Indeed, ignorance of the Bible will lead somebody to ‘wrestle’ the word of God!
(2 Peter 3:16)
“As also in all his epistles, speaking in them of these things; in which are some things hard to be understood, which they that are unlearned and unstable wrest, as they do also the other Scriptures, unto their own destruction.”
Note that the unlearned are the ones that ‘wrest’ or twist the word of God. In our world today, in spite of the advancement in knowledge and technology, there are some sectors of human society that live in their own chosen world understanding only their own adapted language. These are the imaginary people that believe that God is imaginary. Their brains are neither flexible nor elastic. A rubber band can be elastic to accommodate a bundle of money not normally intended for it to bind. So long as it has not reached the point of its perfect elasticity, you can always rely that a rubber band is accommodating. But what is frustrating is that there are people lesser in degree of elasticity than a rubber band without brains! They have read in the Bible the word ‘earth’ and because of their ignorance, they readily presumed that it pertains to the whole planet earth; and because of their ‘non-elastic mind’, they have this to say:
“THERE WAS NEVER A WORLDWIDE FLOOD THAT COVERED MOUNT EVEREST LIKE THE BIBLE SAYS”
[Video: An atheist poor reasoning answered 2]
Nowhere in the Bible can you find any verse that speaks of a ‘worldwide flood’. What is in the Bible are the following informations:
(Genesis 7:10-12)
“And it came to pass after seven days, that the waters of the flood were upon the earth. In the six hundredth year of Noah’s life, in the second month, the seventeenth day of the month, the same day were all the fountains of the great deep broken up, and the windows of heaven were opened. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.”
(Genesis 7:17-20)
“And the flood was forty days upon the earth; and the waters increased, and bore up the ark, and it was lifted up above the earth. And the waters prevailed, and were increased greatly upon the earth; and the ark went upon the face of the waters. And the waters prevailed exceedingly upon the earth; and all the high hills, that were under the whole heaven, were covered. Fifteen cubits upward did the waters prevail; and the mountains were covered.”
Nowhere in these verses mentioned can you find a hint of a ‘worldwide flood’. The flood was ‘upon the earth’. All throughout theses verses the word earth was used. The earth or ‘erets’ in Hebrew, means:
‘erets
eh’-rets
From an unused root probably meaning to be firm; the earth (at large, or partitively a land): - X common, country, earth, field, ground, land, X nations, way, + wilderness, world. (Dictionaries of Hebrew and Greek Words taken from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance by James Strong, S.T.D., LL.D., 1890.)
The word ‘erets’ may mean ‘partitively, a land, a country, a field, a ground, etc. Notice Genesis 1:10, which says;
“And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.”
The dry land that God caused to appear on the surface of the waters which He called “seas”, He called earth — ‘erets’! Note that the ‘earth’ here does not include the seas.
The flood that happened in the time of Noah flooded the ‘erets’ and not the seas… Of course, YOU DO NOT FLOOD THE SEAS! So, this is not a worldwide flood as these imaginary idiots claim. I hope they will not be offended because they are imaginary.
The Bible has a unique language. It was written to be read, first by the people of the then known world. In the time of the apostle Paul, he said:
(Colossians 1:23)
“If ye continue in the faith grounded and settled, and be not moved away from the hope of the gospel, which ye have heard, and which was preached to every creature which is under heaven; whereof I Paul am made a minister…”
Here, he used the past tense of the word ‘kerusso’. Paul is confident when he wrote to the Colossians that he was able to preach the Gospel to ‘every’ creature which is under heaven. At about the same time that Paul was preaching the gospel to the known world (the world of the Roman Empire), the famous Rice Terraces in Banaue, Mountain Province in the Philippines is being built by the Ifugaos, one of the aborigines of the Filipinos.
The Banaue Rice Terraces are 2000-year old terraces that were carved into the mountains of Ifugao in the Philippines by ancestors of the Batad indigenous people. It is commonly thought that the terraces were built with minimal equipment, largely by hand. The terraces are located approximately 1500 meters (5000 feet) above sea level and cover 10,360 square kilometers (about 4000 square miles) of mountainside. They are fed by an ancient irrigation system from the rainforests above the terraces.
But Paul did not reach the Philippines, or the Americas, so, having flexibility in mind in understanding the language of the Bible we can discern that what the apostle Paul means when he said he “preached the gospel to every creature under heaven”, is to the people only of the known world then. Incidentally, the Philippines was discovered only in the sixteenth century by the Europeans led by Ferdinand Magellan.
When the Bible classified the bats (Leviticus 11:13,19) as belonging to the ‘oph’ (Hebrew), it means that it is classified with those “as covering with wings” or those “that flieth”.
oph
From H5774; a bird (as covered with feathers, or rather as covering with wings), often collective: – bird, that flieth, flying, fowl (Dictionaries of Hebrew and Greek Words taken from Strong’s Exhaustive Concordance by James Strong, S.T.D., LL.D., 1890.)
Detractors of the Bible say that it is not scientific because science classifies bats as belonging to the mammalian group. They rely very much on science, and for them science is the final authority of what they believe. This author is not against science, but human science is not as exact as ‘divine science’ in the Scriptures.
(Daniel 1:4)
“Children in whom was no blemish, but well favored, and skillful in all wisdom, and cunning in knowledge, and understanding science, and such as had ability in them to stand in the king’s palace, and whom they might teach the learning and the tongue of the Chaldeans.”
Human science has classified plants and animals only on the seventeenth and eighteenth century.
At any one time in history, there are millions of different kinds of plants and animals in the world. In 1753, a scientist in Sweden named Carolus Linnaeus thought of an orderly system for classifying plants and animals. He grouped all organisms according to a two-part name (binomial). The first part of the name is the “generic” grouping or genus. The second part is the “specific” grouping or species. Scientists today still use this basic idea of his system, but modern classifications systems are much more complicated having many levels of hierarchical organization. For example, taxonomic systems group organisms according to structure and physiological connections between organisms.
[Link: http://www.fi.edu/tfi/units/life/classify/classify.html]
Before these times, the acceptable classifications for bats, because they fly, is that they belong to the ‘ophs’ or the fowls, or the birds. The book of Leviticus was written almost 2500 years before classifications in human science came. Note that the classification introduced by Linnaeus employs two basic ideas: the ‘generic’ and the ‘specific’. The classification used in the Bible is exactly generic, and therefore, in a way, scientific! After all, the word mammal is not in the Bible! The word mammalia was coined by Linnaeus only in 1758!
Mammalia (1773), coined 1758 by Linnaeus for the class of mammals, from neut. pl. of L.L. mammalis “of the breast,” from L. mamma “breast,” perhaps cognate with mamma.
[Link: http://http://www.fi.edu/tfi/units/life/classify/classify.html]
The book of Leviticus that records the existence of bats was written by Moses in around 1512 BC, more than three thousand years before Linnaeus was born!
When the apostles were commissioned by the Lord Jesus Christ to make disciples and ‘teach all nations’, the Lord Jesus Christ knows, and the apostles understood it, that He speaks only of all nations of the ‘known world’. It is impossible for the apostles to physically reach the Americas or my country, the Philippines. The apostles do not have the slightest idea that there are countries existing that time, like the Philippines and the Americas! The phrase “all nations” does not necessarily include all nations of the world or the whole earth.
When the Bible mentioned that the whole ‘erets’ was flooded, it does not necessarily mean that the whole world, including the seas, were flooded! Remember that the word ‘erets’ was used in the Bible, not only to mean the planet earth, but also the dry land.
Most probably, Noah lived not far from where Adam and Eve lived. He is about the tenth generation from Adam. Adam and Eve lived not far from Eden after being expelled from the garden of Eden. Eden is within Turkey. So, the probability is that the flood happened within Turkey. The highest mountain ranges in Turkey are the mountains of Ararat. It was where the ark rested.
(Genesis 8:4)
“And the ark rested in the seventh month, on the seventeenth day of the month, upon the mountains of Ararat.”
The mountains of Ararat are at the extreme eastern part of Turkey. The ark of Noah did not go too far from ground where it floated because it was not meant to travel, but to float.
The idea of a worldwide flood did not come from the Bible, but from people who do not understand its language!
Published on May 30th, 2007 at esoriano.wordpress.com