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In The Image Of God

Genesis 1:27 says that humanity was created in God’s image.

For me, the key revelation here is in which definition is used for “man”. Just like in English, “man” can be the singular, the species, the male gender, or the collective members of any of those other definitions. But the reading I find epiphanous is “man” referring to the collective members of the group. The scripture isn’t informing us so much that God has 10 fingers and toes and all that so he made us that way (i.e. the “species” reading, although I’m sure that reading is also valid), but that God is a community of beings working together in perfect harmony, and so he always intended for mankind to be the same way.

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He Had No Form Or Majesty That We Should Look At Him

One revelation that I had about Isaiah 53:2 is that it’s not saying that Jesus was ugly…instead, I think it’s saying that he was completely forgettable in appearance. This lines up with a few things:

  • Jesus was a common name, the “John Smith” of the day.
  • Men in society tend to be ignored. While girls and women have to deal with too much unwanted attention, guys have the opposite problem – in most situations everyone around us in society basically just dismisses us. Most of the time we feel like the aptly titled The Son Of Man, sometimes colloquially known as The Faceless Businessman.

I think what all of this adds up to is a sort of broader lesson that Christ’s image is in everyone, and for us all to not let anyone slip by our notice without realizing that we should love them like Christ.

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Having A Healthy Attitude On Money, And Self-Esteem

Thankfully, I have never been put in a place of financial crisis (although I have been a starving college student), so my attitudes towards money have never stringently been tested. With that being said, I believe I have a fairly healthy attitude towards money.

Both my wife and I are fairly high earners – so we have a nice amount of money – but here’s the thing: it’s not important. It’s transient. To be stewarded, sure, and spent/invested/given away responsibly – but the point is that it comes in at certain rates and we’re to responsibly make sure it goes out in reasonable directions. If we were to lose everything within our net worth, we could earn it back. The true value isn’t how much or little money we have, but the fact that we’re capable of earning money through hard work. That deep knowledge of an underlying intrinsic value makes all the questions normally pondered about money seem flighty and relatively meaningless.

For me personally, this attitude is easiest to explain with the money example above, but I find that it’s applicable to many other fields as well. There are times people have issued insults at me that I could have taken offense at, except for the personal knowledge of some core characteristic of myself makes the accusation irrelevant or a non-sequitur.

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Observation: Ezekiel And Daniel

I noticed in recent reading of Ezekiel that Daniel is mentioned several times, and as a sort of titan of faith. What’s interesting about this is that Ezekiel predates Daniel, but that the references don’t seem to be prophecy. Instead, they’re almost historical.

While there’s a bit of debate about who this mentioned Daniel is, the theory I like the best is that Daniel was more of a title/almost archetypal reference, like when we say someone was a real Paul Bunyan of a man, for example. What I find appealing about this reading is that it then makes some increasing sense of the Book of Daniel and some of the dueterocanonical books: the collection of stories that mention Daniel aren’t necessarily all of the same character, but are more tellings of some small group of people who acted in particularly faithful ways.

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Jesus’ Specific Cause Of Death

This is fascinating, and I think that the explanation lines up enough things to make it extremely likely. When John mentions blood and water coming out of Jesus’ side, it’s actually a small scientific clue left in the Bible for us, and it lines up with why he died on the cross so quickly – a type of cardiac arrest that causes the blood to seize and separate. Jesus literally died of a broken heart.

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On Libertarianism And Faith

While I have a different blog to journal my thoughts about politics and current events, and I don’t intend to post much in this blog about either topic. However, there is one discussion I’ve had a few times, on my faith-based moral justification for being a libertarian. So there are a few items worth mentioning on the subject.

  • I am in favor of legalizing many unsavory and currently illicit or illegal behaviors. This is not because I support those behaviors, but because I think that the law and government force isn’t the best way to stop or discourage those behaviors. Trying to stop drunkenness by banning alcohol gets you gangsters and intrusive government enforcement, and the more effective way for society to deal with the problem is Alcoholics Anonymous and church-led 12 step programs. People, as long as they’re not directly hurting others, should be allowed to make bad decisions regarding their own life, and the church should try and love and teach society to help them make better decisions. As a side note, and here’s the main faith tie-in, this pretty much mirrors how God set up this entire world: a neutral space to give people the freedom to learn to choose him.
  • Similarly, I don’t think that Government programs to help the needy are compassionate. Taking money from one person to give it to another isn’t compassion, and supporting a program that does so isn’t either. Especially when such programs are always incredibly inefficient compared with private, usually religious charities that do the same thing.
  • Lastly, and maybe most importantly, people tend to make politics too important in their lives, and turn politics into a sort of religion. One of the main reasons I support libertarian positions is that I think that we should do what we can to minimize the importance of big politics in people’s lives, and hopefully they’ll learn to fill those aspects with God instead.
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How I Read The Bible – Or The Merits Of “Literal” Truth

I figure I should start with clarifying the view I take towards truth and “literal” truth in the Bible. First, I do believe the Bible is true – but I probably take a different view of truth than many, because I think that there are several things that modify the concept of truth in the Bible.

First and foremost, I believe that while the Bible is God’s word, it was written by and in the voice of the various authors he gave it to. This means that to get at the “truth” of something, you have to filter it through that author’s words. My favorite example is the star of Bethlehem. Was it really a fixed point of light in the sky in the east, when all the other celestial objects in our sky rotate east to west? Maybe – God is certainly capable – but I find it a lot more likely that it was one of the most spectacular and rarest forms of planetary conjunctions, which would have rotated through the night just like all of the other items in the sky. And when a first century apostle is trying to record what happened and some astrologer points to the east and says, “Well, we saw a star…”, that’s how it got written down. A fair number of people even today would probably write the same thing down in the same way.

The second major lens I see towards finding absolute truth in the Bible is understanding the format of the content being read. Poems, for example, I don’t read as being literally true, but instead poetically true. The biggest bone of contention with this view would be Genesis 1, and I’ll record my thoughts on that later, but it comes into play in other areas as well: Job is a play, for example. So I don’t expect it to be necessarily historically accurate. I also believe that the modern understanding of reading something “literally” is essentially a Greek format, and wasn’t as formalized to the ancient Hebrews.

The third major lens is the one that I think all of us have to fight through: what is the context? In 1 Corinthians 11 Paul instructs women to keep their head covered, but the end of 1 Corinthians 10 is entirely about being culturally sensitive – which can significantly alter the nuance of the command.

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About This Blog:

I’ve thought for a while that I should record the various observations and thoughts that occurred to me about Christianity, the Bible, and the nature of the world – more for my own record keeping’s sake than for anything else. So here we are.