Apologia

More often than not I listen to the talk radio programs in my car instead of music. It seems like the playlist of the radio stations runs the same songs over and over again until I find myself disliking a song that at one point I really liked. Anyway, I was listening to a radio program on the way to work and it was one I had not listened to before. The guys doing the commentary portion were amiable enough and had touched on some interesting political discussion, but then the subject turned to faith. One of the fellows said he didn’t buy into “book based” religion. And he added that “if God was going to give us something in written form, it would be something of an astounding scientific nature that would confirm His existence.” I think the DJ was right and wrong. The Bible does present certain facts about creation that would have been astounding to the first readers and generations of readers, but I think he is wrong in that God would give us purely science when what we needed most was redemption.

The ideas and truths of the Bible that speak of the intricacies of His creation would have been hard to understand to the original readers. Not only that, some of its assertions has been hard to grasp for thousands of years. Think of what the Bible says about blood. Blood has been referred to as “our red river of life.” But it wasn’t until 1628 that the medical doctor William Harvey discovered that human blood circulates. Physicians had long developed their own theories about blood and how it was related to a person’s overall health. Consequently, the practice of draining small amounts of blood from a sick person came about to get rid of the “bad blood.” America’s first president died from a series of blood letting in an attempt to make him well. Could it be that ever since that time the politicians have been bleeding us to death to get even? Sorry, I couldn’t resist that last statement.

The truth about the nature of our physiology was given to us thousands of years before Washington or Harvey. Moses wrote in Leviticus 17:14 that “the life is in the blood.” The blood is the life of all flesh. It is only in the past few centuries that this was not considered an astounding revelation, but at its inception it was millennia ahead of any science. One of the reasons I trust the Word of God is because these types of facts are verified throughout its pages. Sometimes they are immediately verified, and some times it takes awhile for man-made science to discover its truth.