Shocked is how R. Dawkins
would have you react to Bible reading – more on him later. But my surprise did not stem from social
practices or warfare in the Old Testament. Instead, I honestly had no idea that
the ancient Jewish religion was so bloody. Granted their sacrifices were of
animals and not humans like some of their contemporaries, but the Old Testament
seemed a bloody series of ritual though precise killing of animals and
spreading of blood over alter and priestly clothing. I know the purpose was for
atonement of sin. I respect that and make no judgment. When you examine these
practices threaded through book after book coupled with other behaviors, and
when you consider these people in scripture were only a small segment of
humanity, it is no wonder man needed saving.
Disappointment flashed
through me briefly each time I came across one of the grand Bible stories we
learn as children. For it seemed as a child the events were so much larger than
they were given space in the Bible. I remember skits we would act out in Sunday
School and flyers we would take home with pictures of events like Moses as a baby
saved by floating in a basket or David killing Goliath. Instead of paragraphs
and chapters, there are actually only a few simple
verses. I wondered then how these
stories became part of the core events shared through the ages. But there is no
denying the power God displays to bolster Moses who speaks to his people when the enemy is about to attack. He says, "The Lord will fight for you, you need only to be still." There is no denying the playful
innocent love David had for God his entire life even after he broke God’s laws.
Amazed and full of wonder
is how I felt when I read the final verse on the seventh day of the
fifty-second week. You know what happens when you play the children’s “telephone” game where one whispers the story to another and so on around the circle until the last one says out loud what he heard and it is nothing of what the original person said. My conclusion after all the lines of law,
history, wisdom, poetry, psalms, gospels and epistles is – It could not have
been humanly possible to create such a seamless story. Unlike some holy
books of other religions, the Bible was composed by many different persons
across many different centuries. I am not talking about translations – but original
authoring. I do not believe that many people through human talent alone could
have collaborated to unfold such an epic story of life that meshes all that is
wrong with the world with a beginning recognition of the need to atone for
wrong-doing with a solution to fix all that is wrong for eternity.
