Spare Change

Two Sentences: A World Record

Posted by Bryan

Newsweek has released another issue in its occasional effort to provocatively address biblical, spiritual, or theological issues in a thinly-veiled effort to sell its rag to an otherwise not-interested segment of the population.

This issue covers the title page topic, Unearthing the Bible. On the web page, they wait clear until the second sentence before revealing a secular bias:

What there was in the beginning, in the world of the Bible, is what there was in the land now called Iraq. There is nothing left of the Garden of Eden, no artifact at the confluence of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers where myth has placed the Temptation and the Fall. (emphasis mine to highlight the subtle attack in case you missed it)

The article itself is little more than a footnote to the war that's going on there, in my opinion. I get as fascinated as anyone anytime a biblical relic is unearthed. My thought is, though, that God could care less about the artifacts from the past. The reality is, God has placed upon man the call to walk by faith and not by sight. All the heroes mentioned in this article are Old Testament saints who were credited because of their faith, not because of their reliance upon religious artifacts. Similarly, we are called to live by faith, not by sight. Would it make a difference if an ancient papyrus was found in a Golgotha cave, saying "Jesus slept here, but only for the weekend...and all he left were the sheets!, signed - Joseph, from Arimathea"

For some it might. For many, it might affirm what they already believe. But for the vast majority, they'd either look for reasons to discredit it or ignore it altogether. I think these artifacts are interesting and in some cases even amazing, but it is we who place an artificial value on their significance, as well as the proportional level of dread at the prospect of their ruin.