Today's Live Q+A Tim and Jon answer questions regarding Genesis 1 -11

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32 thoughts on “Live Q+A on Genesis 1-11

  1. *I find weird that the only place that people question about time or event is Genesis **1:11**, they don’t question the time that Jonah spent in the belly’s wheel, the time that Joshua marched around Jericho, the resurrection virgin birth…And i am here to tell you this, if Genesis is alegoric, everyhting you believe in has no foundation*

    • Ben G Yes and Amen!
      John 5:46
      “For if you believed Moses, you would believe Me, for he wrote about Me.” – Jesus

      Exodus 20:11
      For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that is in them, and rested on the seventh day. Therefore the LORD blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy. – written by God’s own finger

      Thanks Ben for your comments.
      God bless!

    • Ironically, the fact that you’ve reduced the debate about Genesis 1-2 to either “literal” or “allegory” demonstrates the fundamentally flawed approach to the text the Bible Project is trying to point out!

    • +Daniel Wesley
      I don’t think so. For example if Adam didn’t really sin but it was all allegorical than what exactly did Jesus do on the cross?
      In Romans, Paul bases his whole theology on a literal Adam and Eve with Christ as the finale. If you do not take it literally, whether young or old earth in all their variaties, you will end up like those Swedenborg “Christians” that see everything as mystical and far away.

      HOWEVER I do not deny, and most of us wouldn’t deny, that the thing with Adam and Eve has multiple layers of meanings like many other stories in the Bible.

    • The point is to learn to read Genesis like an ancient person. The strict dichotomy of “literal” vs “allegory” is rooted in a relatively modern approach to the text. Read Walton and Wright on this – very insightful.

  2. To assume that the reason the flood story exists in the Bible is because it’s in “dialogue” with other contemporary flood stories is the fallacy of affirming the consequent. It could be that because the flood is a real event, subsequently all peoples had a memory of this event (see: China) and recorded this event in their history as well, though it would have changed over time. The Bible would contain the same account, but the most accurately preserved version of it. I recommend reading the book Eternity in Their Hearts by Don Richardson. And yes, that book’s title inspired my page name’s title.

  3. I canned myself at 38:40 when he spoke about art being produced by followers of Jesus being crappy!! Hahahaha!!! I Agree, we must make things beautiful for God’s glory! Thanks for the awesome, informative video guys!

  4. bro i like your programes,but if you consontrate on topics that will be great.topics like “jesus blood””son of god” “son of god” bcoz brothers you have lot of material.really both of you only can give the right judgement to the topics

  5. my reply to vid time beginning at 29:36.

    You say:

    ‘The moment you wade into Genesis 1 with’ the assumption that it is about bringing something into physical existence, ‘it immediately doesn’t make very much sense. Because the story begins, “In the beginning, God created”, and then the first thing that’s there is a chaotic, dark, watery chaos.”

    I disagree. Even if we assume that the text merely is something like metaphor, the text does not tutor us on exactly what its author might be implying at each point in the text. So, in language logic, there is nothing that *immediately* ‘doesn’t make very much sense’ there.

    The text is not like the rules to a card game, for which all the rules are spelled out. No one expects that degree of explication in any normal linguistic effort. Even the Law of Moses has many clear instances of implication. Only if we *Stand Too Close To The Text* do those parts of the Law confuse us.

    If we took the approach to any part of the New Testament that you are saying that we should take to Genesis 1 and 2, then we would have to say that the entire New Testament is only metaphor or something like that: that it’s not historical narrative.

    Yes, we can reply that the Genesis 1 text is knowable by our looking at ANE creation stories for comparison. But this assumes that those ANE stories came into being on their own terms, instead of their arriving as, say, greed- and selfishness-driven corruptions of an actual event as described by the Bible’s own account. In fact, such a corruption phenomenon already is known to have taken place for the Gospel. Notably in that case, the corruptions did not make it to the final round,and would have all been lost to the ruins of its inferior cultural results had either those results resulted or those error-filled texts not been collected.

    So, when dealing with any literal historical narrative, logical immediacy is a much more tricky creature than you make it out to be. The New Testament is full of such ambiguities.

    The Genesis 1 text is not like a computer program that spells out every crucial term. It is a text of natural language, and, as such, has an original normative audience who did not miss its every implication. in short, just like for the New Testament, Genesis 1 is not a Complete Idiot’s Guide.

    Though some portions in the Bible were meant be readily accessible even to mind-numbed Space Age people, the Bible simply does not advertise itself as a Complete Idiot’s Something-or-Other. They didn’t have universally programmable simulated computing devices back then. They just had people. (With all they flaws, and all their God-given humanity.)

  6. If we took the approach to any part of the New Testament that you are saying that we should take to Genesis 1 and 2, then we would have to say that the entire New Testament is only metaphor or something like that: that it’s not historical narrative.

  7. I’m not sure if they covered this, but I think they haven’t discussed this topic yet, so imma bring it up.

    In Genesis 6:5-8, it states that God “was sorry that He had made man on the earth, and He was grieved in His heart”. But that would imply that He made a mistake, and we know God to be infallible. Can someone please explain this?

  8. For me the answer to the question regarding Genesis being literal or metaphorical is this verse – But do not forget this one thing, dear friends: With the Lord a day is like a thousand years, and a thousand years are like a day.
    2 Peter 3:8

    Btw, i appreciate the way you answer the question of Kip Weiland, “there is much beauty in these stories if you get to ask the right questions”.

    Keep it up guys. =)

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