacher’s kid and I had been in Sunday school since birth. I had long since memorized every Bible story ever made for flannelgraph (a 1960’s version of PowerPoint). Everything he said was old news to me … until he got to the Red Sea.
It seems, our teacher told the class, that we’ve been mistaken about God parting the Red Sea so the Israelites could pass through on dry land. The Red Sea in the Bible, according his scholarly sources, was better translated “Reed Sea,” or “Sea of Reeds.” Apparently the “Reed Sea” was just a shallow, swampy backwater; a little mucky perhaps, but crossable on foot. There wasn’t actually any need for God to part the “Sea of Reeds” and our flannelgraph pictures of Israelites hiking a dirt path between two enormous walls of water weren’t really accurate.
Our Bible teacher went on to explain that Pharaoh’s heavy iron chariots weren’t made for mud bogging and their wheels became hopelessly mired in the mucky “Reed Sea.” And that, folks, was how the Israelites got away from the Egyptians.
My mind was swimming. The buzzing inside my head drowned out anything else he might have said during the class period. At thirteen, I was having my first spiritual meltdown. No enormous walls of water. No Israelites filing dry-sandaled through the God-made causeway at the bottom of the sea. No Egyptians throwing their hands up in terror as the sea walls above their heads came crashing down upon them.
My faith was in a nose dive - spiraling out of control and headed for a fiery crash. If God parting the Red Sea wasn’t true, what about the other Bible stories? What about the walls of Jericho? Did they really come tumbling down? How about the ark? Did all those animals really form a line two-by-two and march up the gangplank past Noah’s as he checked them in at the door? What about the loaves and fishes? That was my favorite. Did Jesus really feed five-thousand people with one boy’s lunch?
At thirteen it never occurred to me to ask the teacher how the entire Egyptian army could drown in a swamp that a million Hebrew men, women and children, along with all of their possessions had just slogged through without incident. Or, if I had been a better seventh grade Bible student I might have asked where the “walls of water” mentioned in Exodus chapter 14 came from. Or, if it was easier for God to part the sea for the Israelites or to drown the Egyptians in a twelve inch deep “Sea of Reeds.” Like I said, I was thirteen; to question the teacher’s logic never occurred to me.
It took me a while to get over that one. It didn’t take so long to restore my faith in God’s ability to do things we think of as miraculous. It’s pretty easy for a kid to have faith in God. What took me a while to get over, was our Bible teacher - because he couldn’t personally get it into his head as a possibility - telling all those children that God couldn’t part the Red Sea.
I may not be over it yet.
*****
A lot of you know that my father, Jim Spillman, wrote a book titled The Great Treasure Hunt several years ago; and that I republished it recently and wrote a follow-up book called Breaking the Treasure Code: the Hunt for Israel’s Oil. The thesis of these books is that Jacob’s Blessing in Genesis and Deuteronomy contain the prophecy of a great petroleum discovery in the land of Israel in the last days. The proof behind the thesis is that the tribal borders of Israel match the prophecy exactly.
The Great Treasure Hunt made a convincing argument that the Bible had indeed promised oil to Israel. So convincing, in fact, that the Knesset bought books by the case and oil companies have spent millions of dollars searching for the oil based on the information in his book.
Dad was no amateur as a Bible and History scholar. He had degrees in Greek and History. He had a great analytical mind, but more importantly, a great reliance on the Holy Spirit to guide him as he searched the scriptures.
By the time I became involved, nearly twenty-five years later, I did my own research. I wanted to validate my father’s findings for myself before putting my name on a follow-up book. What I discovered, with the help of a few Christian and Jewish Bible scholars and the testimony of geological experts, only further proved his original thesis. The more we researched the subject, the more we proved its validity.
There have always been critics of Dad’s thesis that the Bible prophesies a petroleum discovery in Israel in the last days. Some of the critics are self-admitted atheists, some are secular journalists. Criticism of any connection between the Bible and the real world, for these guys, is understandable. To them, any ancient prophecy, especially from the Bible, believed to have relevance today’s real world is a sign of religious kookiness.
What I couldn’t figure out was that some of the more vocal critics came from the Christian world. A lot of them were Bible scholars. How could their interpretation of those scriptures referring to oil be so different than my father’s? It’s the same scripture. Both were looking with the critical eyes of trained Bible scholars. Both were looking from a Christian perspective, allowing the Holy Spirit to guide them. Why two different answers?
These critics argue that when the Bible speaks of oil it means olive oil and nothing else. Interestingly, this is the same argument the secular critics make. Contextually speaking, when the Bible (whether you believe it’s the Word of God or not) speaks of oil it means olive oil.
“Contextually speaking” means speaking from within the context of the document one is studying; in this case the Bible. What the critics, both Christian and secular, are saying is, in the context of the Bible, the scriptures referring to oil could only mean olive oil. The context they are referring to is that of those men of old who penned the words.
According to the critics, the Bible, when it speaks of oil, always means olive oil and certainly never means petroleum oil because the concept of petroleum oil was outside the context of those men who originally recorded the text. Basically – Moses and his Israelite contemporaries had no concept of petroleum oil, they knew only of olive oil. Since Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible and presented them to the Israelites and since neither Moses nor the Israelites of his day had any idea what petroleum oil was, but were familiar with olive oil, the Bible means olive oil when it says oil.
Contextually speaking, that’s a pretty sound argument. That is, if your context includes the Bible as a book written by men, relying only on their own understanding, at their specific time in history, strictly for an audience of their contemporaries.
A lot of literature is like that. When Shakespeare wrote, “What light through yonder window breaks?” It would be a little silly to postulate that he could have been referring to a 40 watt GE Softlight bulb. Electric lighting hadn’t been invented; the concept was outside of his context.
If, however, your context includes the Bible as the Word of God, that its pages were God inspired and breathed, that it is a timeless, living document, meant for men today as much as when it was first penned by the fathers, then it’s possible that its words could carry a deeper meaning than the contextual framework of its scribes.
Let’s consider for a moment, the original authors of Jacob’s Blessing, as recorded in Genesis and Deuteronomy. Jacob, of course, was the subject. He was the guy purported to actually speak the blessing to his sons. Moses was the scribe. In Genesis, he recorded Jacob’s words in writing and in Deuteronomy, repeated Jacob’s Blessing to the Israelites before they entered the Promised Land. God, if you believe the Bible is what it says it is, was the inspiration behind the words Moses inscribed. In Spirit, God was the author.
Peter summed up how the man-God writing Bible partnership worked:
Above all, you must understand that no prophecy of scripture came about by the prophet’s own interpretation. For prophecy never had its origin in the word of man, but men spoke from God as they were carried along by the Holy Spirit. (II Peter 2:11)
By their own admission, the Jacob/Moses/God partnership stated that the message was for the last generation of Jacob’s children, not the first … “Gather yourselves together, that I may tell you that which shall befall you in the last days” (Genesis 49:1). Hmmm … according to the contextual framework of its authors, the passages were meant for a day when oil could mean a lot more than just olive oil.
If God inspired men to prophesy (and about one-third of the Bible is prophecy) about a blessing to come upon the last generation of Israel’s children and His contextual framework included the technological and political circumstance of Israel’s children in the last days, don’t you think it’s just possible that the Bible might have been referring to petroleum oil when scripture after scripture alludes to just that?
*****
If your contextual framework can’t include the Bible, its prophecies and its miracles, coming from beyond the contextual framework of its ancient scribes, then you’re in the same position as my seventh grade Bible teacher – limiting God to what you can understand.
If the Bible is just a book of collected wisdom that was written by a bunch of wise men a long time ago and if God’s abilities are limited by your ability to understand and accept His works as possible, then why bother?
Seriously. Why bother with the Bible if it’s just a really good book? Why bother with God if He’s incapable of parting the Red Sea and raising the dead because those kinds of things are beyond the parameters of what you’re able to conceive as possible? Why bother? Hanging on to a book like that or a god like that isn’t worth your time; go read a magazine or watch TV. But please, whatever you do, don’t become a seventh grade Bible teacher.
The Bible is the living Word of God. Its message is more relevant today than it was when it was written. God knew that. He planned it that way. His contextual framework is so far beyond ours that we can’t begin to imagine what is possible to Him. Rescuing us from a life shattering tragedy is no more difficult for God than easing our slightest worry. It’s no more difficult than parting the Red Sea. For Him, it’s just a thought.
Don’t ever limit God or His Word to your contextual framework. Instead open yourself up to His. Toss aside your limitations; they don’t exist in His world.
“No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind has conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (I Corinthians 2:9).
