So far in this short series of posts we have looked at the TEXTUAL and HERMENEUTICAL reasons why we need to take the opening chapters of Genesis literally. Now we need to, very briefly, look at the THEOLOGICAL reasons. This is a massive subject and worthy of a much more exhaustive treatment, but this is…
In the first post in this series we considered the TEXTUAL reason by we need to take a literal view of the opening chapters of Genesis. Now we look at the hermeneutical reasons for doing so. 2. HERMENEUTICAL It is amazing how experienced and gifted Christian teachers and preachers inconsistently apply basic rules of interpretation…
It’s an interesting exercise to put the lifespans and the main characters in Genesis 1-11 side by side, based on the genealogical information we have in chapters 5 and 11 and elsewhere. Note that: One of the significant implications of this is that, with Babel being just 100 years after the flood, and with Noah…
Order, Order! I have, in recent days, been chewing over two trinities of names that occur in the early pages of Genesis and with which we are very familiar because of the order in which they appear. We have “Shem, Ham and Japheth” (5:32; 6:10; 7:13; 9:18; 10:1; 1 Chronicles 1:4) and “Abram, Nahor and…
I was reflecting this morning on what James tells us about Elijah and prayer. The prayer of a righteous person has great power as it is working. Elijah was a man with a nature like ours, and he prayed fervently that it might not rain, and for three years and six months it did not…
Genesis 5 brings us the first of numerous genealogical lists in the Bible and it’s worth taking a few moments to consider it. 5:1-2 The opening, introductory verses contain an expression, with a slight variation in this case, frequently found in Genesis. It is one of the 10 incidences of the “toledoth formula”, from the…