Everything you need to know about unicorns

If you've ever been subject to the popular atheist canard of unicorns in the Bible, you'll find this video very informative.

Awkward Angels

Don't you just hate it when you're sitting there minding your own business, reading your Bible, and everything is making sense. And then, just out of the blue, an angel comes and messes you up?

Hasn't happened to you you say? Allow me to refresh your memory. You remember when Peter was miraculously delivered from prison, and knocked at the door of Mary, the mother of John, where the disciples were gathered for prayer? What was their reaction when Rhoda, the servant girl came and said thew one they were praying for were outside at the door? "It is his Angel", they insisted. (Acts 12:15) It's his his what? It could be just the neighborhood I live in, but I never have people's angels knocking at my door in the middle of the night. It seems a little strange, doesn't it, that  this should be the first explanation they could think of?

Or How about the much discussed passage in 1. Cor 11, where Paul instructs the women to wear a head covering? I think both sides of the head covering debate are, if nothing else, united in their common bewilderedness as to the reason Paul states for this practice: "Because of the angels"

Maybe it will all make a little more sense if we learn what "aggelos", the Greek word for angel means. Let me just first make the disclaimer that I have no formal education in the Greek language, and that this should not substitute your doctor's advice, and so on and so forth. I just looked stuff up with e-Sword, like any regular bonehead can do.

That being said, aggelos means messenger. That's why you often see it modified with "of the Lord" or "from Heaven" in the Bible, making it clear that this particular messenger was a supernatural being sent from God. Other times the very same word, aggelos, is used for a human messenger. It was used for John the Baptist ("Behold, I send my messenger [aggelos] before your face, who will prepare your way before you", Mat 11:10). It was used for the messengers that Jesus sent before him to a Samaritan village ("And he sent messengers [aggelos] ahead of him, who went and entered a village of the Samaritans, to make preparations for him. ", Luk 9:52). Even Joshua and Caleb were angels ("And in the same way was not also Rahab the prostitute justified by works when she received the messengers [aggelos] and sent them out by another way?", Jas 2:25).

So I submit the following for your consideration: What about translating aggelos with messenger in those challenging Bible verses I mentioned? Does it not fit a lot better? Could the disciples have thought that Rhoda had misunderstood and that the man knocking at the door must be a messenger Peter had sent? Could Paul's instruction to the Corinthian church have been to act appropriately for the sake of the messengers he had sent with the letter? Or could it be about the message they were sending to the culture around them when the rumor of their feminist revolt were carried on the wings of gossips to the rest of the city?

I'm not about to start a new religion over this, but take it into consideration as you go about studying your Bible. Maybe a piece or two will fall into place.

The blessed curse of pain in childbirth

One of my early childhood memories that has stuck with me into adulthood is the day our pregnant cat started acting funny. I followed her into my bedroom where she made herself comfortable right in the middle of my bed, and started giving birth. I think within an hour or so the whole ordeal was over, and she was licking her kittens clean as they were nursing.

It really seemed like no big deal to her. There might have been some discomfort, but I've seen cats in pain (ten kids and a cat, you do the math), and what I saw on that day looked nothing like a cat in pain. Since then I have learned that this seems to be true for most animals. The only creature who seems to consistently experience any significant pain in childbirth is the human.

We find the reason for this difference in Genesis 3, as God deals with Adam and Eve after they have introduced sin into God's perfect creation. We refer to it as "the curse", and rightly so because this is where God "breaks" his creation, subjecting it to futility, pain, corruption and death as a physical picture of the spiritual reality that just took place.

Hang with me here, because this is the part that most people don't get: As such pictures, each of the curses that is put on creation, and on humans in particular, also serve us as blessings. It is God reaching out to us in our fallen state, saying "Look around you. This is what sin is like. Now come back to me". For example the curse for the man was strenuous work, pointing to the labor under the law to please God, with the sabbath as a day of rest to point to the new covenant of Grace ushered in by the death and resurrection of Christ.

A few months ago, when I found out my lovely wife was pregnant with our first child, among the many thoughts that entered my mind were these words from Genesis 3:16:

To the woman He said,"I will greatly multiply Your pain in childbirth, In pain you will bring forth children; (...)"

To a woman there is really no other blessing in life that comes close to the experience of becoming mothers. Why did God attach a curse of pain to it? Certainly it was not out of malice. What is the spiritual reality that God wants to show us by drawing a picture of the greatest blessing in a womans life resulting from excruciating, unbearable pain?

We find the answer in Romans 8:18-23, where God explains it all to us:

For I consider that the sufferings of this present time are not worthy to be compared with the glory that is to be revealed to us. 

For the anxious longing of the creation waits eagerly for the revealing of the sons of God. For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of Him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself also will be set free from its slavery to corruption into the freedom of the glory of the children of God. 

For we know that the whole creation groans and suffers the pains of childbirth together until now. And not only this, but also we ourselves, having the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our body.

So from these verses we can derive a list of at least three things that God is teaching us through greatly multiplying the womans pain in childbirth:

• That the world after the curse is a place of excruciating pain and suffering.
• That this suffering is not in vain. It is the pains of a birth process that will result in a new creation.
• When all things have been restored to their right order, and the pain is over, we will look back at it like every mother looks back at her birth with her newborn baby in her arms saying even if it was ten thousand times worse it still would have been worth it.

5 ways to sweep challenging Bible verses under the rug

Every now and then when we read our Bibles, we'll come across verses that we don't want to deal with. Either because it would cause us some imposition, or might cause conflict with the predominant worldview. So for the purpose of making  their own life easier and shying away from potential confrontations, innovative Christians have devised methods to make it as though those parts of God's infallible revelation never existed.

I arranged it in a list format because you have a short attention span and are more likely to click on something and read it if it's enumerated. I can write that because I know you'll probably skip this paragraph anyway to get to the list faster.


1. Make history
The events in the Bible took place a long time ago, and as the nice folks who made up evolution knows, you can make people believe almost anything if it was a really, really long time ago. So go ahead. Use your imagination, and make up some historical context that would explain away your difficult verse. Even if some discerning soul tried, it would be nearly impossible for them to gather enough historical evidence to disprove any claim you may have made. You'll find that almost no one will even want to challenge you, but welcome your explanation and start spreading it to sound smart.

Example: 1. Cor 14 says women should remain silent in church. But that's just because in Corinth the women would sit on one side of the church and shout questions about the sermon to their husbands on the other side, not realizing that it might be disruptive to the service until Paul wrote that to them.

No one will buy it you say? Actually that is a real example of made up history making it's rounds in a church near you as you read it. Get the drift? Let's go on.

2. Spiritual interpretation
If you don't like what the verse actually says, how about trying to replace the actual meaning of it with some symbolic interpretation. If someone challenges you on it, say that the reason they can't see it is because they're not as spiritual as you. After all your interpretation is a spiritual one, while theirs is just literal (practice saying the word "literal" with contempt in your voice). This will discourage any further inquiry into the matter.

Example: Someone recently wrote to me that divorce was not a sin, because marriage is symbolic of Christ and the church (that part is true), and thus that command only applied to the relationship between Christ and the church, and not actual marriage. (What puzzles me about that is I don't think this man would hold to the doctrine of the perseverance of the saints either. But since he clearly was not being rational I did not pursue that glaring contradiction any further.)

3. Inferences trump everything
If you keep reading verse after verse explicitly contradicting a doctrine that you want to perpetuate, how about trying a different path? Make an inference, or better yet, a series of inferences from ambiguous texts, leading to the conclusion that your doctrine is correct. I have to warn you that it will require a lot of work, but the payoff is great. You get to spread false doctrine, while at the same sounding knowledgeable and educated.

Example: Yes, there's a lot of verses that say homosexuality is a sin. But David and Jonathan were sure good buddies. From that I infer that they were gay, and based on that I further infer that God must be okay with homosexuality.

4. Make exceptions
Every once in a while you might find yourself in a situation that our all-knowing God didn't really think of before he wrote his commands. That's when you make an exception for yourself in your special situation. This allows you to feel better about your own sin, while at the same time allowing you to self-righteously judge others who sin.

Example: No sex before marriage? Well except if you really love them, and you really think this will be the person you marry some day.

5. Put an expiration date on it
This is a good one, because there are commands actual commands in the Bible that are legitimately  limited to a certain covenant and time (for example the commands about sacrifices and ritual cleanliness). So who would notice if you added a little bit to that system?

Example: Everything Jesus said before his death and resurrection (or better yet - before the day of Pentecost) was under the old covenant, so it must be discarded. At least most of it. We can keep the don't judge thing.

Alright. Hope you all got some new and fresh ideas for how to twist scripture. Have fun, and remember to always have a grownup help you if you try to do any of this at home.

Never read a Bible verse!

Greg Koukl from Stand To Reason has a rule about Bible verses. It goes thusly:

Never read a Bible verse. That's right, never read a Bible verse. Instead, always read a paragraph at least. (str.org)

That's one of the best pieces of advice you can ever get when it comes to reading the Bible. Many don't realize that, while the concepts of chapters and verses are useful tools to reference scriptures, they are not part of the original inspired canon. In fact the Bible didn't even have verses until around the 15th or 16th century. (You can learn more about that on wikipedia).

So why can isolated bible verses be a bad thing? Consider what would happen if you tried to read any other form of communication in the same way as many read the Bible. Imagine if you for instance would divide this blog post into different units, each consisting of one or two sentences. And then in stead of reading it through from beginning to end would randomly select a sentence from it to read whenever you felt so inclined. Do you think you'd ever come to know what I was actually trying to communicate to you?

Yet that is how many read their Bibles. They'll pick verses here and there and view them as an isolated unit. Each verse is completely detached from its context and interpreted merely on its own. In stead of letting the text of scripture explain itself, they might pray about it or meditate on the verse, and then settle for some arbitrary interpretation that they feel God has shown them. They even regard this as the more spiritual approach to the Bible since they imagine it must involve close interaction with the Holy Spirit. Yet at they same time they might be unsettled about the amount of contradictions they seem to be finding in the Bible.

Consider, if you would, a jigsaw puzzle of roughly 32 000 pieces. Each piece represents a Bible verse. There are two ways to approach the individual piece. In both cases you would carefully look at the picture on each piece. You'll study it to see what it might be. An eye, a part of a flower, or what keeps every jigsaw puzzler up at night; a light blue piece that goes somewhere in the huge sky that makes up for half the puzzle.

So we've studied the piece. Now what? Well, one approach would be to select a handful of puzzle pieces that you think are particularly beautiful. The ones that "speak to you". And then put the rest of the puzzle back in the box before you lay out your pieces in different patterns until you "have a peace about it". And behold, there's your picture of God. It's a rather small one, and not quite rational. The pieces don't seem to fit very well together. But perhaps you see that as beautiful in itself. Like in a postmodern piece of art, the impossibilities and unintelligibility of it is a part of the artwork. And it allows you the luxury of interpreting it any way you want. After all, nobody can speak authoritatively of the meaning of a picture like that.

Then there's another approach. But few chose it, because it involves a lot of hard work, and the result isn't really open for interpretation. You don't get to put the plain or gray or dark colored pieces back in the box to devote your attention to the pretty and colorful ones. No piece can be left out. You don't merely study the pieces on their own, but you study other pieces that look like it, and find which ones go together, and which ones go in a different portion of the puzzle. There's no other way around it than to say it's a tedious task.

Yet shortly into the puzzle you start to see details emerging. Beautiful things, that you would never have gathered from staring at the individual pieces. You start to see that even the boring pieces when seen together forms a picture of beauty beyond what you could have ever imagined. And for each piece you put in you see a fuller picture of the glory of God. And have greater and greater assurance that once the last piece is in there that glory will be enough to keep you occupied for all eternity. This is how you should read the Bible. Not a piece here and a piece there, but paragraphs, chapters and books seen together. That's how you come to truly know what God is like.