John Dekker's Day

9:38AM - Learning from Skeptics

I discovered the Skeptic's Annotated Bible the other day – HT to Jonathan Lange.

Basically, this site contains the Bible, with comments by a non-Christian pointing out objections and contradictions. And although many of these are blasphemous, it's great to see unbelievers reading Scripture. I also believe that this could be an important resource for pastors and preachers, for three reasons. In the first place, it alerts us to the sort of objections people have to the Bible, so that we can be prepared with an answer. Secondly, some of the statements they make are so wonderfully simple and true: (And some are so obvious, it's incredible why Christians debate them!)

On Exodus 20:11 – Believers often say that the "days" of creation should be taken allegorically, but this verse is quite clear. God created the universe in six 24 hour days.
On Psalm 147:7 – God knows how many stars there are and knows them all by name. That's pretty impressive since there are 100 billion or so galaxies, each containing about 100 billion stars.
On Matthew 24:37 – Jesus believed that Noah's flood actually happened.

The third reason to utilise this resource is that many apparent contradictions in the Bible point to a significant things in the text. They alert us to the sort of questions we should be asking about the passage. I did a post the other day on what an apparent contradiction in 2 Kings might teach us. Since I had been preaching on 2 Kings 22 – 23, I looked up those chapters in the SAB, and I found another "contradiction" at 2 Kings 22:20 – God promises Josiah that he will have a peaceful death. But Josiah's death was anything but peaceful. This is an issue that needs to be addressed if one wants to understand the story of Josiah.

Some other apparent contradictions, that lead instead to a deeper understanding of the point of the text, are:

On Exodus 16:35 – It took the Israelites 40 years to travel from Egypt to Canaan, yet such a journey, even at that time, would have taken no more than ten days.
On Numbers 1:45 – The Israelite population went from seventy to several million (over 600,000 adult males) in about 400 years.
On Esther 6:6 – "Haman thought in his heart." Most people think with their heads, but biblical folks think with their hearts.
On 2 Peter 2:8 – Lot, who did some horrible things, was a "just" and "righteous man".