13 September 2023
This is a good time to mention righteous skepticism and cynicism. We need to be skeptical about claims from western religious folks trying to ride the Indiana Jones myth, and be cynical enough about people's motives.
The example I'll use is the recent noise about an archaeological site that has gotten some press notice in the past two years: Tell el-Hammam in modern Jordan. There's a very noisy article from the Daily Star. Must have been a slow day for them, since the actual story behind this claim that it could be the site of biblical Sodom and Gomorrah dates from September 2021. A representative notice would be Christianity Today's article.
The people who made all the noise in the first place were mostly associated with something called The Comet Group. This bunch is famous for taking a minority position on some research regarding the last ice age. In essence, they insist it was a comet impact, whereas the wider consensus is that it was something more like cyclical solar activity.
The real problem here is that the big push from The Comet Group regarding Tell el-Hammam included some apparently doctored evidence. I confess I haven't dug too deep into this. Every major miracle in the Old Testament is a matter of faith, not physical evidence. That's by design. Our God isn't looking for converts; He's calling to His children.
Do you understand the difference between those two?
Over and over again: The human knowledge regarding facts in reality is not a factor in redemption. The problem is the reliance on science in the first place. That is, human damnation arises from the decision to trust human capabilities -- human knowledge and awareness of things. If your brain can grasp it, then it doesn't matter eternally. Whatever it is your intellect can process, it will all go away when Christ returns.
The only use we have for archaeology and scientific evidence is to help us envision things that seem implausible in the flesh. The Bible does say that God rained fire down on Sodom and Gomorrah. That may well mean some kind of solid material falling from space and getting super-heated from friction plunging through Earth's atmosphere. There are more sources of solid material out there than we could possibly guess: comets, asteroids, chunky CMEs, etc.
If you wish to get technical about it, there is one huge issue with dating events in the Bible lands: The only dates scholars feel very certain about goes back to Solomon's reign, nothing earlier. The actual evidence for his father, David, is too sketchy by itself, so David's reign and anything before that depends on how you read the text in tracing dates backward. And the entire system of dating for ancient Egypt is just a house of cards, so that whole thing is subject to radical revisions any day now.
For myself, I have provisionally accepted the more-or-less "conservative" dating system offered by mainstream evangelicals. For example, I date Abraham's birth to about 2166 BC, and the Exodus to around 1447 BC. Notice that I don't embrace that system fully, and you'll probably notice that I seldom cite dates on ancient events. I'm not fully convinced either way, but I'll use what is commonly accepted by that community because it works well enough. The popular alternatives almost all rest on a rejection of the Bible's narrative. What matters is that we understand what the events tell us about our Heavenly Father.
If you start sweating when someone cites "evidence" that contradicts what amounts to a rather arbitrary dating system of biblical events, then your faith is very weak, indeed. Our endeavor here does not stand on human scholarship. It stands on faith. It must grab your soul and drive you against all human knowledge, because it is at war with the flesh in the first place.
We say that this whole business of the gospel is God seeking His children, not converts. His children are His already; these are the Elect, chosen before the Creation of the world. Scripture says very little about the rest of the human race, but the common evangelical drive to include them is deeply flawed. It's based on a sense of fairness that isn't in the Bible anywhere.
Rather, Scripture warns repeatedly that you cannot understand the distinction God makes between the Elect and the Damned, so to speak. All you can possibly grasp is that you have been called. If you aren't called, then the whole question means nothing to you. If He does not implant faith in your soul by His divine Presence, everything else is pointless.
If you can explain why you believe, then you don't really believe.
The only real question left to us is how to claim His promises here and now while we await the final redemption of all things. The redemption of souls between now and that Final End is not a question of convincing people to change in their own power. It's a question of discovering whom God has chosen already. This needs to be how we view it, or we will chase all kinds of methods and means that would miss the point.
Meanwhile, there is a level of blessing God has for every human, elect or not. That's what the Covenant is for. No, the Damned will never really get it, but they will benefit as much as they are going to if the Elect walk in the Covenant. We are very specifically not permitted to know who is or isn't Elect. All we have is a provisional assumption that someone is family or not. We can discover that a lot of people are allies, but that's a functional definition, as is the notion that plenty of folks are enemies, and most of humanity is simply peripheral to our divine calling day by day. None of this is certain knowledge about the nature of their souls, just a pragmatic recognition of what role they play in any given context. It's not a question of ontology, but of what God wants from us individually.
Human existence in itself is provisional, a fleeting mist that is gone suddenly. Most of it is a lie. Don't trust what your flesh can know. We cannot convince the lost to be saved; God alone does that. So, we need not rely too much on archaeology and science to support the Bible. We cannot possibly grasp how tentative reality is in the first place, and then we cannot estimate what God wants to reveal about all the times He has adjusted "reality" to suit His whims.
The question is not what happened, or what can be proved. The question is whether you will obey Him against a hostile fleshly nature.
Comments
DarkMirror
Interesting point about comets you make. One thing I've learned is that there's no way of telling, outside of direct observation and one other way I'll explain, whether a disaster is caused by a comet or an impactor from a CME. They'd be virtually indistinguishable, scientifically and to the layman. The only other way to discern plain comets from impactors is if there's accounts about other things happening with an extreme CME, like a darkening of the sun or a flash of light. Not always, though. It's all conjecture because comet impacts are ostensibly random, where as solar activity and micronovas have an overall schedule of events.
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