May 4, 2011 – Numbers 9

Acts 4:12 is what got me thinking about that thing yesterday with the Lutheran name.  “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.”  It was on my daily Bible verse calendar.

I was reading a book yesterday and thought of something I wanted to share.  Since I cannot think of anything to write on this chapter, accept talking about the complete obedience to God, I thought I would share it.  The book I am reading is about Genesis and the 10 commandments and  how they are a reaction to the things that occurred in Genesis.  I don’t know if I will finish the book because in the first discussion and second chapter the author is already said he does not believe God to be omnipotent but a God that is learning as He goes.  This is based, at least in this chapter, on the fact that God said if Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge they would die Genesis 2:17.  But God doesn’t follow through on His promise because they eat from the tree and do not immediately die.  They eventually die, but the promise is that they will die on the day they eat.  The author goes on to talk about God learning that there is a difference between actual threats and following through and that He changes His mind many times throughout the Bible.  I really had to think about this because it does appear to be a backing away from a promise and a perfect God cannot break a promise.

It comes down to the thought that if something in the Bible appears to be contradictory, maybe we are not looking at it correctly.  So I thought about what dying might mean.  Could it only mean physical death or could it mean something else.  To try and answer this, I looked at the promise (that day you will die) and what actually happened immediately after they ate the fruit.  Genesis 3:7 “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked”.  So something did happen right away when they ate the fruit.  Not a physical death, but a death of their innocence.  By this act, sin enters the world and the human, made in the image of God, allows sin to corrupt us.  The human is physically changed forever and has this desire to sin, also called Concupiscence.  The sin that enters the world does cause human mortality by allowing physical death and spiritual mortality by allowing us to chose sin over God.  I think the author is limiting God’s definition of what death means when He made His promise and from that limiting, leads him to limit God over-all power of being omnipotent and all perfection.  Maybe I will continue to read it, but I was hoping for something more insightful than something I was going to have disagreements with starting from the beginning.

But this whole thought process got me thinking about sin and death and how to perhaps relate that to natural disasters.  I can understand cancer as a disease in the body that is usually caused by something that has entered the body when it should not have.  Even some people who are innocent themselves can die from cancer that started from someone else’s act.  You think of mother’s that drink when pregnant, or second hand smoke, or the chemicals we put in our foods to maybe make a little more profit.  Cancer and diseases like that have always been something I can see connected to sin, either that persons or someone else somewhere down the line.  Whether it is fair or unjust, that is not for me to decide, I am just saying the connection has been something I feel I can wrap my head around. 

But natural disasters are another thing.  I have always thought it is harder to show they are justified by a God that is Love.  I don’t know why one thought led to another, but here is a notion I came up with.  I take that back, the author was talking about the Tower of Babel and humans wanting to be God or on God’s level.  When natural disasters occur, there is virtually nothing you can do about them.  You can take shelter, you can run away, you can build a levee, but if nature wants to get you, it will get you.  Natural disasters should be a shot across the bow for all of these new age movements that want people to be their own Gods.  With the rise in secularism, atheism, the new age movement, and all the home grown ideologies that we can control the things around us and nothing is bad and all that, a natural disaster brings it all home.  We have little to no control over the world.  Things are out of our hands and we are not Gods.  When we build large cities on fault lines, entire cities below sea level, nuclear power plants on the coast of known volatile areas, we are saying we are in control.  I heard all the people talking about Japan and the nuclear plant and all the precautions that they had and how they were all thrown out the window because of the size of the disaster.  That makes sense if someone is trying to get a message across that they have to make it clear. 

That may all sound insensitive, and I don’t mean for it to be, I was trying to understand things in light of what I was reading and it seems logical.  People talk about global warming and the idea that these natural disasters are going to get bigger.  Bigger hurricanes, bigger tornadoes, bigger floods, all of it.  We are told that this is all because of our wasteful lives and the trash we have selfishly used and continue to use.  That sounds reasonable to me.  But it also seems to make sense that the increased magnitude of things coincides with a decline in morality in the world and a decline in looking to God.  We are looking to science and our own human intelligence and thinking we can figure it all out.  We think we have control.  I think the natural disasters show us that we do not and will never have control.  But when will people realize that.  When will that balance tip back to people turning to God.  When will we stop trying to be God.   The question is what will be our Babel. 

The book is The Genesis of Justice: Ten Stories of Biblical Injustice That Led to the Ten Commandments and Modern Law by Alan M. Dershowitz