THE VANITY OF ATTEMPTING TO GIVE RATIONAL ANSWERS TO SPIRITUAL QUESTIONS

Here's a little exercise I give to students:  Suppose you are on board a boat when a terrific storm comes up. The boat takes on water, and the small life boat breaks up as the waves beat it against the side of the boat. The Skipper says the boat is about to sink. He says there's an island nearby. Everyone will have to swim for it. Being a Christian, you instinctively grab your Bible, rush out on deck, and jump overboard. The impact of jumping into the water causes you to lose your grip on the Bible. When you get to the island, exhausted, cold, you discover a few soggy, crumpled pages from the Bible. Given that the Bible has always been important in your life, what biblical texts would you wish were left on those few pages?

The answers I get to that question are all over the board: Psalms, one or another of the Gospels, favorite books, like Esther, Ruth, etc.
Then I tell them my answer: Genesis chapters 1-6. Why did I make that choice?  What would your choice be?

I pick those early pages because without them the whole rest of the Bible would make no sense. There would be no answer to the question: Why did Jesus have to come, die on the cross, rise from the dead, and return to heaven.

Take for instance, Genesis one. If you ask most people - both non-Christians (if they have any knowledge of Genesis 1 at all), and  Christians, (who do supposedly know what's in Genesis 1), the answer that is almost universally given is that Genesis 1 is about how God created everything. Many times Christians will be confronted rather condescendingly, or with the presumption that anyone who believed such stuff must be nuts. "You don't really believe this is how the universe came to be, do you? But is Genesis 1 really about how God did it?  I wonder if there isn't something far more important to be found in those creation verses.

Suppose we were to see Genesis 1, as God introducing Himself to us - establishing a primary relationship, because He is a Being-for-relationship (1 John 4:8, 16, etc.), and because He loves us; and, "Oh, yes, by the way, here are a few things you should know about Me - I am this kind of Being: I just will something to be, and speak it into existence. I am that kind of super-natural Being; I have no beginning and no end. I am eternal, sovereign, infinite, omniscient, omnipresent, and a whole bunch of other things I'll let you know about as we get to know each other. " "This is eternal life, to know Thee, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom Thou hast sent." (John 17:3)

What happens so often, when this kind of contention arises is that Christians immediately fall into the trap of attempting to answer questions of a spiritual nature by rational means. That's a bit like attempting to solve an algebraic problem by making a cup of tea. Leaving the spiritual dimension out of our thought systems is like playing poker with only two thirds of a deck. Those first few chapters of Genesis confront us with what Pascal referred to as our human "wretchedness,"...the pervasive unhappiness that characterizes most of the human race, and is the root of man's inhumanity to man (P/S+D)
More later...