Author: Christopher R Smith

The Rev. Dr. Christopher R. Smith is an an ordained minister, a writer, and a biblical scholar. He was active in parish and student ministry for twenty-five years. He was a consulting editor to the International Bible Society (now Biblica) for The Books of the Bible, an edition of the New International Version (NIV) that presents the biblical books according to their natural literary outlines, without chapters and verses. His Understanding the Books of the Bible study guide series is keyed to this format. He was also a consultant to Tyndale House for the Immerse Bible, an edition of the New Living Translation (NLT) that similarly presents the Scriptures in their natural literary forms, without chapters and verses or section headings. He has a B.A. from Harvard in English and American Literature and Language, a Master of Arts in Theological Studies from Gordon-Conwell, and a Ph.D. in the History of Christian Life and Thought, with a minor concentration in Bible, from Boston College, in the joint program with Andover Newton Theological School.

How could God traumatize Isaac by having Abraham nearly sacrifice him?

isaacsacrifice — Anton Losenko, “Abraham Sacrifices His Son Isaac”

Q. One of the things I struggle with most is God requesting Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. I get the dynamic between God and Abraham on this, but why wouldn’t God at least have done it when Isaac was a baby and couldn’t remember it? It just seems cruel to me to inflict lifelong psychological damage on someone from the terror and other emotions that your father tying you up, ready to sacrifice you, would cause. I’m not sure any level of faith in God would compensate for the damage that would do to a person.

In these study guides, I often ask groups to envision particular biblical stories through the eyes of one of their characters. Your question is a sensitive and compassionate one that arises from a perceptive reading of this story through Isaac’s eyes.

We typically interpret this story from God’s perspective and see in it a foreshadowing of the substitutionary atonement: “God himself will provide the lamb.” Or, we see it from Abraham’s perspective and read it as an object lesson in faith and difficult obedience. (Charles Spurgeon preached a famous sermon on this passage, using Abraham as a positive example, about the kind of obedience that faith produces: immediate, unconditional, complete, etc.)

But when we see the story through Isaac’s eyes, it is pretty terrifying. It would be bad enough to be tied up and nearly sacrificed by anybody, but for your father to do this, when he’s supposed to be your protector, would be devastating.

One possibility to consider is that Isaac might have experienced this event somewhat differently from the way a person would today. This story is, among other things, about Abraham and his family coming to understand better the character of the God who has called them into a covenant relationship in order to make them a blessing to the whole world. Considered in that light, it’s actually a polemic against human sacrifice, which was widely practiced in this place and time.

It’s not as though God thought up human sacrifice as an extreme way to test Abraham’s loyalty. Rather, God was asking of Abraham what it was believed the other gods were asking of their followers. When Abraham demonstrated his complete devotion, God then made clear that he didn’t want human sacrifices.

But going into the story, Abraham and Isaac don’t yet realize how different God is from the other so-called gods in this respect. This is why neither one of them balks when they realize that a human sacrifice is in view (Abraham at the beginning, Isaac later on): if you didn’t do what the gods expected of you, they would bring disaster on you and your family. In effect, Isaac may not have expected his father to protect him from a demand like this from the gods–no one was able to defy them, and trying to do so would only expose the family to greater danger and damage. Children today don’t have issues with their parents for not keeping a tornado from hitting their house.

But I think this is only a secondary answer. I agree with you that, whatever the cultural differences, for Isaac to be tied up by his own father and nearly turned into a human sacrifice must have been terrifying and traumatic on some level. So the primary answer must be that coming to know God deeply and truly as our Heavenly Father can and does bring healing from the psychological damage we suffer through things our parents do. If they fail to protect us, or if they actively harm us, this does more damage than almost any other person could cause. But even when this has happened, coming to know God, in a deep relational sense, as our Heavenly Father brings emotional and psychological healing by reassuring us of our infinite worth in his eyes and giving us renewed confidence in his love and protection. And this is what I hope all readers of this story from Isaac’s life will experience.

Do not “quench the Spirit” or “put out the Spirit’s fire”?

In your guide to Paul’s Journey Letters (session 2), you ask us which of the instructions at the end of 1 Thessalonians we’d most like to see put into practice in our community of Jesus’ followers. Our small group has a couple of questions about one of those instructions. It’s the one that the TNIV translates “Do not put out the Spirit’s fire,” but which other versions such as the ESV translate “Do not quench the Spirit.”

First of all, which is it, the Spirit or the Spirit’s fire? Why the difference in translation?

And then, if it is fire, how are we to understand what that means within the context of the letter? There are numerous references throughout the Old and New Testaments of God’s presence/Spirit coming in the form of fire, so it’s easy for a reader to project this kind of imagery here. I suppose this is a specific case of a more general question: To what extent is it appropriate/accurate/permissible to project extra-textual meaning into a specific literary context? It seems to me that the answer cannot be “never” nor “always,” which means that it’s somewhere in between.

In this instruction Paul uses the Greek verb sbennúo, which means “to put out a fire.” (This root is found in our word asbestos, which originally referred to a substance, quicklime, that couldn’t be put out when it was on fire; pouring water on it only made it flame higher. Ironically, the word was then erroneously applied to a substance that couldn’t catch on fire, and the name, even though opposite in meaning, stuck!)

In Paul’s sentence the Spirit is the simple object of this verb; the word “fire” as an attribute or possession of the Spirit does not appear. So “do not quench the Spirit” is the more literal translation. The reading “do not put out the Spirit’s fire” appears in the 1978 and 1984 editions of the NIV as well as in the TNIV, but in the latest update to the NIV (2011), the reading is now “do not quench the Spirit.” So leading translations are converging in their understanding of what the object in the sentence should be.

I’m not sure they’ve gotten the verb translated right yet, however. Sbennúo can be used in a more literal sense of putting out a fire (e.g. as in Ephesians, “Take up the shield of faith, with which you can extinguish all the flaming arrows of the evil one”), but it can also be used in a more figurative sense, to describe doing to something what you would do to a fire to put it out. And so I think an even better translation of Paul’s instruction would be, “Do not stifle the Spirit,” particularly since the very next phrase (not necessarily a separate sentence) is, “do not treat prophecies with contempt.” In other words, if the Spirit wants to speak to you in your gatherings, let the Spirit speak, and listen. So the notion of fire, certainly associated with God’s Spirit in many places in the Bible, is not necessarily present here.

This means that this instruction may be an even better example than you perhaps realized of readers projecting extra-textual meaning into a specific literary context! I agree with you that we must expect readers to do this kind of thing sometimes, because words are full of meaning and they are bound to have associations for readers beyond what those who first used them intended. I’d say that we need to recognize that reading is a creative act, but that at the same time, like any creative act, it should be constrained by considerations that keep it from becoming so wild that it’s meaningless. I’d argue that these considerations include the author’s overall perspectives and social and historical context. These must exert some control over the meanings we bring in to an author’s words.

So while Paul probably meant “do not stifle the Spirit,” he was using a word figuratively that means more literally “put out a fire,” and in that word the rich biblical associations of the Spirit-as-fire can be heard echoing. This is particularly true since Paul was writing self-consciously within the biblical literary tradition, as evidenced by his frequent quotations from and allusions to the earlier Scriptures. So when we read the instruction not to “quench” the Spirit, I think we do have the freedom to think about what this means in light of the broader biblical imagery of the Spirit-as-fire, so long as we don’t miss Paul’s main point about allowing the Spirit to speak through individual members to gatherings of Jesus’ followers.

Do people choose or refuse to believe, or does God choose who is saved?

As my small group was using the guide to Paul’s Journey Letters, a question came up in 2 Thessalonians. In one section, Paul says that some will perish “because they refused to love the truth.” But in the very next section, he tells the Thessalonians, “God chose you as firstfruits to be saved.” The first statement seems to place agency in the hands (and hearts and minds) of individuals, while the second one seems to imply God’s agency in determining who is saved. How do we reconcile ostensibly contradictory statements that are right next to each other? What is the bigger picture we are missing?

This isn’t the only place in the Bible where God’s sovereignty and human moral responsibility are asserted in the very same place. For example, Peter says about Jesus in his message on the day of Pentecost, as recorded by Luke in the book of Acts, “This man was handed over to you by God’s deliberate plan and foreknowledge; and you, with the help of wicked men, put him to death by nailing him to the cross.”

Benjamin West, “St. Peter Preaching at Pentecost”

It seems to me that divine sovereignty and human responsibility are two sides of a mystery or paradox that we today have much more difficulty reconciling and living with than the biblical authors did. So how can we reach the place where we’re as comfortable with this paradox as they were?

I find it helpful to think about this by analogy to the understanding the community of Jesus’ followers eventually reached, after centuries of debate, about whether he was divine or human. The answer was, “Both.” The Council of Chalcedon proclaimed in AD 451 that Jesus was “fully divine and fully human, without separation and without confusion.” That is, he was somehow 100% divine and 100% human at the same time, without it being possible to say which things he said and did as God and which things he said and did as a man, and without either nature getting in the way of the other.

We might say similarly that when a person is saved, this is the result of a process or action that is “fully divine and fully human, without separation and without confusion.” Paul says in 2 Thessalonians, after all, that when people “refuse to love the truth and so be saved,” “God sends them a powerful delusion so they will believe the lie.” Divine and human agency working simultaneously—in this case, unfortunately negatively, but the same thing happens positively when a person is saved.

The practical takeaway is to acknowledge that we have a human moral responsibility to respond to God’s gracious offer of salvation through the gospel, but also to acknowledge in all humility that our salvation is a work of God achieved only through the incarnation, life, ministry, atoning death, and resurrection of Jesus.

What did Jesus do for three days after he descended into hell?

Q. I have a question. What do you think Christ “did” for three days after he descended into hell?

The Bible doesn’t tell us very much about what Jesus did between the time he died on the cross and when he was raised from the dead, but it does give us a couple of tantalizing hints.

Peter writes in his first letter, “Christ also suffered once for sins, the righteous for the unrighteous, to bring you to God. He was put to death in the body but made alive in the Spirit, in which also he went and made proclamation to the imprisoned spirits—to those who were disobedient long ago when God waited patiently in the days of Noah when the ark was being built.”

This suggests that Jesus, between his death and resurrection, went in the Spirit and actively preached the gospel to those who had perished centuries before in the great flood. Perhaps these people, because of the great wickedness on the earth at that time, were considered not to have had a reasonable opportunity to respond to God, and so Jesus came and proclaimed the gospel to them in its fullness, in light of his just-completed death on the cross.

Even though Peter doesn’t mention people from other historical periods, since his concern in this part of the letter is to develop an analogy between baptism and rescue from the flood in the ark, it’s possible that on this occasion Jesus also proclaimed the gospel to other “imprisoned spirits” who had lived at different times. Peter says more generally later in this letter that “the gospel was preached even to those who are now dead, so that they might be judged according to human standards in regards to the body, but live according to God in regard to the spirit.”

Paul gives us a suggestion that some of those who heard the gospel under these circumstances responded positively. In Ephesians he quotes from Psalm 68, “When he ascended on high, he led captives in his train,” and then applies these words to Christ: “What does ‘he ascended’ mean except that he also descended to the depths of the earth?” The “captives” would be the souls whom Jesus led out of their “imprisonment” after they responded positively to the gospel when he proclaimed it.

From these biblical hints about what Jesus did between his death and resurrection, the community of his followers later developed the doctrine of the “harrowing of hell.” To “harrow” means to despoil; the idea is that Jesus triumphed over hell and released its captives. This doctrine has a rich history in the art and literature of the church.

Duccio di Buoninsegna, "The Harrowing of Hell" — Duccio di Buoninsegna, “The Harrowing of Hell”

If someone’s prediction doesn’t come true, are they a false prophet?

Our church believes that the gift of prophecy is still available today. There’s one man in the church who recently predicted something that didn’t happen. The Bible says in Deuteronomy that if a prophet’s words don’t come true, they’re not genuine. I mean, we’re not going to kill this guy or anything (as it also says to do in Deuteronomy), but is he a false prophet?

I wouldn’t apply a “one strike and you’re out” rule to the question of whether someone who speaks prophetically is genuine. The book of Deuteronomy offers us more than one test of a false prophet. One is that their predictions don’t come true. But another is that even if their predictions do come true, if they then say “let us go after other gods,” they are false prophets and are not to be trusted. The fulfilled prediction is a test of faith for believers. So we aren’t supposed to go exclusively by outcomes, but by whether a prophet’s words and actions point us to the true God.

Since prophecy is a spiritual gift, we should expect that for budding prophets, there will be a “learning curve.” As they learn to use their gift, they will become sharper and more accurate in their prophecies. The corollary is that those who feel called to develop a prophetic gift and calling should be more restrained at the outset, until they develop confidence in their gifting. That’s why I wouldn’t apply a “one strike and you’re out” rule in every case. To me the main test is whether the prophet is calling people faithfully to obedience.

That much said, I have to admit that I lost confidence in a man I had considered a prophet, who made much of the fact that “God had told him” everything he was predicting, when several of his predictions in a row didn’t come true. So there is still something to this test of accuracy.

Another thing to consider is that only a small percentage of prophecy in the Bible is predictive, or “fore-telling.” The rest is exhortation or “forth-telling,” a description of God’s perspective on how the community is conducting itself, rather than a prediction of what God plans to do, whether in mercy or judgment. I would therefore add that a (mature) true prophet will probably come close to these proportions in his or her words to the community.

(A guide to Deuteronomy and Hebrews is available in the Understanding the Books of the Bible series.)

Was Noah’s flood a worldwide event or a local one?

Q. In your Genesis study guide you seem to take for granted that Noah’s flood was a worldwide event. You write, “God must have used some extraordinary means to cause a flood of this magnitude, since ordinary rainfall, even a downpour of forty days, wouldn’t be sufficient to cover all the mountains on earth.” But I’ve heard some people claim instead that this flood was a local event. How would you respond?

You’re right, one school of interpretation does hold that Noah’s flood was a local event in which the waters rose 15 cubits (22 feet) above their usual height, or else this far above their flood stage. This would still be a tremendous flood, but local one. However, the statement in Genesis that the high hills (or mountains) were all covered with water would seem to rule this out.

The statement is actually made within a poetic couplet that’s based on the repetition of meaning, whose second line provides greater focus, as is typical of Hebrew poetry. The couplet can be translated this way:

And the waters were great, exceedingly, exceedingly, upon the earth
and they covered all the high hills that were under the skies;
Five and ten cubits upwards were the waters great
and they covered the high hills.

“All the high hills that were under the skies” are in view, and the claim is that these were covered to a height of 15 cubits, so I think the writer’s intention is to describe a worldwide event.

However, it’s important to remember that all of this is written from an observational perspective. The author of the flood account is reporting that all of the high hills out to the visible horizon (“under the skies”) were covered by the waters. So this would conceivably still allow for a local flood, although it’s being envisioned as a worldwide event.

In either case, however, this would still be a flood of such magnitude that the problem of its mechanism remains. Some extraordinary means must have been responsible, because as I go on to say in the guide, the description of the flood in Genesis, no matter how we interpret it, “doesn’t line up with our modern cosmology. Much of the universe is described here by analogy to things in human experience, so that there are ‘floodgates’ in the sky and ‘springs’ in the ‘great deep.'” So it’s a real challenge to get from the way the author envisioned the created world to the way we understand it today.

I think it’s more profitable to realize that the Genesis account here is describing a wrestling match between the waters and the earth. The waters “were great” or “prevailed” over the earth: “Prevail” in Hebrew is the root GBR, while the adjective “high” applied to the mountains or hills is GBH. Both roots convey the sense of strength and might. In other words, the greatest strength that the earth can muster—supposedly immovable mountains—cannot resist the force that God raises against it.

The flood was sent because almost the entire human race had turned away from God into violence and wickedness, but if they felt nothing could stop them from taking that path, their false sense of security has now been exposed. The story ultimately has a moral lesson, so if the only thing we take away from it is a conclusion about how widespread the flood was, or about how it happened, we’ve missed the point.

For a further discussion of the flood in light of the way the biblical authors envisioned the created world, see this related post.

How does knowing about Hezekiah’s name and the 130 proverbs help me to be more like Jesus?

Okay, you’ve convinced me that there are 130 sayings in one of the collections in the book of Proverbs because this is the numerical value of Hezekiah’s name in Hebrew. But how does knowing this help me be a better Christian? How will it make me more like Jesus?

Many of us may have been encouraged to look, every time we read the Bible, for some specific thing that we should believe or do to become more Christ-like. This, we’ve been told, is how God speaks to us through the Bible and how reading it helps us grow. And so we look for what one person called their “gem of the day,” a bright and inspiring thought to carry with us as we go about our activities.

There’s a real danger to this approach, however. It risks turning us into moralists who are trying hard on their own, in small ways each day, to become better people—to be able to say, as Émile Coué put it, “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.” What we should want instead is to become genuine followers of Jesus who are implicated in the grand story of God, which Jesus brought to its culmination, followers who are creatively and courageously living out that story in their own lives.

Knowing about Hezekiah’s name and the 130 proverbs won’t help you become a better moralist. But it will help you appreciate more about the story that you find yourself in, if you do want to become more like Jesus.

For one thing, it gives you a better understanding of what the Bible actually is. The Bible isn’t a loose compilation of thousands and thousands of discrete propositions that we need to select and arrange in order to get guidance on various subjects. Rather, it’s a carefully crafted and curated collection of literary compositions, some as short as poetic couplets (proverbs), others as long as the sprawling histories in Samuel-Kings or Chronicles-Ezra-Nehemiah. Seeing the care and intentionality behind the collection of proverbs “compiled by the men of Hezekiah” can help you appreciate the nature of the Bible and the crucial role that God allowed human agents to play in its composition and collection over the centuries. In the Bible, God was letting us humans write his story with him. And that’s what he still wants us to do in our lives today.

Seeing the honor that Hezekiah’s men paid to their royal patron by making sure their collection of proverbs came out to the right total (even though they had to repeat some proverbs from the earlier collection of Solomon’s sayings to reach that total) helps us recognize that at a particular moment in Israel’s history, after godless kings had suppressed devotion to the true God, a new righteous king was reshaping the affairs of the kingdom and allowing biblical scholarship to flourish once again. Behind that little number, 130, there’s quite a story about what it took and what it cost to give us the Bible. I personally find this much more inspiring than any “gem of the day” my eye might happen to glance upon and isolate from the flow of the text that makes up the flow of the story.

So, to sum up, details like the 130 proverbs help us appreciate the fabric of the Bible, how it has been woven together from real stories of real people who were striving and struggling to serve God in their own places and times, and who are implicitly calling on us to do the same. When we do, we become more like Jesus as we continue in our own lives the story, of which he is the center, found in the pages of the Bible.

Hezekiah and the 130-proverb collection: does it really add up?

To justify your organization of the book of Proverbs in The Books of the Bible, you claim that the collection of proverbs “compiled by the men of Hezekiah” has 130 sayings in it because this is the value of Hezekiah’s name in Hebrew. But his name is actually spelled different ways in the Bible, so the value could be 136, 140, or 146 instead. Besides, there are 138 verses in this section of Proverbs, or 137 if you don’t count the heading; neither of those match any possible value for Hezekiah’s name.

Hebrew, like several other languages, uses letters for numbers, so every word has a total numerical value that can be employed for symbolic purposes. The argument I’ve made in the introduction to Proverbs in The Books of the Bible and in my study guide to Proverbs/Ecclesiastes/James is that the compilers of this collection put exactly 130 sayings in it as a way of honoring their royal patron.

It is true that the name Hezekiah is spelled different ways in the Bible, resulting in different totals. In the book of Kings, for example, it’s typically Hizqiyahu, which adds up to 136. In the title to the book of Isaiah, it’s Yihizqiyah, which totals 140. And in Chronicles, it’s usually Yihizqiyahu, totaling 146.

However, the issue when it comes to appreciating the design of the book of Proverbs is how the name is actually spelled in the heading in that book that introduces the second collection of Solomon’s proverbs. There it is Hizqiyah, which adds up to 130. If the compilers of the book are using the value of Hezekiah’s name to determine the size of this collection, then 130 is the value we must consider them to be using.

And while it is true that the traditional verse divisions typically do correspond one-to-one with the individual sayings in the book of Proverbs, this is not the case in every part of the book. In this second collection of Solomon’s proverbs specifically, there are several longer sayings that make up more than one verse, for example:
Remove the dross from the silver,
and a silversmith can produce a vessel;
remove wicked officials from the king’s presence,
and his throne will be established through righteousness.
(This is Proverbs 25:4-5 in the traditional numbering.) So there will be something less than 137 actual proverbs in this collection.

It would not be difficult to propose a division of the material that would result in a total of 130 discrete sayings. However, it would be just as easy to dispute this division and suggest a different one that would yield another total. I don’t think it’s possible for us to establish today exactly how the compilers of Proverbs intended for this material to be divided up. However, the way they use, to all appearances, the value of Solomon’s name, 375, to determine the size of the first collection, which clearly contains 375 discrete sayings, strongly implies that the same thing is going on in the second collection of Solomon’s proverbs, the one “compiled by the men of Hezekiah.” This is particularly true since a few proverbs are repeated from the first collection (e.g. “The words of a gossip are like choice morsels; they go down to the inmost parts,” 18:8 = 26:22), suggesting that the compilers were trying to get up to a particular total.

A reader of this post has asked, “But how does knowing about Hezekiah and the 130 proverbs help me to be more like Jesus?” To see my reply, click here.

Did the earth’s atmosphere become translucent and then transparent, allowing light and then the sun to become visible on earth?

The following is a comment on my earlier post on the question of how there could have been light on the first day of creation when the sun was only created on the fourth day. Because of its length and detail, the comment is printed here and my response follows.

What a great question. Whilst I don’t believe that Genesis was written as a science textbook, I believe that there should be harmony between what we see in the Bible and what we observe in science. This is because God is the author of both.

One of the most important things one needs to do in scientific research and in Biblical hermeneutics is to determine the frame of reference. I think that it is important that readers of Genesis 1 understand that the days of Genesis come from the Hebrew word “yom” which can mean a very long indeterminate length of time . . . an age.

Furthermore, a change in the frame of reference takes place between Gen. 1:1 [“In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth”} and Gen. 1:2 [“Now the earth was formless and empty”]. It moves from the universe to the surface of the primordial earth.

The text does not say that light was created in Gen. 1:3 [“God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light”]. The actual Hebrew word is “hayah” which means to “appear” or to “cause to appear”. According to the best planetary theory the primordial earth had a dense and opaque atmosphere. This is exactly what the Scriptures say. Planetary models describe how the atmosphere slowly cleared and day and night were distinguishable . . . they “appeared”. Later on the atmosphere becomes translucent and then transparent. This explains the sun and moon “appearing” only on creation Day 4. This scientific model is in harmony with what the best science describes.

The rest of Genesis is also completely consistent with science. The establishment of a stable water cycle, the appearance of continents and plants, the clearing of the atmosphere, the appearance of sea animals and birds, followed by land animals and humans. Science tells us that this is the order that these things happened. But the Bible said it first! For an ancient writer to just get one of these creation events correct would be something. But to get them all correct and in the correct order is truly remarkable. The probability of an ancient writer getting the order of the 13 creation events correct is 13 factorial or 1 chance in 6.227 billion.

Don D. Wallar, M.Sc.
President, Toronto Chapter
Reasons to Believe
http://www.reasons.org

Don, thanks so much for sharing your own reflections on the Genesis account. It’s great to engage these questions with you.

It seems to me that we are approaching the account with different expectations. You’re expecting that it will be possible to match up its narrative details with the facts of natural history. I’m not necessarily expecting this; rather, I think we need to try to understand the account as a whole from its own perspective and then ask how it speaks to us today.

But this difference in approaches doesn’t mean we can’t talk. In the Genesis study guide in the Understanding the Books of the Bible series, I invite small group members to state their opinions briefly about how the Genesis creation account relates to science, but then “leave them at the door” and not debate them, so that the group can explore the text on a literary level. And that’s what you’ve allowed the two of us to do by your references to its literary structure and vocabulary. Let me then engage each of the points you made.

• The meaning of the word “yom.” The basic and most common meaning of the Hebrew word yom is “day.” In most cases this is an ordinary day. It’s true that the term can also be used figuratively to mean a longer, even an indeterminate, length of time. In Deuteronomy, for example, Moses tells the people of Israel to celebrate Passover so that they will always remember “the day of your going forth from the land of Egypt.” The NIV translates this as “the time of your departure,” recognizing that a longer period of time is in view. The prophets, to give another example, often begin their oracles by saying “In that day,” referring to an indefinite future period. And so forth. So how can we tell whether yom means a simple day, or a longer time period? We have to depend on the context. And the Genesis account says that for each “day,” “there was evening, and there was morning.” I take this as an indication from the author that we’re meant to understand these as ordinary days, which the Hebrews considered to begin at sunset. From the author’s observational perspective, creation looks like six days’ work: realms are created on the first three days (day vs. night, sky vs. sea, sea vs. land), and these realms are populated on the next three days. “A place for everything, and everything in its place”: the account communicates the original order, beauty, and harmony of God’s creation. But it doesn’t necessarily say that creation took place over a long period covering many ages.

• Change in reference after the start of the account. Our English translations give us the impression that there is a change in the frame of reference after the opening sentence of the creation account, a change “from the universe to the surface of the primordial earth,” as you put it. We hear about God creating “the heavens and the earth,” and then the action apparently shifts to the waters of the sea, grass on the ground, etc. But the words used for “heaven” (shemayim) and “earth” (‘erets) in the opening sentence are actually the very same words used for the “sky” and the “land” everywhere else in the account, for example, “God made lights for the expanse of the sky (shemayim),” “The land (‘erets) produced vegetation,” etc. So it would be more accurate to translate the opening line of the account this way: “In the beginning God created the sky and the land.” We would then realize that this is a summary of what follows, in the characteristic Hebrew narrative style. (For example, later in the book of Genesis we’re told in summary, “Joseph had a dream, and when he told it to his brothers, they hated him all the more.” Then we get the details.) So as I see it, there is no change in the frame of reference. An earthbound observer is describing “the sky and the land” throughout the whole account.

• The meaning of the word “hayah.” The Hebrew word for “to appear” is actually ra’ah, “to see,” in the Niphal or reflexive stem meaning “to be seen” or “to appear.” That’s the word that’s used in the creation account when God says, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” The word hayah means “to be.” It can also mean “to become,” that is, “to come into existence,” and that’s what I understand the term to mean with regard to the light of the first day: “God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and the light was (hayah),” that is, light came into existence. This is not a case of a previously created entity becoming visible.

Even though these considerations related to the vocabulary and structure of the account leave me convinced that it is literally intended but written from an observational perspective, I share your belief that there is an ultimate coherence between scientific discoveries of the wonder and beauty of the created universe and the Bible’s revelation to us of God as Creator. I happen to believe that these operate on two different levels, while it seems you believe they operate on the same level. But we both agree that we can learn much about God from what are often called the “two books” of God’s revelation, nature and Scripture. The fine organization you work with, Reasons to Believe, encourages believers and seekers to reflect with wonder and respect on the universe that God created, and I feel that the Genesis author is doing exactly the same thing, speaking out of an ancient culture to readers down through the ages.

How could a divinely inspired book be written from a limited human perspective?

Valentin de Boulogne, "St. Paul Writing His Epistles" — Valentin de Boulogne, “St. Paul Writing His Epistles”

In my last post I discussed the question of how there could have been light on the first day in the Genesis creation account when the sun wasn’t created until the fourth day. I suggested that the Genesis author was writing from an observational perspective—that he was describing on the first day the light that appears in the sky before the sun rises and which is still seen on days when the sun doesn’t become visible, believing this light to be independent of the sun. As I noted, this explanation may answer the original question, but it raises another one: How can the inspired word of God be expressed through such a limited human perspective? In the Bible, wasn’t the omniscient God making sure that everything the human authors wrote was fully accurate, scientifically and historically?

My response to this would be that we only have one divinely inspired book, the Bible, so that whatever expectations we might have of such a book, if we want to know what one is really like, we have to look at the only one we have. And when we do, it appears that the Bible is indeed written from an observational perspective: The Genesis creation account as a whole, for example, describes a flat earth under a solid sky, lit by a diffused light independent of the sun. That’s exactly how it appears.

But it’s actually very gracious of God to allow the biblical authors to tell his story from our perspective like this. Imagine if the Bible had said instead that while the sun might appear to be moving through the sky, it’s actually stationary relative to the earth, and while the ground beneath our feet might not appear to be moving, it’s actually spinning at a thousand miles an hour, creating the impression of the sun’s motion. People throughout the centuries would have rejected a book that made claims so outlandishly contrary to plain experience! People would still do the same in many parts of the world today. So by having the biblical authors express divine truths in observational language, God ensured that the Bible could travel into all different times and places, speaking to all human cultures. It can still speak to our own scientific culture today if we simply recognize and accept the perspective from which it is written, without being scandalized that this is contrary to the expectations we might have of it.

Indeed, the Bible itself says that it was delivered through human authors. The implication of this is that while the authors were given divine wisdom and insight, the human limitations on their knowledge were not supernaturally lifted. Peter, for example, describes the inspiration of Scripture in this way: “Men and women moved by the Holy Spirit spoke from God” (2 Peter 1:21). He does not say, “God took over the minds of people and used their hands to record His omniscient thoughts.” Later in that same epistle Peter describes Paul’s letters as “scripture,” but listen to how he describes their composition process: “So also our beloved brother Paul wrote to you according to the wisdom given him”—not “through the substitution of the divine mind for his own” (2 Peter 3:15).

Indeed, when we look at Paul’s letters themselves, we find that, even as inspired scripture, they show that there were limitations on Paul’s knowledge, which he himself recognized. For example, when pleading with the Corinthians to be unified, Paul said he was glad he only baptized Crispus and Gaius, so that no one could say they had been baptized in his name. “Oh yes,” he adds, “I also baptized the household of Stephanus, but beyond that, I don’t remember if I baptized anyone else.” This is a place where Paul admits the limitations on his own knowledge of a specific point.

Later in that same epistle, he shows that he was aware of the limitations on his knowledge generally, compared with God’s knowledge: “For we know only in part, we prophecy only in part; but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end. . . . For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.” Here we see a biblical author, in the very act of writing scripture, contrasting his partial knowledge with the divine omniscience. We should therefore not conclude that if the Bible is the word of God, it will demonstrate omniscience—among other ways, by transcending phenomenological description of the natural world—and that if it does not behave this way, it cannot be the word of God. Rather, we should marvel at God’s creativity and gracious condescension in allowing his story to be told from our perspective, so that people everywhere and at all times could hear it without impediment from within the framework of their own earthly existence.