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Chapter 1: History or myth?

Some commentators say that the Bible should not be viewed as a history book but as a source of spiritual guidance so we can know who God is and what He is like.

I disagree. But before I explain further, let me tell you a story.

The Genesis problem

In my personal testimony (which you can read online at builtplant.org/my-testimony) I describe how I met God as I was about to pursue a graduate degree in astrophysics. My whole world turned upside down at that point, but although I was now a born-again Christian, I was still pretty much a pagan in my thinking. And pretty soon this began to worry me.

You see, before I met the Lord I believed fully in science. My childhood hero had been Isaac Asimov, and my life's ambition had been to know everything about everything in the universe. So I had no problem believing in evolution, in the Big Bang, or in anything else that standard scientific doctrine teaches us is true.

This naturally caused some mental difficulties for me when I tried to read the book of Genesis in the Old Testament. You say that God created the entire universe in six days? Astronomical observations indicate that the universe is about 13.7 billion years old!  What, all mankind originated from a single individual named Adam? What about those homo sapiens fossils several hundred thousand years old according to isotope dating? Noah's ark and the Flood? Well, what about the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs?

Being an new Christian however, I wanted to find answers to such questions, so I bought a bunch of commentaries on the book of Genesis. Unfortunately what I read in them only confused me further, for many of them said there was no need to take everything in Genesis as literally true provided you believe the Bible to be infallible and inerrant in regard to spiritual matters.

Great. At that point I began to grasp what the Evangelical theologian Francis Schaeffer had said in his classic book Escape from Reason where he described how the Enlightenment had separated truth into an objective lower-story and a subjective upper-story. In other words, the results of hard sciences like Physics should be viewed as objectively (really) true, yet still open to investigation. Religious experiences like mine on the other hand can only be considered as subjectively (personally) true since they vary between individuals.

And the consensus of most Evangelical commentators (excluding a few Fundamentalist ones) was that when you read the book of Genesis you can basically ignore any questions of historicity regarding the first eleven chapters, that is, up until Abraham appears on the scene. In other words, Abraham was a real person who had really existed in history; Noah and those earlier to him however can be viewed as mythical characters, though the moral lessons we can learn from the stories about them do have value.

So this division of the Bible into an upper-story portion of Genesis chapters 1 to 11 (which while true in a moral and spiritual sense didn't need to be considered true from a rational, scientific perspective) and the rest of the Bible (which was truly true and all really happened, including especially the death and resurrection of Jesus) created a tension within me, and over time this led me more and more to doubt the miraculous—at least as far as the possibility of miracles happening today were concerned.

And so I ended up a cessationist. I believed of course in angels and demons because they were described in the New Testament, but my belief was merely an upper-story belief that had no real relevance to my personal life, the lower-story where I ate, slept, worked and lived.

Yet something just didn't seem right. After all, I knew I had met the living God—it was an objective fact as far as I was concerned. But how to reconcile my spiritual experiences with my rationalist and materialist worldview? This was the question that caused me difficulties and created a logjam that hindered my growth as a new Christian.

What was I missing?

Thirty-three reasons

As the years progressed I served the Lord in various ways, got married (to the most wonderful woman in the world!) and started a new career as a high-school Physics teacher. Then one day my sister and her husband returned from a year they had spent at a church called Anaheim Vineyard. When Ingrid and I visited with them, they started excitedly telling us about how they had seen the sick being healed and demons driven out of people.

And I thought: No, that can't be right. By this time I had gravitated strongly towards Calvinism, partly because the systematic nature of Calvinist theology appealed to my mathematical training, but also because its promise of the Perseverance of the Saints gave me hope regarding my ongoing struggle with sin in my life.

But my brother-in-law wanted to talk more with me about what they had experienced down in Anaheim, so we arranged a time to meet together the following week. This gave me some time to prepare, so I carefully studied the subject of healing in the Bible and summarized my results in a four-page handwritten document listing thirty-three reasons why divine healing wasn't for today.

I was ready for our discussion! When the day arrived, I began by reading through my thirty-three arguments why we cannot expect the sick to be healed today like they were during the Apostolic times when we pray for them. My brother-in-law listened patiently as I listed all my reasons, and when I was finished and sat back with a triumphant smile, he said:

"The problem with us Evangelicals today is that we don't take Jesus seriously. If Jesus is our model, then we are supposed to do the things that he did, like heal the sick and cast out demons."

I could almost hear the air coming out of my balloon.

Being like Jesus

Jesus said that a disciple is supposed to be like his teacher (Matt 10:25, Luke 6:40). What does it mean to be like Jesus? In our free book Simple Kingdom: Discipleship we demonstrated from Scripture that being "like" Jesus means doing the same kind of stuff that he did. So what did Jesus do when he was among us? He healed the sick, cast out demons, and proclaimed the good news of the kingdom of God. And what did Jesus train his earliest disciples to do? To heal the sick, cast out demons, and proclaim the good news of the kingdom of God (Luke 9:1-2). So what are we to do today as followers of Jesus? Yep, you're right!   

But how can we possibly do the kinds of things that Jesus did, like make the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, and deliver people from demonic oppression? Well, the truth is we can't—at least not by our own power. But Jesus gave authority and power to his disciples to perform such signs and wonders as they traveled around proclaiming the kingdom of God. And he didn't just give this to the Twelve (Luke 9:1-2) but also to others he had trained and sent out to proclaim the good news (Luke 10:1,9) and the Great Commission in Matt 28:18-20 and other verses in the New Testament strongly suggest that such authority and power is available for all who are willing to become his followers.

But is it really true that signs and wonders like this are for today? After our meeting my brother-in-law gave us a box of cassette tapes of John Wimber teaching on healing and other subjects, and as I listened to these tapes I began to undergo a paradigm shift in my worldview. Clearly the miraculous was happening to some degree down there in Anaheim, but can it also happen here, and with us? But first we needed convincing that this was not some new teaching but a teaching and practice that has always been present in the Church, at least in some fashion and to some degree.

So to find out, Ingrid and I started spending our weekends in the library at our university reading the works of the Church Fathers. Our goal as we read all this material was to look for healing and deliverance stories that were congruent to and consistent with the kinds of things that we heard were happening at Anaheim Vineyard, and soon we had compiled a whole binder of such stories from the second to the twelfth century.

Coincident with our research into signs and wonders in church history, Ingrid and I also started praying for the sick and troubled every opportunity we got, both in the home fellowships we started and with individuals we happened to meet in the marketplace. I kept detailed records at the time of how we ministered to people and the results, and about a decade after we began I did some analysis and discovered that about 10-15 percent of those we prayed for had been immediately healed and about 30-40 percent had been progressively or partially healed. Most of the remainder had at least felt loved by our attempts at ministering to them.

This sounds in retrospect like a pretty good record, but it often discouraged me that many of those we prayed for didn't get healed. So again the question arose: what was I missing?

The missing link

It slowly became apparent to me that what I was missing was faith. Not faith for salvation through Christ's death on the cross, but faith for the release of God's power for divine healing and deliverance. Wimber talks about this in chapter 7 of his book Power Healing, and it took me a long time to acknowledge that I was an ὀλιγόπιστοι, a man of little faith (Matt 17:19-20). And like the first disciples who had asked Jesus to increase their faith (Luke 17:5) but had only received what seemed to be a rebuke as his answer (Luke 17:6) followed by a parable that said "Just do as you're told" (Luke 17:7-10), I too wondered discouragedly how I could somehow have more faith whenever I prayed for the sick and oppressed.

Remember that before I became a Christian I had been a pagan living in a universe with no God. Not only my deeds were pagan, but also my thinking. And slowly, it dawned on me that my thinking needed to change. The apostle Paul says "Do not be conformed to this world, but be transformed by the renewal of your mind (Romans 12:2). But transformed in what way? And how? How could I increase my faith in God's miraculous power when everything in the world I lived in was against there even being a God, against everything that is supernatural and miraculous, against there being a heaven or a hell?

Then one day it dawned on me that if a disciple (like me) is supposed to do what his teacher (Jesus) does, then he should also try to think the way his teacher does. In particular, as followers of Christ our thinking about the nature and utility of the Holy Scriptures should align with how Jesus viewed them.

Jesus and Genesis

For Jesus, the Scriptures meant the Old Testament which included the book of Genesis. How did Jesus view the story of Noah and the Flood? Did he consider it history, or a fable invented to convey a moral lesson? What about the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah? Science has found no conclusive proof that these cities ever existed. Let's examine what Jesus says about these stories and some others whose historicity modern science rejects.

"For as were the days of Noah, so will be the coming of the Son of Man. For as in those days before the flood they were eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage, until the day when Noah entered the ark, and they were unaware until the flood came and swept them all away, so will be the coming of the Son of Man." (Matt 24:37-39)

What's important to notice here is that Jesus ties the fact of Noah's ark and the Flood with the fact that he will return again. I say "fact" concerning Noah because as a Christian I consider it a fact that Jesus will return one day. Why? Because he said he will (John 14:1-3) and I believe what Jesus says. And the grammar of these verses in Matthew clearly state that as this thing is true, so this other thing is true. This is the simple, no-brainer way to understand the passage.

The same is true with regard to the story about Sodom and Gomorrah:

"Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago in sackcloth and ashes. But I tell you, it will be more bearable on the day of judgment for Tyre and Sidon than for you. And you, Capernaum, will you be exalted to heaven? You will be brought down to Hades. For if the mighty works done in you had been done in Sodom, it would have remained until this day. But I tell you that it will be more tolerable on the day of judgment for the land of Sodom than for you." (Matt 11:21-24)

In the above passage Jesus makes mention of cities like Tyre and Sidon whose historical existence has been archeologically confirmed. But he also includes Sodom here in a way that one cannot help but think that Jesus believes that city once existed. And the clear implication of this passage is that God's judgment on Sodom as described in Genesis really happened, because Jesus is warning the town of Capernaum that they're going to receive a worse judgement than Sodom's because they rejected him as their Messiah.

So Jesus clearly believed the Flood happened, that Noah built an ark, and that fire fell from heaven upon Sodom and Gomorrah. There's no good reason to believe that he didn't consider these stories from the book of Genesis as anything but literally true.

Or is there? Many Christians, including me and probably you as well, have tried to find ways around believing in the historicity of such stories. For example, the Athanasian Creed says that Jesus is both fully man and fully God. And if he was fully man when he lived among us, then his understanding was limited by his human brain except when his divine nature expressed itself within him. Furthermore, as fully human he was a man of his time, immersed in the worldview and thinking of the age he lived in which believed in the existence of angels and spirits and in Hebrew myths and fables such as those in the early chapters of Genesis.

But dividing truth into lower-story (historical) and upper-story (mythical) categories like this is, to put it simply, hazardous to your faith. For if you don't believe what Jesus says about Noah, how can you believe what he says about his second coming? And if you don't believe the story about what happened to Sodom, do you really believe in a final Day of Judgment?

It gets worse—from the viewpoint of someone raised on science—when we read these verses from the series of woes Jesus pronounced on the scribes and Pharisees:

"Therefore I send you prophets and wise men and scribes, some of whom you will kill and crucify, and some you will flog in your synagogues and persecute from town to town, so that on you may come all the righteous blood shed on earth, from the blood of righteous Abel to the blood of Zechariah the son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the sanctuary and the altar." (Matt 23:34-35)

There is virtually no reason to believe that the prophet Zechariah being referred to here never existed. And the plain and obvious way of understanding Jesus's words here is that he believed that as there really was a Zechariah, then there really was an Abel also. And who was Abel's father? You guessed it.

The same can be said concerning stories from the Old Testament that Jesus used in his teaching. For example, Jonah (Matt 12:39-40) and Daniel (Matt 24:15) both have fantastic stories associated with them in the Old Testament, stories which modern science (and many Biblical commentators) consider to be fiction. Jesus however refers to these men in a way that clearly indicates not only that they existed but that the stories about them are literally true.

Do we have to believe this stuff too?

Not above your teacher

In the Introduction of this book we included the following statement by Jesus:

"A disciple is not above his teacher, nor a servant above his master. It is enough for the disciple to be like his teacher, and the servant like his master." (Matt 10:24-25)

We've focused up until now on how Jesus says here that as his disciples we should be like him. And that's really the essence of what discipleship is all about: a disciple is trained to become like his teacher in thought, word and deed.

But what we haven't looked at is the first part where Jesus says that a disciple is not above his teacher. And this is essential to understand if you want to follow Jesus. He is the teacher, you are the student. He knows more than you, and it's your job to learn from him, not to form judgements concerning him.

And that's exactly what many of us Evangelicals, including myself for a long time, do all the time when we divide parts of the Bible into this bit really happened, but this bit has been embellished; this part is true, this part is fiction; this portion has relevance for my life, but I can safely ignore this part because it's historicity is not important, just the moral lesson one can draw from it.

It's especially true that we are positioning ourselves above Jesus when we postulate theories concerning his humanity so we can ignore statements Jesus made that make us uncomfortable because they clash with our scientific, materialist, rationalist thinking as "educated" Evangelicals.

How far we are from being like little children, which Jesus says we must become in order to enter the kingdom of God (Matt 18:3).

Conclusion

How can thinking like Jesus did concerning the historicity of the stories in the book of Genesis be reconciled with what modern science teaches us? Truth is, I don't know. And actually, I don’t really care that I don't know.

You see, I'm not like some believers who spend their time and energy trying to scientifically prove that the Flood really happened, that a city named Sodom once existed, that Adam and Eve were created six thousand years ago, and so on. I have better things to do with my time and energy, like praying for the sick and telling people about Jesus. And I don't really believe that a non-believer would ever be convinced by evidence that a worldwide flood really happened, because few people really believe in science nowadays—most believe only what they want to believe.

What I do know though, is that what science tells us about the universe is incomplete. Because there's a whole other dimension, for want of a better word, to reality that is beyond what we are able to see or handle or measure or study. I'm referring angels and demons, heaven and hell, signs and wonders, the resurrection, and of course God. None of this can be proven by science, but it's all real—objectively real—because it's testified by Jesus and in Scriptures himself authenticates as objectively true.

And I have also learned, mostly from personal experience through years of struggling to be his disciple, that the more I submit my thinking to Jesus by believing what he said is true, the more I am able to have faith for doing the kind of stuff he tells us to do, like healing the sick and casting out demons.

After all, how can we expect to be like Jesus if we think we're smarter than him?