Rightly Dividing

In this video, I want to walk you through my process of how I learn to understand the Bible. It is through a series of questions.

Some say the soul sleep in an unconscious state at death while other say we are immediately in the presence of the Lord. Can the sleep and being in the presence of the Lord be reconciled? Find out in this episode.

I start with the words of Jesus to repent for the kingdom of heaven is at hand. We ask ourselves what kingdom is Jesus talking about and that takes us back to Genesi.

What is my purpose in life? Genesis Answers this!

It is possible Genesis 1:26-31 is specifically talking about the garden, and if so, it has some powerful meanings, like why we exist.

In this episode, I try to finish up the week so that we can move on to chapter two. Chapter to is where the real theology starts to form.

This podcast is about the second day and the waters above the firmament. There has been some controversy over this text, but that is largely due to the fact that some want to make Genesis a scientific discourse. This is what I am apposed to. What is so vitally important is that we read Genesis without connecting to a scientific theory on how things happen. In this case we are not concern about why, meaning how, we have water and rain on the earth. We are concerned with he how come there is water and rain. These are two different questions, that many seem to convolute. Anyway I hope you enjoy it.

In the previous episodes, I have been trying to show that we must read Genesis as story telling us why our universe and we humans exist because it is was written to give meaning to our existence.

If we remove ourselves from interpreting it as a timeline of events describing the creation process, it becomes possible to think about the text with fresh eyes. To demonstrate this, I want to look at day one and the creation of light. Here I will follow the Apostle John’s way of reading Genesis.

Notice John says that there was a spoken Word as God said, “let there be light.” The Word was Jesus, and He is life, and this life was the light of men. That demonstrates that John is using Genesis as a metaphor. Something does not have to be read literally to be truthful. Jesus told many parables that were not to be taken literally except for the truth they taught.

We have to pay attention to a couple of cues that will tell us how to read these verses. God creates light and then divides it from the darkness, and he names the two divisions day and night. If we are to be literal, we know that day is when the sun is up and night is when it is hidden. If you don’t read it this way, one has to realize they are making up a concept that does not have reality attached to it.

Why would God turn it off the light if it was a vacuum? Why allow darkness? That is very hard to comprehend! The people Moses wrote this to would have no concept of the earth rotating around the sun, which we didn’t figure out until thousands of years later. They would only know that the sun comes up and then disappears.

We also have to think in terms of what darkness means. Today we have lights everywhere, but for the ancient people, light wasn’t with them constantly. If you have ever been away from any light and there was no moon, you realize how dark it can be. You will also recognize that it is terrifying because you have no idea what is around you. You could trip over a rock or fall off a cliff, walk into a tree, or a dangerous animal. Darkness is chaos; it is disorder. Light then is the exact opposite. It is beauty and order.

I know that many have struggled with what this light could be because they believe the sun was not created until day four. We will deal with this in more detail later. However, I will say this now. It does not say the heavenly bodies were created on day four because the word bara was not used. Instead, what we are reading on day four is God telling us He made these celestial bodies for our timekeepers.

As our knowledge of the heaven/sky has increased, this truth has not been found faulty but is become more defined. We define our universe by light, and when astrophysicists describe the size of the universe, it is with lightyears, and light is what defines our space and time dimensions.

However, the genius in Genesis is that it talks about Jesus long before He stepped foot on the earth. Besides what we have read in John, we have other references to Jesus and the light that brings order into our world.

In this episode, I talk about how Genesis should be read as a teleology that gives meaning to our world instead of a narrative explaining how it came to be. We want to know why more than how. People want to know they are loved by their parents more than how they conceived them. I am not aware of anyone who struggles with life because of not understanding conception, but I have met people struggling with the feeling they are not loved.

I also talk about how the creation week is set up to be rememberable. On day one, God creates light. Corresponding with day one, day four, God gives the light to the celestial bodies to govern our time and seasons. On day two, God divides the waters, forming the sky. That corresponds to day five because God gives the water to the fish and the sky to the birds. On day three, God created dry land with its plants, occupied by animals and man on day six. If you remember one of the first three days, you can remember the last three days and the other way around.

The last point is that we are to recognize that there is only one Lord and this God made very thing. We do not have to figure out who we are to follow in this world. Many gods want us to participate in their kingdom, but we only have to trust in one God, who is the real God.

Whether you realize it or not the way we think about the world today is very different than the way people thought about the world in the past. This is because all people alive have lived in the age of enlightenment. This age started in the 17th century and has change the way most of the humanity views the world and the universe. We think different than people in the past! We must consciously think about this when reading things written from the past. Listen for more.

To understand a text correctly, you need to figure out its purpose. If your boss got a love letter, you wrote to your husband, and your husband got the letter written to your boss, they would be pretty confused. So today, we will look at why and who Genesis was written to.