"So the Lord scattered them from there over all the earth, and they stopped building the city. That is why it was called Babel - because there the Lord confused the language of the whole world. From there the Lord scattered them over the face of the whole earth." Genesis 11:8-9
I had an interesting conversation with my brother last night. We talked about something fascinating - how could it be that all the different world peoples in ancient times develop a similar desire to worship something bigger than themselves without necessarily having interacted with each other - e.g. Native Americans; South American Indians; Egyptians. His current thinking is that there may be a higher power, not necessarily in the traditional form of the Jewish/Christian/Muslim belief system, and that as humans we have a natural instinct to worship that higher power.
My own belief is that the God of the Bible is that higher power, He created the Universe and the earth and He created humans as spiritual as well as physical beings. For me this part of the Genesis narrative goes some of the way to answering that question. Of course for people that may not believe in the historicity or legitimacy of the Bible it would be harder to accept this explanation. Throughout our Old Testament studies we have looked briefly at a number of conflicting opinions on this matter and so far everything I have examined has not changed my mind about the legitimacy of the Biblical accounts. I think it is really important for Christians to be open minded and hear challenges to our beliefs - it has really strengthened my faith to realise that other explanations often have much less corroborating historical evidence than the Bible does for what they claim, in fact in some cases I reckoned it takes far greater faith to believe them than it does to believe in Jesus.
I'm interested to know what others think of this question that my brother raised and my response, please leave a comment if you feel you have anything to add to the discussion.......................
1 comment:
I wholeheartedly agree Fletch! Since coming to ICC I've had to look at my own beliefs and how they're constructed and what they're based on, and I'm still believing and walking on in the faith.
Discussions with others who don't share the same beliefs (even sometimes within Christianity...?) can only help to build your own faith, and its something that more Christians (myself very much included) need to realise that other beliefs (for example, the Da Vinci code) can contradict all they like, but at the core of it God's word holds to be true, and no body has produced a legitimate claim that Christianity is false in its 2000 year history.
Significant, one might say
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