Genesis, Contradictions, and Changing your thinking

My goal is to help people to look at things differently. I hope to present some new information or present old information in a new way every time I teach, write a blog post, or speak to a crowd.

We don't plan on ever changing the way we think of anything. When the issue is something more important to you, you can either get mad about it (which there are better things to get mad about), or you can have an "aha" moment where a new space in your mind is opened up and you find yourself intrigued. I prefer the latter and I hope that you do too, or reading posts on my blog may be hazardous to your health. 

I thought that I understood the Bible to near perfection when I was 12. There wasn't much more that I needed to get to heaven, but at the same time I was afraid that I would never be good enough to get there. About that time I started a Facebook group called "Let the Bible Speak for Itself." It has since been renamed as I have come to understand that I was not actually letting the Bible speak for itself. Instead I had my interpretation of the Bible and I engaged in arguments to prove it. With a name like that, everyone THINKS they are letting the Bible speak for itself, but in reality they are inserting their own will into the Bible. So, I recently named it something different. 

One of the things that I have been taught since a young age is that the Bible is flawless. There is no contradiction at all in the scripture. Every supposed "flaw" in the Bible could be explained away by anyone who would take the time to generate an apology for a particular scripture. I knew it all already and was confident in my spiritual strength, so I sought out those that would challenge me. I invited people to my group where I would argue with them. I took on people of all faiths, and I thought that I had defeated them, but I still, internally, knew many of my arguments were weak. They were logically sound. I didn't break any rules or commit any "fallacies". At least I didn't think so. But as I looked through scripture, troubling passages started at the very beginning of scripture. 

Please, before continuing, read Genesis 1 and 2. 

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. -- As much as I want to talk about everything Genesis 1:1 says in that one line, I must go on. 

Day 1: God Created the earth, heavens, and light and separated it from the darkness (which he didn't call "good"). There was day and night. 

Day 2: Waters separated

Day 3: Dry land. Plant life 

Day 4: Sun, moon, and stars (to be used for "signs" and seasons. Take from that what you will)

Day 5: Sea animals and birds

Day 6: Land animals "Then God said 'Let us make man in our image...'" 

Day 7: God rested. Blessing of the Sabbath. 

So now a reader begins to read chapter two and things get all kinds of confusing. 

vs. 4 "In the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens." Okay, so this must be before day 2.

vs. 5 "When no bush of the field was yet in the land..."

      "...and there was no man to work the ground."

     Okay. Yeah. This was before any of this happened. 

vs. 7 "then the LORD God formed the man of dust from the ground..."

      Wait! You need to make plants first! 

vs. 9 "And out of the ground the LORD God made to spring up every tree..."

      But you were supposed to have done that already! 

vs. 19 "Now out of the ground the LORD God had formed every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens..."

     But God, you made birds BEFORE beasts and beasts BEFORE man! 

This two chapters were brought up in my Western Humanities class in my freshman year of college, and I had absolutely no answer for this. I feebly argued that chapter 2 was a retelling of chapter 1, just more specific. Then I was confronted with the problem of the events happening out of order. They were clearly out of order, and every time I would try to line them up, I only got more confused. Furthermore, my teacher tells us that the two creation myths are even from different periods in Hebrew history. I was strong in the faith, right? I knew my Bible, right? How could I have overlooked this every time I read it?  I had to convince myself that there was no contradiction, even though I knew it in my heart. 

So what happened here? Why all of a sudden is the creation story told over again? Moses recorded both chapters. Of course he KNEW that they didn't exactly match up. Of course not! Chapter 1 tells how the cosmos was created while chapter 2 tells the creation story of the first of Jesus' lineage. Maybe we've been looking at it all wrong. Maybe the story of the creation of the garden happened AFTER the creation of the world. That would mean that vs 4 actually belongs with chapter 1, and "the land" in chapter 5 refers only to the area of land where the Garden of Eden was planted. 

This may or may not have been the case, but if we accept it, the story lines up a little better. God always planned Adam and Eve to be the lineage of Christ and that is why their story is important to have recorded. That is why they are special. To them, much was given, including the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil. Their sin is why we needed Christ and by their seed we were given Christ. Much was also expected of them, so their sin cost them the Garden.  When Cain killed Abel, he was afraid others would kill him because there were already other people on the earth. We aren't told that part of the story. We didn't need to be told or we would have been.

The problem with all of this is that we are trying to force our modern way of thinking onto ancient writings. We want the scriptures to be a completely literal, complete account of everything that happened. The Bible is 100% historically accurate when it intends to be, but much of Hebrew prose was never intended to be a line-by-line account of everything that happened. Just one perspective. Sometimes writers were more concerned with the allegorical than the historical. BUT we will never see a contradiction in the scriptures that contradicts the purpose for which it was written.

So, I urge you to accept a little more variance with the scriptures. Don't found your faith on the scriptures always fitting your mold of what you think they should say. That is shaky ground and you will find yourself doubting every time a new question arises. The Bible doesn't contradict itself... unless you take everything literally. Instead, read the Bible like literature. Parts are literal. Parts are allegorical. All of it is God-Inspired. Think of the intent of the writer at all times. What was the point of this story? What elements were left out? Who is the intended audience? What customs and myths did they already embrace? What details were altered to make it more understandable to the intended audience? What biases do YOU have that prevent you from reading it like it was intended?

If we keep all of this in mind, we may find things that surprise us, but it also takes study of the customs and cultures of the time period. Don't neglect to study the Bible and supporting material. Not just one or the other.