A Case for the Greatest Book!!
By: Geo (November 19th, 2007)
After the dinner, the guys resurged with renewed energy to bash me, but I think I was ready for them. Read on.
Kumar: During your entire discussion, the only source you drew your logic and answers was from the Bible. How can we or you or anyone trust the Bible? It is just written by some mere mortal like all of us and that too at a time when science had not advanced so much? How can you rely so much on an old time book? I mean, we don’t even refer to text books that are more than 5 years old. How can you trust something that is perhaps thousands of years old?
Me: (Oh no! this is a new track all together. God help me!!) So I have to prove everything I say, huh?
Rahul: You are the one who is making the extra ordinary claims!
Me: I don’t agree to that. I think it’s the other way. However, let me come to this new offensive you guys have now put up on me. First of all, the Bible is not written by one man. Though, the author is one, the writers are many.
Kumar: Come on!
Me: It was written by 40 different authors who were spread across 1600 years of human history. These people came from different backgrounds, sat at different locations, were influenced by different cultures, were involved in diverse occupations themselves and most of them, never met each other. Some were shepherds, some were kings, many were prophets, some were farmers, some were fishermen, and one of them was a doctor!
Kumar: What! I always thought it was a work of one man or maybe a group of men who sat together and wrote it down.
Me: In fact you can perhaps relate better to what happened when I explain it like this. Imagine a novel that was started in the 6th century. Let’s assume this novel will have 66 chapters. After 5 chapters, the author dies. Now in the next 1000 years, 30 different amateur ‘free lance’ writers who hardly know each other and hardly have anything in common, speaking different languages and living in different socio-cultural, political, and geographical setups, faring from diverse occupations and most strangely different literary styles, pen down the next 34 chapters. The writing then ceases for the next 4 centuries. In the 20th century, 8 different writers pen the remaining 27 chapters and finish the novel.
Now tell me, what kind of a novel will evolve? What will be the moral, scientific, prophetic or historical unity of such a novel, or forget all that, what will be the literary condition of such a motley collection of chapters!
Yet, the Bible, despite every odds is a book of amazing unity. This is because only a common author – ‘God’ could make it happen.
Kumar: I mean, if what you say is true, then it is really amazing.
Rahul: But how did God make these people write? Did God really come down and speak to them and they just copied or something. I mean, I don’t get it. How did they get it from God?
Me: Well, we do not know exactly how each of those books was revealed to each of those writers. But through the Bible, we see instances and events of God talking to man and it is in diverse ways. Sometimes it a audible voice and sometimes a still small voice, sometimes it is dreams and sometimes it is visions, sometimes it is angels who brings God’s message, and one time it’s a donkey!
Kumar: A donkey! (laughs)
Me: Yes, God once spoke to one of his disobedient prophets through the mouth of the donkey that he was riding on.
Kumar: Why doesn’t God do that more often now?
Me: He is. For now, I am his donkey, speaking to both of you.
Kumar: That’s not very funny.
Me: It was not intended to be funny. (Pause)
In fact the most difficult part was not when God spoke to these writers, but actually when they wrote it down on to their scrolls. That is the area, where corruption could set in. That is the area where, they had liberties to pen down their own ideas and interpretations.
Rahul: And surely, even if we assume the first part to have happened very cleanly, which I cannot still comprehend how, the second part is really questionable.
Me: Yes. That’s the area which needs to be verified. However, let me give you another illustration, and that will perhaps make you understand what happened.
Imagine for a while that you are amateur journalists and you get a call from none other than Einstein himself who calls you to his home! You go there expecting a lot of others like you waiting for the announcement from the great scientist. But surprisingly, you are the only one there. He tells you that he has secretly invited you alone and he wants you to be the one who writes down and send across to the world his latest findings, an important mathematical concept about the nature of the Universe, called ‘The Theory of Relativity’!!
You are dumb struck just by the thought of it and that’s when Einstein starts declaring his formula and findings and passionately describes and illustrates to you how he came to his conclusions. You are trying hard to understand what he says, but you are not getting much clue as to what to write down.
After Einstein is through, he comes to you and says, “Now I want you to write it down in your own words and tell the world!” And you go from shock to greater shock and bewilderment and that’s when Einstein reassures you that he will supervise the entire exercise and help you write the formula in the technically correct way and yet it will be in your own words!
Then begins the staggering exercise of penning down ‘The Theory of Relativity’ in your own words but thank God that Einstein said, “Main hoon na!”
Now after its all done, he wants you to tell the media about it. He sends you away. You take reluctant steps about how to go about this. How is anyone in the world ever going to believe that what you have in your hands is Einstein’s theory. It didn’t read like Einstein wrote it, it didn’t sound very scientific. How will you manage to convince anyone at all? That’s when Einstein adds, I will call up and tell all the media heads that I have sent you with my latest findings. The smile returns. The adrenalin shoots up. You know, this is the biggest day of your career. The world gets to know the theory in your very words!
Kumar: I must concede that this illustration is quite impressive. But that doesn’t mean I concede that God did something similar with these writers.
Me: I too agree that we can keep on putting arguments and counter arguments and never reach any conclusions. But I do like to stress on the final aspect of the illustrations.
Rahul: About the Einstein calling up the media heads?
Me: Yes. That’s what makes the whole Theory in your hands authentic. So in the same way, it doesn’t matter how much arguments we have in favor of how the message was received and how it was penned down, what ultimately matters is, what is the book to you? I mean, the proof of the pudding is in the eating.
Kumar: So you mean to say, you got a phone call from God?
Me: You could say that. Bible is not just an idea and a philosophy and a book containing principles of life, it is alive and cuts you and speaks to you into your situation. I didn’t take it for what it was until it started carrying me.
Rahul: All these are intangible things. No way I am going to buy it.
Me: I am not selling anything. But you cannot disprove my personal experience. I cannot ignore its life transforming influence over me. It changed my perspective, it changed my
priorities and goals, it changed my passions and my aspirations in life, it changed my outlook about people and relationships, and I can very boldly say, it made me a better person in a whole lot of terms. I am a more contented man now.
Kumar: The Bible is not the only book that can bring that kind of an impact.
Me: Maybe. But Kumar, as I said before dinner, we need to look at the whole picture. The problem with us humans is that when we discuss an issue, we remain inside the limits of that issue and try to find a solution. We should always come over the situation and find a solution. And this solution must not only answer the problem appreciably but also not contravene or rather create problems in other areas.
Rahul: I didn’t get you.
Me: See, what I mean is, our conclusions in one area should not hamper or disturb our conclusions in another area. We cannot bracket life into boxes. That kind of bracketing happens only in our minds and that we do for a better understanding, while life and its realities cannot be bracketed. Realities are very diffused and inter-related and conclusions in one area will intersect other areas and so we have to come to conclusions that satisfy a host of conditions spread across several questions in life.
Kumar: But what about the Bible saying that the earth is flat and that the earth is at the centre of the universe and why did the church start punishing and outlawing the proponents of the Solar System?
Me: Its strange how the church came to such conclusions in the first place. 600 years before Christ, Isaiah described the ‘Circle of the Earth’ and much earlier Job described about how ‘Earth was suspended in space over nothing’. Despite these descriptions, the leaders came to their erroneous conclusions. In fact Bible talks about watery paths in the oceans and about mountains and canyons in the sea and about springs and fountains in the sea and even laws of thermodynamics, all of which was discovered by science only in the recent past. The Bible is not a science book for sure, but it is scientific.
Kumar: (laughs) Is it? How will you explain the division of the sea, and sun and moon stopping at some man’s commands! Is it scientific?
Me: If you can believe that an entire universe and all its majesty can stem from nothing, I surely think it is much more credible to imagine a red sea dividing and the sun and moon stopping. It is a humanly impossible feat, but it is theoretically possible. There are infinite things happening right now in this universe which are humanly impossible. Just because, we using our combined efforts and knowledge cannot do something doesn’t mean that it is impossible.
Rahul: What about the ‘Jesus Returns’ stuff? That is derived from the Bible too right! Eh!
Me: Yes. Jesus during his ministry and more vehemently at the end of it proclaimed that he will return to establish his kingdom.
Kumar: Looking at the way the world is going, I think he should. But will not the wolves of today tear him apart as soon as he appears. Some human bomb will blow him away!
Me: Oh yeah! They may try all that. But the Bible says, that he will return to reign forever and ever. He died once, then resurrected to live forever.
Kumar: Too much for me.
Me: Yeah, it was too much for me too, once upon a time. But today I look forward to his return. If a book is dependable for the things it has said in the past, and if it’s applicable and useful for the things it says to the present and if it is consistent and time and again has been proven to be dependable, I would vouch for what it says about the future and about things that I understand not. Isn’t that the way we build trust about people and companies etc. If the past record is good, we can always extrapolate a good-ness into the future, right? That’s why I rely on the Bible for all that it says.
Kumar announced that it was time to call it a day. We decided to meet again in couple of days and continue the discussion on the Greatest Book Ever. Till then Soul Café would have to wait. I decided to pray for my friends all the more since I had already shared so much with them and also because, though with much dissent, they were at least ready to talk about it. Else who in this busy life even thinks about such things! Maranatha!
Tags: Bible, einstein, Illumination, Inspiration, Revelation