The Foundation

Solomon, a king and written about in the history books as one of the wisest men who lived, wrote about his father King David’s teachings in Proverbs 2:1-5 My son, if you accept my words and store up my commands within you, turning your ear to wisdom and applying your heart to understanding— indeed, if you call out for insight and cry aloud for understanding, and if you look for it as for silver and search for it as for hidden treasure, then you will understand the fear of the Lord and find the knowledge of God.

When it comes down to it, we need to have a standard to refer back to. Through these posts we will have discussions around many great things and big questions. Now, I’m open to someone questioning the foundation of the bible but it’s very hard to have someone argue against it who hasn’t read it – you must be able to substantiate. Sure, you can have questions. Sure, you can see it as hard to understand. But when it comes down to it, as the passage above states, you must be willing to search as if for silver to find the truth.

With this, I believe it’s important to have something that we can all come back to as the foundation – the one thing that can resolve differences. If everyone goes off of feelings or sentimentality or dogma, we would end up with, well, what we have today – thousands of denominations. I don’t believe that’s what God wants.

As I’m putting this together, I’m finding it tough to get things in the right order. What comes first, understanding that the bible is a foundation? Or, should we make sure we aren’t getting caught up in sentimentality? Or should we prove God first or do we answer some of the questions people have so they can get off on the right foot? I’ve decided the bible is the place to start, since I believe it’s the word of God. The gift God gave us to understand him and our relationship with him. As some have said, “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth”.

So, what is the bible?

I believe the bible is the word of God. How can I say that this book from ancient times isn’t just a story or the writers’ best description of events and probably filled with mistakes and selfish desires and, like a game of telephone, lost in translation over time?

What I’m saying here is that, although written by mankind, it’s clearly lead by God in it’s writing. I claim it is completely unlikely that humans could come up with something so thorough, so cohesive, so far reaching, so powerful and so relevant.

I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s first books in the Foundation Series. The earliest books were written pre-space flight (early 50s). There is a part where they are communicating between spaceships with loudspeakers. Okay, here’s Asimov, a recognized astrophysicist not knowing that sound can’t travel through space. He didn’t know what he didn’t know… that’s only about 60 years ago. In the bible, we’re talking several millenia.

Here are a few things that I find too important to point to anything other than the bible being God’s word to us:

• The bible was written over a period of approximately 5000 years, in three languages (Hebrew, Aramaic and Greek). There are 44 authors and 66 books. The authors were from different levels of society (kings, the poverty stricken, shepherds, scholars, men and women, prophets and more) and from several different cultures and geographies. If you took two or more people even in the same cultural space and time – like my wife and I – and asked us to write all we know about God, you would likely find some theological discrepancy. And yet, the bible is cohesive and consistent in it’s message throughout.
• The bible contains a very factual and, at times, embarrassingly honest view of people and history. If any of us today were keeping a history of our lives, we would likely embellish, improve, or leave out periods of our lives we didn’t think were flattering. When we see, without fanfare, honest scenes like King David taking Bathsheba as his own and then killing off her husband to cover his sin, we surely would think this isn’t something that most would put in their biography. The bible is as clear on the deepest darkest parts of human history as it is on the occasional bright parts.
• There are rules and stories that we would want to leave out because they challenge us to the core. If I were writing the bible, especially in trying to attract as many as possible, I wouldn’t put in passages like Matthew 7:21 or Luke 14:26.
• The translations and manuscripts are clearly good examples of how ancient text can be carried forward and there are no better examples in any historical texts.
• When the dead sea scrolls were found in 1947, they were very well preserved from times dating back well before Jesus and yet were almost a perfect copy of the books originating back to 750+ BC.

This is just a partial view of what I see as a reliable foundation to build upon.

There is a ton of controversy around the bible, what do you think?