//Bishop John Shelby Spong’s new book, Reclaiming the Bible for a Non-Religious World, pointed out three interesting parallels between Joseph, the father of Jesus, and Joseph, the most-beloved son of Jacob in the Old Testament. This comparison comes from the book of Matthew, and in fact, Matthew was the first book written to identify the father of Jesus as Joseph. Did Matthew borrow his story from the Old Testament?

Here are the startling comparisons:

[3] Both saved their family by taking them down to Egypt.

Coincidence, foreshadowing, or creative license on Matthew’s part?

And we know that in all things God works for the good of those who love him, who have been called according to his purpose. For those God foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the likeness of his Son, that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those he predestined, he also called; those he called, he also justified; those he justified, he also glorified.

Ephesians 1:4-5, For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us to be adopted as his sons through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.

Romans 9:15: For he says to Moses, “I will have mercy on whom I have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I have compassion.” It does not, therefore, depend on man’s desire or effort, but on God’s mercy.  

Acts 13:48, When the Gentiles heard this, they were glad and honored the word of the Lord; and all who were appointed for eternal life believed.

But what about the other side? How about if we’d rather believe we have some semblance of a choice in the matter? Before delving back into the New Testament, let’s start with God’s expectation of obedience throughout the Old Testament, which is easily summarized in this one passage:

Deuteronomy 11:26-28, See, I am setting before you today a blessing and a curse–the blessing if you obey the commands of the LORD your God that I am giving you today; the curse if you disobey the commands of the LORD your God.

Will this simple matter of us choosing our own destiny carry forward into the New Testament? Are we in command of our own will? There, it’s not so clear:

1 Corinthians 7:37, But the man who has settled the matter in his own mind, who is under no compulsion but has control over his own will, and who has made up his mind not to marry the virgin—this man also does the right thing.

Revelation 22:17, The Spirit and the bride say, “Come!” And let him who hears say, “Come!” Whoever is thirsty, let him come; and whoever wishes, let him take the free gift of the water of life.

While these verses are encouraging, they only provide hints of free will. None of them directly address the issue of  whether or not we are masters of our own destiny. Did God give up on his Free Will experiment after the Old Testament, where his people seemingly couldn’t learn to behave?

Then Joshua spoke to the LORD in the day when the LORD delivered up the Amorites before the children of Israel, and he said in the sight of Israel: “Sun, stand still over Gibeon; And Moon, in the Valley of Aijalon.” So the sun stood still, And the moon stopped, Till the people had revenge Upon their enemies. Is this not written in the Book of Jasher? So the sun stood still in the midst of heaven, and did not hasten to go down for about a whole day.

//We all know that in antiquity, the common belief was that the earth was flat and fixed, while the sun and moon rode through the sky. But for some reason, it troubles some readers to imagine that the Bible espouses this belief. Why does this surprise people? How could anyone in antiquity, writing down the words that would become our Bible, describe something they didn’t believe to be true? That the earth was spherical and spun on an axis, providing the illusion of the sun rotating around it?

Rather, the most common understanding in the Mediterranean world was that the earth was flat, covered by a dome of sorts, and that the sun and moon rode tracks daily across the underside of the dome. You’ll find this description of the creation in Genesis, chapter 1.

A number of other verses also support this idea that the sun can simply be held back on its track, or even made to reverse course:

Habakkuk 3:11, The sun and moon stood still in their habitation;

2 Kings 20:11, So Isaiah the prophet cried out to the LORD, and He brought the shadow ten degrees backward, by which it had gone down on the sundial of Ahaz.

Isaiah 38:8, “Behold, I will bring the shadow on the sundial, which has gone down with the sun on the sundial of Ahaz, ten degrees backward.” So the sun returned ten degrees on the dial by which it had gone down.

More about this topic tomorrow.

//Is this verse true, or does it reflect only the author’s romantic picture of God? If God can’t tolerate evil, where did evil come from?

The Psalms promise, “The LORD is good to all; he has compassion on all he has made.” Lamentations 3:33 agrees, “For he doth not afflict willingly nor grieve the children of men.”

But other scripture seems to differ in opinion. Who made the Serpent of Eden, if not God? And can Satan really take all the blame for evil? Job’s “brethen” recognized that God had brought evil upon Job. (Job 42:11)

Says Isaiah 45:7, “I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil.” Jeremiah 18:11 reads, “Thus saith the LORD; Behold, I frame evil against you, and devise a device against you.” Judges 9:23 tells how “God sent an evil spirit between Abimelech and the men of Shechem;” Amos 3:6 asks, “Shall there be evil in a city, and the LORD hath not done it?”

The problem of evil is one of the most troubling aspects for many believers. Many simply can’t comprehend that God could be omniscient and omnipotent while still allowing evil to exist. It just doesn’t jibe with our fervent wish that, above all else, God is good.

Today’s verses prove that this topic troubled believers 2,500 years ago just as much as today.

//If you’ve read the books of Acts cover-to-cover, you know it contains some mighty hard-to-believe stories. This tends to hurt the book’s credibility in the eyes of many scholars. But there is a fascinating turning point in Acts, where scholars suddenly perk up.

They had as king over them the angel of the Abyss, whose name in Hebrew is Abaddon, and in Greek, Apollyon.

//In this verse, John of Patmos finds a corny play on Greek words to make a point. He describes a fearsome army of locusts the size of horses arising from the smoke of the Abyss. (The Abyss was thought to be a cavern within the underworld.) The job of these locusts is to torment people for five months. John calls the king of this fearsome army the “the angel of the Abyss,” and names him Apollyon, or Abaddon.

Apollyon, like Abaddon, means “destroyer,” and John’s clever play on words seems to be saying that the Greek god Apollo reigns over Sheol. Abaddon is another name for Sheol, the realm of the dead.

In an earlier post about Revelation, I described how the pose of twenty four elders around the throne of God mocked the Greek god Apollo. Now, here is Apollo again, as the angel of Sheol. It’s no coincidence that the locust symbolizes Apollo, the god of pestilence and plague.

Why does John seem to have it in for this particular god? Because Nero Caesar, the Roman emperor who tortured so many Christians and ordered the destruction of Jerusalem and the Temple, claimed to be Apollo. Coins were minted with Nero’s portrait appearing as Apollo, Nero’s statue was erected in an ancient temple of Apollo, and a building in Athens was dedicated to All powerful Nero Caesar Sebastos, a new Apollo. Meet the original angel of the Abyss: Nero Caesar.

More about Nero Caesar and his dastardly role in the book of Revelation can be found in my book, Revelation: The Way it Happened.

 … there is no other God but one.

Every living thing on the face of the earth was wiped out; men and animals and the creatures that move along the ground and the birds of the air were wiped from the earth. Only Noah was left, and those with him in the ark.

//This verse seems pretty clear on the matter. But since scientific study continues to insist there has been no worldwide flood, a number of Bible readers consider the flood story to be a local event. They point to other locations in scripture where “the whole world” appears to mean only the surrounding area of the writer.

The flood story, however, carries an unmistakable moral lesson: Life on earth would not have survived were it not for Noah’s faithfulness. Life was preserved only because Noah brought animals into the ark, to preserve these species on earth. That’s the entire point of the flood myth, isn’t it? God wiped out his creation and started over.

But not only does external evidence undermine this interpretation, the Bible itself does! If you believe all life on earth was destroyed, consider the following:

Genesis 6:4, The Nephilim were on the earth in those days–and also afterward–when the sons of God went to the daughters of men and had children by them. They were the heroes of old, men of renown.

This verse is provided to bolster the wickedness of mankind before the flood. The story reads as if God wished to destroy the Nephilim (giants) by the flood. But then comes this verse, long after the flood, describing the fearsome people inhabiting the promised land:

Numbers 13:33, We saw the Nephilim there (the descendants of Anak come from the Nephilim). We seemed like grasshoppers in our own eyes, and we looked the same to them.”

Perhaps the Nephilim were so tall that they were able to keep their heads above water?

//The book of Jonah is a wonderful, humanitarian story about universal love. You know the story: God says to Jonah, “go, preach to Nineveh.” Jonah balks, for who could be sympathetic toward the hated Assyrians and their capital city of Nineveh? Jonah runs the other way. He winds up on a boat tossed by a powerful storm, is heaved overboard by the sailors when he is discovered to be the cause for God’s wrath, and is swallowed by a big fish. When the fish coughs him up three days later, Jonah has had enough. He repents and does what God commands, preaching to Nineveh.

The whole city of Nineveh repents (Jonah must have been one heckuva preacher) and Jonah is miffed because God decides to pardon them. Jonah goes and sulks under a big “gourd” to escape the hot sun and contemplate the unfairness of life. Before the next day dawns, however, God creates a little worm who eats the gourd. Jonah is miffed all the more. God explains his lesson: Then said the LORD, Thou hast had pity on the gourd, for the which thou hast not laboured, neither madest it grow; which came up in a night, and perished in a night: And should not I spare Nineveh, that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand persons that cannot discern between their right hand and their left hand; and also much cattle?

This tale might be considered no more than a fun bedtime story, were it not for its timing. Scholars date the writing of this book precisely to a period in time when Jerusalem was undergoing a severe ethnic cleansing, shortly after a wave of Jews returned from captivity in Babylon. In an attempt to purify God’s race, all non-Jews were being banished outside the walls of Jerusalem, even though it meant breaking up marriages and families.

Enter the anonymous book of Jonah, a bit of protest literature, with its plea for tolerance for all nations. The man Jonah, readers would recognize, is a portrayal of the Jews’ own bigotry.

[S]he shall be brought to the door of her father’s house and there the men of her town shall stone her to death. She has done a disgraceful thing in Israel by being promiscuous while still in her father’s house. You must purge the evil from among you.

//In my verse yesterday, Jesus said if you call somebody a fool, you’re on your way to hell. So, I thought I’d provide a bit  of ambiance, describing what happened to “fools” in the Old Testament. Here’s another one:

Joshua 7:15, He who is caught with the devoted things shall be destroyed by fire, along with all that belongs to him. He has violated the covenant of the LORD and has done a disgraceful thing in Israel!'”

So, people who disobey the law of God are to be stoned or burned. Probably both … killed with stones, then the body destroyed by fire. But what does this have to do with fools? We go back to the promise of Jesus in Matthew 5:21, the verse I quoted yesterday. Say to your brother, Raca, and you might have to go before the judge (Raca is an expression of contempt, like calling him stupid.) But say Thou Fool, and you’re in danger of hell fire.

It’s our interpretation that makes this hard to understand. “Thou fool” sounds quaint next to “hey, stupid!” But the Greek word translated “fool” actually speaks of something far more sinister than mere stupidity. Think of it as someone practicing idolatry or worse. It’s no sin to be stupid, but it’s a sin to be stupid about God’s directives. That’s why the fool says in his heart, “There is no God.” (Psalm 14:1) … not because he’s an idiot, but because he justifies his sin with unbelief.

Which brings us to another point. When Jesus promised “hell fire,” the Greek word he used was Gehennah, which is not hell at all. It’s a once-pleasant valley on the south side of Jerusalem, but which drew the disfavor of God because of idolatry practiced there. Gehennah eventually evolved into a garbage dump that burned perpetually, a sort of fiery symbol for contemptuous destruction. The King James version of the Bible leaped to the conclusion that Jesus was speaking symbolically of eternal damnation, but scholars continue to argue about just what this image of Gehennah was meant to convey. A closer translation than eternal punishment might be the promise in Joshua 7:15, above, where the punishment is to be killed, and the body burned … exactly how the valley of Gehennah was once used; as a fiery disposal of the bodies of the enemy. 

We may never grasp just what this distasteful image of Gehennah was meant to convey. But if I were you, I’d stick to just calling my brother stupid.