Weekend Bible Reflections With Jon

my reflections on the Bible or even read the Bible itself if it is not actually the Word of God as it claims to be?

Is there any evidence that would lend credence to Scripture’s claim to be from God? Well, let’s first point out that even all but the most unreasonable atheists will concede that the Bible is a collection of ancient documents written 2,000 to 3,500 years ago. Denying that it is the Word of God just as they deny God’s existence, they believe the Bible is a collection of ancient myths and superstitions.

Consider something else. The Bible does not present itself as a scientific textbook, yet it stands to reason that any and every scientific statement found within its pages would be completely accurate if God truly did inspire the human authors of the books which compose the Bible ( 2 Peter 1: 19- 21).

So look again at Genesis 15: 5. Also check out a similar passage in Jeremiah 33: 22. The author of these ancient books of Genesis and Jeremiah wrote that God basically told Abraham and Jeremiah that one could not number the stars. Guess what? Prior to the 1800’s, most of mankind thought there were no more than 6,000 stars total. That’s only because they were counting what could be seen from the naked eye from all points of the earth.

That changed when the first telescope, and then the more powerful telescopes which followed, were invented. We found a lot more after that. CNN reported in 2003 that in just this universe alone they have estimated a number of 70 sextillion stars. ( That would be 70,000 million million million. 70,000,000,00 0,000,000,000,000.) They came to that number not by trying to count each individual star, but rather by taking a survey of one strip of sky. Within that one strip, they pinpointed 10,000 galaxies and took detailed measurements of their brightness to simply try to calculate how many stars they contained; 70 sextillion is the number they guessed at.

How did the authors of Genesis and Jeremiah, living in those ancient primitive times, know that the stars were innumerable if there is no God and He did not tell them so?

Also, did you know that the ancient books which make up the Bible talk about wind patterns and the fact that air has weight ( Ecclesiastes 1: 6; Job 28: 25)? Yet it was airmen in World War 2 who first discovered the wind patterns, and the discovery that air has weight was made by Evangelista Torricelli in Renaissance Italy in 1643.

Assuming that God doesn’t exist and therefore the books of Job and Ecclesiastes are nothing but ancient superstitions, how did their primitive authors know these things so long ago? Did the writer of Ecclesiastes climb Mount Everest to get his data? Since there were no airplanes back then, he would have had to have climbed a mountain higher than the altitude in which jet stream winds are found in order to observe them and thus write about wind patterns. But if he climbed Everest or some other extremely high mountain, how did he do it without an oxygen tank? What instruments did he use in order to discover these wind patterns and track them so he could write about them in Ecclesiastes?

The author of the ancient book of Isaiah wrote that the Earth is a circle ( Isaiah 40: 22). Yet how many people still believed the Earth was flat hundreds of years after Isaiah was written? Technically, one could say that it was not proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planet Earth is round until just a few decades ago when the first camera was sent up into space and took the first picture of the planet. Without the inspiration of God, what gave the ancient author of Isaiah the notion that the Earth was round?

Something to think about.