Quote:
Originally Posted by coadie
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God is not flakey with words.
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DING! DING! DING! coadie and I agree! coadie and I agree!
However, we still need tools to help us to understand those words. For example:
Matthew 27:9-10
"Then was fulfilled
that which was spoken by Jeremy the prophet, saying, And they took the thirty pieces of silver, the price of him that was valued, whom they of the children of Israel did value; And gave them for the potter's field, as the Lord appointed me."
Yet, as every student of the Old Testament knows, these are NOT the words of "Jeremy the prophet" (Jeremiah) but the words of Zechariah the prophet who lived almost 100 years later.
So, how can we demand that
Genesis 1 - 11, be held to one standard of absolute wooden literalism while we waffle a bit on the historical account of our Lord's own crucifixion?
Do we
demand that these be the words of Jeremiah even though they are clearly the words of Zechariah? (See
Zechariah 11:12-13).
Or should we just abandon the faith and live like the men of Sodom (whether literally or figuratively, we'll let you choose)?
How about this? How about if we just accept the words of the Bible the same way that we accept the natural speech of those around us? This is NOT to say that the Bible isn't inspired. However, this approach does recognize the Bible as being given to us in human speech and not some "magical formula" that only a magi could read.
When someone in the Bible makes a sweeping generalization or an expansive reference like Matthew does here we should handle it in the same manner that we understand other human speech. When a later writer makes a generalization and quotes the words of
Genesis 1, we should understand it the same way we understand Jesus' command to "go and do likewise" - - Likewise what? Likewise a story that Jesus had just made up (
Luke 10:30-37).
The absence of "literalism" doesn't negate the importance of the command.