Today’s a Monday, and especially rough since we had a Super Bowl party at our house last night. I’ve woken up with a terrific headache.
…and NO, it’s not a hangover! It was a church party. People don’t wake up hungover and naked after those…usually ;0)
Bleary-eyed, I start checking through notifications on my phone and see a message from Twitter. It’s an atheist responding back to a tweet from the other day. He’s posing several challenges about the Bible to me, which is their usual strategy on Twitter. I do want to answer, not in hopes of “winning an argument”, but believing that God can speak to the heart of even the angriest atheist.
I commonly get the usual “gotcha questions” atheists lob at Christians to try and rattle them. The questions usually come from what many Christians would consider “fly-over country”: the Old Testament laws. Christians don’t always spend a lot of time learning those laws because many of them applied to the Israel nation-state, which was just for that particular time in history. Since we are not living in that ancient country, many of the laws simply do not apply today although their underlying principles are still important as part of Biblical history.
When answering Biblical questions, it’s smart to remember “the first to plead his case seems right, until another comes and examines him” (Proverbs 18:17). The real Truth takes time to find, especially when dealing with 2000+-year-old books of antiquity. And most atheists are simply unwilling to explore the Bible enough to find out that, unlike Noah’s Ark, their own critiques don’t hold water.
Here’s one of today’s questions from Twitter:
“How do you explain the UNICORNS in the Bible?”
And lo and behold, when you look at the King James Version, there are no fewer than nine mentions of the fanciful little beast from fairy land (Numbers 23:22, for example). Wow, the Bible really is just a bunch of mythology after all! We might as well be getting our worldview from Tinkerbell, right?
The truth is when you look past the surface to the original language, the Hebrew talks not about “unicorns” but instead about a large animal with one horn. When translated, the KJV Bible gave it a name that at the time had a different connotation than it does today: “unicorn: a one-horned animal”.
But the animal they described is actually not mythological at all and fairly easy to recognize…if you’ve ever heard of a RHINOCEROS!
However, to discover that, the Bible’s critics would actually have to do something they claim to be all about: research. They would have to look at scholarly sources and understand textual criticism and the Hebrew language. By the way, there is a name for people who actually do study those things and whose job it is to understand them…
They’re called “pastors”.
It’s the same issue when looking at the next question:
Doesn’t the Bible allow rape?
In truth, the Hebrew doesn’t say rape, and in fact avoids the specific Hebrew words like chazaq used with anah as in Genesis 34:1-7 where it is indicating actual rape. Instead, in opposition to the culture of the day which said an unwed woman who had sex could be abandoned or abused, the man who had sex with a woman would not get away without marry her or paying a fine to her father who was her protector.
So the Bible actually shows a respect for women, in stark contrast to the accepted ethics of that era. In fact, Deuteronomy 22:25-29 gives a sentence of death to the rapist while warning them that the woman shares no fault in the rape. Here again, the Bible honors and defends women in a society that saw them only as property, no better than cattle.
The Bible warns “a little learning is a dangerous thing”. A contemporary reading of a 4000+ year old Scripture is not true research, and it is not scholarly. Here’s another question from Twitter today:
Why didn’t the Bible completely ban slavery?
I don’t know of anyone beyond human traffickers and Boko Haram who approve of slavery these days. But in ancient times it was a harsh reality of life. Tribes warred with other tribes, and often taking slaves was an option instead of killing prisoners of war.
To release a prisoner from a neighboring warring tribe meant they would only run away, regroup and attack you again. And since these POWs lived with you and not in some far away camp, often physical punishment had to be used. This was the reality of the era. But when the Bible deals with the reality of slavery within the culture, it puts limits on punishment of unruly slaves and makes always their lives more humane.
Actually, the Bible did ban slavery…later in Galatians 3:28. The Apostle Paul also wrote a whole book against it called Philemon.
So why didn’t He just say that back in the Old Testament? Why didn’t He demand society adopt a wholesale, drastic change of operations?
There were many things during Old Testament times God didn’t approve of. Try polygamy and premarital sex, for example (actually, I’d prefer you NOT try them). Yet the Ten Commandments only really dealt with “adultery” specifically, and not all the other creative options we’d come up with to martial fidelity. So, how come?
Basically, because God understands reality and human nature. So, He started a reform in the Old Testament that we finally see come to fruition in the New.
What He did was to bring His people through a progression, moving them continually forward. Finally in God’s “emancipation proclamation” of Gal 3:28, He announces that “In Christ, there is no Jew nor Greek (anti-racism), male nor female (anti-sexism), slave nor free (anti-slavery). The fact this statement was dropped in the midst of a pagan culture that would think it crazy-talk reveals how ahead of its time the Bible was, and still is.
As stunning as that verse must have been to 1st-century ears, it would have fallen on deaf ears in the barbarism of Old Testament times.
It’s funny that skeptics expect a 2000+-year-old book to perfectly reflect their own contemporary politically-correct thinking. Their delicate sensibilities are offended that God would dirty His hands dealing with such uncouth cultures.
It’s as if they expect the Apostle Paul to walk into one of those coliseums we saw in the movie GLADIATOR, and start scolding everyone like a substitute teacher with an out of control class of teenagers. “Now now, everyone. Don’t you realize you’re being unkind to each other in here! Those swords are very pointy and could put an eye out! Put those away right now, and let’s all play nice…”
They all look and stare at him for about 5 seconds. Then they release the lions on him, and go back to their fighting.
One of the things I appreciate most about my God is that His patience through the Old Testament proves He’s not the demanding legalist atheists often accuse Him of being. He’s a loving Father who patiently moves His children along, even though there are things about them which truly offend His standards of love, kindness, and respect.
One day, I may look back on some of the things I found acceptable and tolerated about myself and wonder how God ever put up with me. Thankfully, from looking at His patience from the Old Testament through the New, I can see He won’t just give up on me either.
And I’m not going to give up on my atheist friends either, even if they want to spar on a Monday morning when my head hurts and kids are screaming. If there’s hope for me, maybe there’s hope for them as well.
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This article is a chapter from YOUR BRAIN’S TOO SMALL FOR GOD, my book for skeptics and the Christians who love them. Order your copy today at Amazon!
