Hath it not been told you from the beginning?

Even the most liberal of my journalism professors at Ohio State would be absolutely appalled to see how disgracefully unethical and biased the so-called “Gray Lady,” with the motto "All the News That's Fit to Print," has become.

In the Science section of yesterday’s New York Times was a straight news piece (without any type of opinion or “according to” disclaimer), under the headline, “Camels Had No Business in Genesis.”

It began by informing “camels probably had little or no role in the lives of such early Jewish patriarchs as Abraham, Jacob and Joseph,” and that “these anachronisms are telling evidence that the Bible was written or edited long after the events it narrates and is not always reliable as verifiable history.”

The article continued, “These camel stories ‘do not encapsulate memories from the second millennium,’ said Noam Mizrahi, an Israeli biblical scholar, ‘but should be viewed as back-projections from a much later period.’

“Dr. Mizrahi likened the practice to a historical account of medieval events that veers off to a description of ‘how people in the Middle Ages used semitrailers in order to transport goods from one European kingdom to another.’ ”

It’s not until the fifth paragraph that you learn this flat-out “statement of fact” is based simply on the findings of two archaeologists at Tel Aviv University who dug up some camel bones at an ancient copper smelting camp in Israel and “used radiocarbon dating to pinpoint the earliest known domesticated camels in Israel to the last third of the 10th century B.C. — centuries after the patriarchs lived and decades after the kingdom of David, according to the Bible.”

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When God created everything in the six days of creation, He didn't just go, "Pfwhoof, let's see what happens."

David writes in Psalm 8, "When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers, the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained. . ."

When you ordain something, you order it and set it up in a very specific way. That's why when people ask, "Why am I here?" the answer is, "God ordained some things that you're a part of."

The answer isn't that we jumped out of some primordial soup onto the land, shed our tadpole tails and grew legs, all because we just happened to happen.

"When you do something with your fingers, you're doing it with a great deal of skill and carefulness—with purpose," explains Jordan. "The finger of God is a reference to the Holy Spirit. In Deuteronomy, when God wrote the tables of stone and gave them to Moses, it says He wrote with His finger. In Luke 11, when the Lord Jesus Christ refers back to the finger of God, He calls Him the ‘Holy Spirit.’ "

In talking about the greatness of the Messiah, Isaiah says, "Who hath measured the waters in the hollow of His hand, and meted out heaven with the span, and comprehended the dust of the earth in a measure, and weighed the mountains in scales, and the hills in a balance? Who hath directed the Spirit of the LORD, or being his counseller hath taught him?" (Isa. 40:12-13)

As Jordan explains, it's like God figured to Himself, "You know that lake over there—I want it to have so many gallons of water."

"It's like He goes over and dips out so much dirt—gets it out of the way so it will hold so much water—and then He fills it up. Now you know He didn't literally do it that way, but the point is He had a plan. He knew just how big He wanted the Pacific Ocean to be, just how big He wanted the Indian Ocean, the Adriatic. He had a plan minutely designed."

The word "span" in the passage refers to a way of measuring, akin to a measuring stick.

"God measured the distance between the earth and the sun and made it exactly the 93 million miles that it is," says Jordan. "You ever think about the fact that the universe is put together with that kind of care? Ordinances. That's why everything works the way it does."

Isaiah asks pretty much the same question of Israel when he writes in Isaiah 40:21-22, "Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning? have ye not understood from the foundations of the earth?
"It is he that sitteth upon the circle of the earth, and the inhabitants thereof are as grasshoppers; that stretcheth out the heavens as a curtain, and spreadeth them out as a tent to dwell in."

"If God sits on 'the circle of the earth,' what shape do you think the earth is?" asks Jordan. "Nobody who was ever a Bible-believer thought the earth was flat. You know who thought the earth was flat? Scientists. The people who were stating the science of their day."

From the same verse, we know God actually created the universe as tent for Him to dwell in.

"He was creating a house in which He intended to live," confirms Jordan. "He created it in a way that honored, pleased and satisfied Him. He set it up the way He wanted it set up."

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Most people aren't aware of the fact that the Book of Job has much more information about creation than Genesis. Also, Job was the first book written in the Bible.

When the nation of Israel came out of Egypt with Moses and went across the Red Sea, they carried the Book of Job among their belongings. It was after that that Moses wrote the Book of Genesis.

This is precisely why Isaiah pleads in rhetorical fashion, "Have ye not known? have ye not heard? hath it not been told you from the beginning?"

"When you read Genesis 1 and 2, you need to remember that the people Moses wrote that for already had the information," says Jordan. “When God gave birth to the nation Israel, He educated them as to why He was creating them. It wasn't just to set them free from Egyptian bondage. He was creating a nation in the earth in which He would accomplish His purpose in man.”

The Apostle Paul tells us in Romans 5:14 that Adam "is the figure of him that was to come." The very reason Jesus Christ had to become a man is because—as the one who represents all those who are in Him—He'll be the one to accomplish God's purpose for man.

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Here’s a piece I wrote in 2005:

Several times now in Manhattan I've inadvertently flustered someone "in the know" by informing them that the great Greek sages—Plato, Homer, Aristotle, Socrates, etc.—were actually plagiarists who grew up with the Old Testament and stole from it.

I found out this eye-opener myself several years ago from a Bible study given by my pastor.

"You know what Plato had in front of him before anyone ever burped him or weaned him off the pabulum?" says my pastor, Richard Jordan of Shorewood Bible Church in Chicago (graceimpact.org), in a study I have on tape. "He had a Bible in front of him. The fellow got his philosophy out of the Old Testament. The wisdom literature—Job, Psalms, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes—is the source for all those big shot philosophers. Aristotle's Golden Mean is found in Ecclesiastes 7… Every philosophy known to man has been plagiarized out of the Book of Ecclesiastes…written by Solomon literally 500 to 600 years before these guys ever showed up."

At the same time these sagacious wonders made a living and name for themselves cheating off God's Word, though, they spouted absurd hokum as if they grew up reading nothing but Dr. Seuss.

Concerning the earth, for example, as Jordan explains, "these presumed masterminds came up with such bizarre, hare-brained ideas as to be found laughable by any civilized intelligent standard.

"If the Bible were to assert that the earth was carried on the shoulders of the god Atlas, who stood on the backs of giant tortoises, which stood on the backs of elephants, this would be more than sufficient reason to discredit the Holy Scriptures as being of God. And still the Greek scholars are revered today by those who refuse to recognize the wisdom of God and His Holy Book."

In contrast, Job, the oldest book in the Bible, explains that God spread the skies over empty space and "hangeth the earth upon nothing." (Job 26.7)

Isaiah, a book dating, in part, as far back as 698 B.C., confirms that the Lord sits enthroned above the "circle of the earth." (Isaiah 40:22)

Up until the 15^th century, without the benefit of a telescope or a knowledge of the physics of astronomy, no one knew nor would many people believe the earth was not flat.

"Noted Bible teacher, J. Vernon McGee, has stated that the word 'circle' is synonymous with 'globe,' a round geometric figure," says Jordan. "The Bible is not a book of science and yet not even in one point does it contradict any principle of modern science that has been established as fact rather than mere theory."

 

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About a year ago I had a conversation with a New York City fireman (on sick leave due to a lung condition from being on the scene at the World Trade Center on 9/11 and then helping with the clean-up) who was adamant there could never have been a flood covering the earth because there's simply not enough water for such a thing to happen. He used this as one argument why the Bible could not be true.

Of course, the Flood is another long-time puzzler solved in the pages of the Old Testament. Moses perfectly explains in Gen. 7:11 that fountains, or springs, of the "great deep" burst forth at the same time rains fell from heaven, creating the flood Noah built his ark to escape.

It has only been in recent years that scientists have discovered that there are indeed great water fountains erupting from the ocean floor.

 

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A pocket-sized paperback I picked up last year at the Christian bookstore on 43^rd and 8^th Avenue, called "Hidden Wealth; Scientific Facts in the Bible," explains that even the man considered to be the "father" of oceanography, Matthew Maury (1806-1873), used the Bible—in this case Psalms 8:8 and its reference to "paths of the sea"—as his jumping off point to his eventual discovery of warm and cold continental currents. Maury's book on oceanography remains a basic university text today.

Detailed in the paperback, written by Ray Comfort, are many other examples—in areas of medicine, biology, astronomy, archaeology, etc.—where the Bible pre-dates by thousands of years scientific findings and thereby proves its supernatural origins.

Take, for example, radio waves and wireless communication:

"God asked Job a very strange question in 1500 B.C.; He asked, 'Can you send lightnings, that they may go and say to you, 'Here we are?' (Job 38:35)," writes Comfort. "This appears to be a scientifically ludicrous statement—that light can be sent, and then manifest itself in speech. But did you know that all electromagnetic radiation—from radio waves to x-rays—travels at the speed of light? This is why you can have instantaneous wireless communication with someone on the other side of the earth. The fact that light could be sent and then manifest itself in speech wasn't discovered by science until 1864 (3,300 years later), when 'British scientist James Clerk Maxwell suggested that electricity and light waves were two forms of the same thing.' "

When it comes to increasing entropy and the Second Law of Thermodynamics, as another example, Comfort explains the Bible nailed this eons ago in three different places (Isaiah 51:6, Psalm 102:25, 26; and Hebrews 1:11). Both Isaiah 51 and Hebrews talk about how the earth "shall wax old as doth a garment."

In the field of medicine, notes Comfort, the Bible's ancient commands vastly pre-date medical breakthroughs regarding laws of hygiene, laws of quarantine, food-borne bacteria, the immune system, saturated fat intake and the correlation between mental and physical health.

As one example Comfort gives, epidemics such as the ravaging Black Death of the 14^th century, while attributed at the time to "bad air" or "evil spirits," could have been avoided by minding God's decree on leprosy to the children of Israel in Leviticus 13:46: "All the days wherein the plague shall be in him he shall be defiled; he is unclean: he shall dwell alone; without the camp shall his habitation be."

Leviticus and blood biology meet in verse 17:11: "For the life of the flesh is in the blood."

"In 1616, William Harvey discovered that blood circulation is the key factor in physical life—confirming what the Bible revealed 3,000 years earlier," writes Comfort. "Blood is far more complex and has far more to do with life than science ever imagined…The blood carries water and nourishment to every cell, maintains the body's temperature, and removes the waste material of the body's cells. It also carries oxygen from the lungs throughout the body...The great biological truth concerning the importance of blood in our body's mechanism has been fully comprehended only in recent years. Up until 120 years ago, sick people were 'bled,' and many died because of the practice. If you lose your blood, you lose your life."

(Editor’s note: new article tomorrow)