I doubt that’s what the Lord had in mind when he said, “I tell you the truth, if you have faith as
small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to
there’ and it will move. Nothing will be impossible for you.” (Matt 17:20b
NIV)
August 23, 2013
Better Living Through Chemistry
Once a week the retired old-boys at church get together for coffee to visit
and roast one another. The resident patriarch preacher, who had been
incapacitated because of a bad hip, showed up to the coffee looking energized. When
asked how he was feeling he moved around freely demonstrating the wonders of
what one Vicodin and a couple of Advil can do. With his physical body now in
better alignment with his spiritual thinking he quipped, “You remember that mountain that used to be south of town?”
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Gail;
-----I would expect Jesus was well versed in history and affairs current to his day. North of the Palestine area, and to the West a bit, was a mountain from which the Romans sought a particular mineral; I forget specifically what it was. But they dug and dug and dug into that dirt and rock until the digging was not keeping up with demand. So they dug vertical shafts deep into the mountain, then dug horizontally about half way to breaking out the mountainside. Leaving off there, they plugged the tops of the shafts and dammed up a river flowing out of the mountain’s high valley until the water well covered the shafts‘ plugs. Then they broke the plugs. The side of that mountain blasting away from megatons of water pressure slamming into the closed ends of those tunnels must have been a spectacular sight! Having the rest of the resources born inside the mountain now in the open, the mountain was soon removed.
-----I highly doubt Jesus was speaking specifically about this event, but I would be completely surprised if the thought of that Roman operation did not at least float through His mind. The more I find in history, the more connection of it to Jesus Christ I see.
-----I used to pine about how little, almost nil, was the overlap of ancient history and the Bible. If God’s Book relates early man‘s history, then man’s historical tracks must resemble the events of God’s Book. So, in the late 80’s I bought the first five volumes of The Cambridge Ancient History set and proceeded to study. As much as I marveled at what archeologists have dug from the dirt, I was yet deeply disappointed at how little connection historical theorists made of it to God’s Word.
-----What should I have expected? The blitzkrieg against God begun with the eighteenth century has heaped a Mt. Everest of deceit upon the past. They desperately desire to show God’s Word as wrong, because that concludes God as false, which precludes His prevalence in judgment, which lets the blitzkriegers off the hook of their own pitiful faults. But the very fact that God’s Word describes not only the fundamental elements of our current times in which historians freely mince and frolic upon God’s face like carousing mental drunkards, it describes the historical elements of the twenty centuries leading up to their intellectual debaucheries. All that description having been given centuries before it happened, without error in either what has transpired as portrayed or in the order of which it was portrayed as happening, speaks a quiet, solitary, piercing truth against their Mt. Everest.
-----I held that quiet truth with faith. Then I stumbled across the Book of Jasher and Ken Johnson, Thd and his books, all of which embellish copiously as well. But the grains of connection peeping through the embellishments led my mind back to Josephus. Thirty years ago I read therein and failed to appreciate that Berosus the Chaldean, Mnaseas, Nicolaus the Damascan, and Manetho, Mochus, Hestiaeus, Hieronymus the Egyptian, the Phoenician historians, Hesiod, Hecataeus, Hellanicus, Acusilaus, Ephorus, even Sybil, “…and a great many others,” all Gentiles, most before Homer wrote the Odyssey, between them wrote of the flood, the Tower of Babel and confusion of languages, and the extended long lives of people in those times. Moreover, our own historical elitists’ beloved Menander wrote much about Hiram’s friendship with Solomon, and about Solomon’s renowned wisdom. Neither was Abraham any obscure figure. Nicolaus of Damascus places Abraham’s presence there, Berosus the Chaldean speaks of him affectionately, and Hecataeus wrote an entire book about him.
-----If I had been around when the Alexandrian Library was struck into flames, I’d have shoved some Bics up a bunch of noses and broken many clicking fingers! But regardless of that great loss, this small bit of evidence well blows away the historians’ Mt. Everest of deceit. Jesus again is right! Even a tiny bit of faith is well worth holding.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
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