Gen 3 Human potential

I watched some of Hitler's home movies today. The relaxed, friendly man they capture is at times perhaps even more chilling than the one we see shouting at rallies in front of huge Nazi flags. The Hitler portrayed in these films plays with children, genuinely and gently interacting with them. He engages in small talk about films, joking at one point that some of his female friends would rather have watched "Gone with the wind" the night before.

One commentator said this of the films:

"it's very easy to think of Hitler simply as a Monster, simply as a raving mad man if you like. To see him in this atmosphere is I think somehow very disturbing, because this human dimension, in a way, relates Hitler to us and says to us that he is a human being just as we are. That maybe in some, even if a very small way, we have the sort of potential to do evil as Hitler did."

And that's the truth of Genesis 3. Adam was human, Cain was human, Hitler was human and we are human. The seed of Hitler's sins was sown in Eden and passed to him through Adam's decedents. That same seed lives in me. I have the same root in me as the ordinary men and women who drove the cattle trucks, separated the men from the woman and children, who stoked the fires, who piled up the teeth and collected the hair.

I still vividly remember the first time I realised I was really sinful. Stained with guilt. I never really saw it before. It wasn't just other people who were bad it was me and I needed a saviour.

PS. Interesting enough I learned today that Hitler was said to be a vegetarian and very concerned about animal welfare. The Nazis engineered the torture and slaughter of million yet passed laws to protect horses and lobsters. Just another chilling insight into the twisted blindness of sin.

Gen 2 and 3 Would you Adam and Eve it?

I recently listened to a brilliant version of the Adam and Eve story told in the style of Del Boy from Only Fools and Horses:



Adam and eve
had it made
lovely garden
nice bit of shade

didn't need nothing
no thees and those
it was cushty
so it goes

'cos they didn't Adam and Eve it
when God said
Oy apple leave it.

'Allo sweat heart
sunny day
Splendid ourchard
Ooo I say

scrummy apple
what a sight
Go on darling
have a bite

course they didn't Adam and Eve
when God said
"Oy, Apple leave it"



(see Keith Park's book Bible Stories in Cockney Rhyming Slang, Jessica Kingsley Publishers)

Good eh? This is where it all went wrong for us. We "had it made", yet we didn't trust in God's loving care of us. The lie of sin is that "it's worth it" but the truth is, it never is.

I love the introduction to the Clangers. The voice of creator Oliver Postgates introduces each episode with slow soothing speech:

"of all the planets in the solar system
of all the stars in the milky way
perhaps the most troublesome is this one.
This cloud covered planet called earth
our planet, the home of the human race"

He's right. It is troublesome. A lot of very troubling things go on on our planet. And this bit of the bible tells us something of why that is. Man didn't trust God and went his own way. Man was not the first to fall over course, Satan was. Our fall was though perhaps the most disastrous yet leading to something awesomely glorious.

Gen 1:27 Vive la Difference

"male and female he created them" Gen 1:27

Men and women are different. I know that not only because I married someone of the opposite sex but because I have two daughters. I remember the day the first one appeared. I was expecting a boy because I thought God had told me it would be a boy. It's all very embarrassing and involves a piece of wallpaper that I may even still have somewhere. I was praying one day and noticed that the nursery that I was using as an office had wallpaper with a pattern of two big blue dogs carrying blue balloons and one little pink dog carrying a pink balloon. Well obviously God was telling me that I was going to have two boys and then one girl. So with the wallpaper having spoken you can imagine my surprise when a girl arrived.
Suddenly life became an adventure. I know how boys work. I am one which helps, I had a brother, and when I was young all my friends were boys who liked boy things. I could map out the next decade at least in terms of what we would do, the things we would hit, and explode and re-build and break and burn again. Suddenly the next decades of my life were a wonderful mystery. And I loved it! It was one of the most wonderful experiences of my life. I had a daughter! And then a year or so later another one! And every day it's got better and better and more wonderful and more flowery and more pink and dolly.

But not all girls are like that however and not all boys like hitting things with sticks. If we look into it we find a statistical distribution of traits with a few girls hitting things and a few boys knitting things. Or put another way although spacial awareness may be a stronger male trait some women can fly a fighter aircraft better than most men. So actually although certain characterisics are more male or more female they don't define what it is to be male or female. Just because I am bad at football doesn't make me less of a man. It's not really to do with that.

So what is it to be male and what is it to be female? Is it just biology and statistical distributions? No, there is something more profound going on.

Because this is a blog and not a theology paper, and I'm a man and not a woman, I'm just going to consider what it is to be a man and how I can be a better one. A while ago we ran an evening for men about what it meant to be a man. In it we talked about general principles (which was much easier than a more recent one where we talked specifically about sex). Anyway, here are some of the things we identified from the bible that a man should carry in his heart and look to express in appropriate ways; protection, provision and leadership.

There is something put in the heart of a man by God to protect the women around him. Not because they are necessarily weaker (some may not be) but because they are valuable and special and worth protecting. It's such a tragedy when that does not happen. A man is made to provide for those around him, especially his wife and family. How sad when men leave their families, or lay about and don't provide for them. Finally, the most tricky one in our culture, a man carries a burden to lead, or more specifically a sense of primary responsibly to live and lead others in a Godly way. To call his family to prayer, to initiate reconciliation where a marriage has faltered. Frankly I find many aspects of these things challenging. Even harder than learning about football. But at least I have some sense of where to aim and how to be more of a man.

Gen 1:26 An aside about Adam

In my discussion about creation I didn't really talk about the pinnacle of creation which is Adam and Eve. I think I'd have to put a stake in the ground in the person of Adam as he is
spoken of as a real person Luke 3:38, 1 Cor 15:22, 54 and appears in biblical chronologies. In terms of creation / evolution thing I like what John Stott says:

My own position is to accept the historicity of Adam and Eve, but to remain agnostic about some of the details of the story like the precise nature of the tree of life and of the serpent. This is not to be arbitrary or inconsistent, however, for I have biblical reasons for both. That Adam and Eve were literal people seems clear from Romans 5:12-21, where Paul draws a deliberate contrast between the disobedience of Adam through which sin and death entered the world and the obedience of Christ who secured salvation and life. The analogy would be meaningless if Adam’s act of disobedience were not an event as historical as Christ’s act of obedience. But for the serpent and the tree of life, they both reappear in the book of Revelation, where they are clearly symbolical, the serpent representing Satan and the tree eternal life…….My acceptance of Adam and Eve as historical is not incompatible with my belief that several forms of pre-Adamic ‘hominid’ seem to have existed for thousands of years previously… you may call them Homo erectus…you may even call some of them Homo sapiens…but Adam was the first Homo divinus…made in the image of God” John Stott

23rd April addition
from "the genesis question" Hugh Ross
Bipedal, tool using, comparatively large-brained primates (called hominids by anthropologists) may have roamed Earth as long as 1.5 million years, but religious relics and alters date back only as far as 24,000 years, at most, and art containing indisputable spiritual content just 5000 years. Thus, the archaeological debate for the beginning of spirit expression agrees with the biblical date. p 110

no shred of evidence credibly links Neanderthals with spiritual activity page 112

In 1995 a Y-chromosome research project -- one which examined 100 times more nucleotide bases than any previous study -- fixed the date for the most recent common ancestor of all human males at somewhere between 35,000 and 47,000 BC... Mitochondrial DNA results typically place the most recent common ancestor of all women somewhere between a few thousand and a few tens of thousands of years earlier.... While scientists ponder the reason for this discrepancy, Genesis provides an explanation. Genesis reveals that we can expect to find a much earlier date for the most recent common ancestor of all women than for the most recent common ancestor of all men because of what happened in the flood. Of the eight people on board Noah's Ark, the four men were blood related but not before women. Thus, the most recent common ancestor for the four men on Noah's Ark (and for all men since) was Noah; the most recent common ancestor for the four women on the Ark, Noah's wife and the daughters-in-law, could go back all the way to Eve. The difference in the two biochemical dates roughly fits the timeframe suggested by the Genesis 5 genealogy. p 112

Gen 1:26 Naked Apes?

"let us make man in our Image" Gen 1:26

In 1967, Desmond Morris, an English zoologist and curator of mammals at the London Zoological Society, authored a book titled The Naked Ape. It became an overnight best-seller. Excerpts from the book were featured in Life magazine, it was condensed by Reader’s Digest, and it sold half a million copies in a few short months. Morris’s book began in the following fashion:

“There are one hundred and ninety-three living species of monkeys and apes. One hundred and ninety-two of them are covered with hair. The exception is a naked ape self-named Homo sapiens.”

Are we just naked apes? Is this how are we are to best to understand ourselves?

In 1970 Richard Ryder coined the term Speciesism as a provocation to treat animals better. Mistreating someone because of their species was as bad as mistreating them because of their race or sex. This is what he says:

Since Darwin, scientists have agreed that there is no ‘magical’ essential difference between human and other animals, biologically- speaking. Why, then, do we make an almost total distinction morally? If all organisms are on one physical continuum, then we should also be on the same moral continuum.

Ryder argued that we should treat animals more like humans (although others have since argued for treating humans more like animals!)

This seems reasonable of course unless there is some essential difference. And there is! Verse 26 and 27 tell us that regardless of the way that he did it God made man, but more than that, he made man in his image and likeness. And that makes all the difference!

Almost every day I tell my children that they are special. Every human being is special. You are special. Not because of some sentimental sugary, "wouldn't it be nice" wishful thinking. Not because they have done anything special. Not because they are unique from other people in some ways. But because of the objective fact that they are made in the image of God.

Many of us have "small moments". You may be in a room or party and no one is talking to you. Everyone seems to be ignoring you. You feel small and unimportant. Or maybe you look up at the stars, and see the vastness of the universe and feel small. For me it's when I land in a city at night, or cross over the Dartford bridge and see all the lights of the city beneath me. All those people, all those big buildings. I feel small. Unimportant.

But I am not. And you are not. We are in the image of God. Placed on this earth to represent him and point to him and bring his presence into situations. You are not just a naked ape, an animal. You are an image bearer with inherent dignity and worth and status. You have that not by your achievements or abilities, but just by your existence as part of the human race.

Incidentally these verses also keep us from big moments. "It's all about me", "I'll do what I want", "The universe revolves around me", or at least my little corner of it. We need to know at those times we are not God. We are simply his image. We are more than animals and less than God. We are in-between. That's not such a bad place is it?

Gen 1:16 BTW

"God also made the stars" Genesis 1:16.

It sounds so off hand when you read it. "Oh, by the way he created the stars too". For most of us the stars don't figure much in our lives. We are either tucked up in bed or there is too much light pollution to see many of them. For the people in bible times however the stars must have been an awesome sight. An uncountable number of bright pin pricks spread out in a massive canopy above them. No wonder many came to think of them as effecting the lives lived out below them. Only recently have we in the west given them a second glance through the eyes of the Hubble telescope. A perfect storm of turbulent gases in the Omega/Swan Nebula, the majestic spires and pillars of the Eagle Nebula, the spectacular birth and death of stars, whirling colliding galaxies. They are all summed up in this incredible BTW.

If we didn't have the bible the stars might just give us the wrong idea about our significance. I've just watched the end of James May's 20th Century. He seems to be on TV a lot now doesn't he? Driving around on Top Gear, Making Lego houses, and now this. All very watchable though. Anyway funnily enough he was talking about Edwin Hubble who was the first person to demonstrate the existence of other galaxies outside our milky way confirming that not only was our planet one of several in our solar system and our solar system one of millions in our milky way galaxy, but our galaxy was one of billions of others in a gigantic expanding universe. "It could be" pondered James May "that we really don't matter at all".

If we discount God then that conclusion may have some force but there is a God who is very interested in us and so the argument can be run the other way. How awesome must his purposes be that he didn't just create a small blue planet to fill with people but he set it in such a frame. If the centre of the universe is defined by anything then surely it's defined by the death and resurrection of his son. Here is the centre piece, all else is just backing. God's son dying for our sin and rising to give us new life.

All this reminds me of an argument put forward by a "new atheist" Christopher Hitchens (new in the sense of strongly militant stance against religion). One of the things he hates about Christianity, is that on the one hand it says we are all worms deserving of eternal punishment in hell, but on the other it says that all the vast awesome expanse of the universe, with its suns and galaxies and nebula is all here for our benefit. He uses some long words for that but I can't remember now. There is some truth in both those statements although they are of course rather distorted versions of the truth. The main thing they fail to grasp is the cross.

On the cross God displayed his glorious love and grace to us "worms" dealing with our sin and adopting us into his family. The universe exists not so much for us as for Him with you and me being happily caught up in his glory.

BTW - The bible does not say we are horrible worms! Nor does it say we are mere monkeys. But more on that next I expect!

Gen 1 An interesting side track

Many people read Genesis chapter 1 and are happy to "just believe it". They can't see what all the fuss is about. If that's you I commend you and suggest you skip to the next blog entry. If you're like me however your passion for science and the bible often draw you back to this passage and it would be a great omission in my blog to ignore the issues raised by it. So let's put the matters of timescale, sequence and mechanism in front of us and enjoy going down a little side track for a moment.

First there is the question of time. How long did it take to get from the creation of the universe, or our planet at least, to man. The scientific evidence for an old earth (ie greater than 10,00 years) is strong, for example sedimentary rock and radio metric dating methods. Even someone as sound as Wayne Grudem, the Delia Smith of Theology, feels the weight of these things. OK, I'll explain, most kitchen bookshelves I see have a Delia Smith's cook book on them, and every bible students book shelf seems to have a copy of one of Wayne's books on systematic theology. And for good reason. I had the privilege a few years ago of sitting on the front row of three days of lectures given by Wayne Grudem and along with two friends were used as an analogy to the trinity. You can get the "Christian Beliefs" lectures on DVD if you want from clearcutmedia.

The bible however doesn't seem to give any hint of an old earth. If you add up the geologies like Bishop Usher did you get something like 6000 years (or to be more precise it all kicked off the night before 23rd October 4044BC). There are of course gaps in the genealogies he used but are there really gaps of thousands of generations?

The Hebrew word translated day is ‘yom’ and has a similar range of meaning. It can mean 24 hours or an unspecified long period of time depending on the context. If the latter then we have some long general chunks of time. We might even allow a little overlapping although the clear beginnings and ends of each day seem to provide clear cut-offs. The 24 hour day isn't easily shrugged off, as if we let scripture interpret scripture we need to factor in Ex 20:11 where God says "In six days the LORD made the heavens and the earth". Just read that Mark Driscoll goes for a literal six day creation but with the possibility of a gap in between Gen 1:1 and 1:2. The gap theory also has to answer to Ex 20:11.

In defence of long days there is no sun till day three, plants seem to grow very quickly on day 3 and in one sense the seventh day has not ended. In going for this however I not only have to face up to Moses’ comparison of creation days with our week of seven 24 hour days but make a stab at fitting the scientific sequence of events to the biblical sequence. It's not that easy. Here is the generally accepted scientific time line:

Nothing or a bubbling froth of universes appearing and disappearing.
Our universes' big bang
Universe 11 billion years ago (bya)
Earth 4.6 (bya)
Tiny-life 4 (bya)
Big-life 580 million years ago (mya)
Plants 490 mya
Fish 370 mya
Animals 350 mya
Dinosaurs 230 mya
Birds 150 mya
Modern Humans 200 thousand years ago (tya)
Spiritual artefacts 24 tya
Göbekli Tepe, oldest known man-made place of worship 11 tya
Permanent settlements, tool use, domestication of animals 10 tya
Larger states in Mesopotamia, the Nile and Indus Valleys 5-6 tya

The biblical time line is:

day 0 Watery planet (there is darkness and Spirit hovering over waters)
day 1 Light created
day 2 Sky created (clouds? water canopy?)
day 3 Land appears and vegetation produced from ground
day 4 Sun and moon and stars
day 5 Sea creatures and birds
day 6 Land animals and Adam and Eve

Although there are small organisms around in the sea before plants the main problem is that we don't get birds until after land animals. I think someone proposed day 5 is talking about insects but I'm not that convinced.

I find the Framework view which looks at the passage poetically more attractive. It recognises the unusual style of the text and the other symmetries and patterns in it (days 1-3 create space and days 4-6 fill them...kind of). Although it's not an obvious way of reading the text and can leave you wondering if smoke and mirrors have been used it doesn't force me to make a decision on the age of the earth or sequence of events.

In terms of mechanism ie in what way did it all happen there is a lot of scientific evidence for what's called common descent. That is every living organism had a common ancestor at some time in the past. This is distinct from any particular theory of how changes occurs. Several trees of common descent can be built up by looking at different aspects of organisms:
i) How they look
ii) When they appear in the fossil record
iii) Where they existed on the earth
iv) DNA comparisons including mutation and retro virus insertion.

The fact that these trees are said to end up being rather similar to each other strengthens the argument for common descent like threads twisted together make up a stronger rope.

The bible however seems at first sight to describe the instantaneous miraculous appearance of animals reproducing according to their own kind. I don't think that's necessarily the only interpretation and am happy to credit God with not just the "wow" of immediate appearance but the beautiful sophistication of evolution. Would the sudden appearance of galaxies be better in some way than their exploding and swirling into place? I don't think so.

If you want to follow this up further you might want to look at www.talkorigins.org and www.answersingenesis.org. I've had many a happy evening ping ponging between these two sites.

Hope you're still with me, especially if you are strongly in one camp or the other of the creation/evolution debate. Although I love thinking about all this I struggle to see how it makes much difference to me, or increases or decreases God's glory. Anyway, let's press on to more fertile ground.

Gen 1:3-25 Apollo 8

Apollo 8, the first manned mission to the Moon, entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve, December 24, 1968. That evening, the astronauts spoke live in one of the most watched broadcasts of the time. Sounding like they were speaking down a crackly telephone line, this is what they said:

William Anders:
"We are now approaching lunar sunrise and, for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you:

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth.
And the earth was without form, and void; and darkness was upon the face of the deep.
And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. And God said, Let there be light: and there was light.
And God saw the light, that it was good: and God divided the light from the darkness.

Jim Lovell
"And God called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. And the evening and the morning were the first day.
And God said, Let there be a firmament in the midst of the waters, and let it divide the waters from the waters.
And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so.
And God called the firmament Heaven. And the evening and the morning were the second day.

Frank Borman
"And God said, Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together unto one place, and let the dry land appear: and it was so.
And God called the dry land Earth; and the gathering together of the waters called he Seas: and God saw that it was good.

And from the crew of Apollo 8, we close with good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas – and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth."


Someone responded by trying to sue the United States government for a violation of the First Amendment but it was dismissed due to lack of jurisdiction. (According to Wikipedia Buzz Aldrin secretly received communion on the lunar surface shortly after landing in Apollo 11.)
Putting the controversy aside for a moment what does this passage tell me? God not only spoke the universe into being but there was a process involved in it. In computer graphics packages you have extrusion operations as well as creation operations. You make a sphere, then you pull out a bit of it, or you create a cube and extend one side of it to make a rectangle. You make and you shape. And that seems to be what's happening here. In these verses God creates and separates. Then in the next verse he populates. Such creativity.

One of my hobbies (ok I don't really have that many) is programming little virtual worlds. I get such a buzz out of creating water, land, sky and then filling them with plants and animals. As well as modelling, one of the main aspects of computer graphics is light; describing mathematically how it reflects, and refracts, and scatters on a surface. Light is so cool to play around with and it's God's idea. I wonder if I would get away with describing computer programming as worship:-)

Gen 1:2 Divinely Tripped Up

I was planning on whisking forward past the next verse to the "And God said" section where he speaks everything into being. But I tripped up over verse 2: "the Spirit of God was hovering over the waters". You can almost hear a low rumble and feel the exhilarating change in pressure that comes before a storm. There is powerful potential here. There will be the first blinding flash of light in the next verse but now there is darkness. No life. No shape. No beauty. But the Spirit of God is hovering, or as other translations put it "moving" or even "brooding".

What really matters is not what things look like, or what is there now but whether the Spirit of God is there. As Jesus' body lay in the grave, still and lifeless in the dark, the Spirit of God must have been hovering (Roman 8:11) because suddenly light burst in as the stone rolled away and Jesus rises to his feet. That same power is at work in us! That same Spirit is brooding over us. Over our church, our city, our nation. It doesn't matter how dark it looks or how bleak your situation is, the key question is this : is the Spirit of God hovering? If he is, then the potential is not only life changing, it's world changing.

On one occasion, just before a paralysed guy gets lowered down through the roof we read "the power of the Lord was present for [Jesus] to heal the sick." Luke 5:17 God's Sprit was hovering again and so a few verses later the paralyzed man gets up, rolls up his mat and walks away, forgiven and healed.

Images of God's spirit fill the pages of the OT, water (Isaiah 44:3), fire and clouds (Exodus 13-21-22) and wind (Isaiah 32:15) signifying his powerful presence but the Spirit is going to be poured out in an unprecedented deluge first on Jesus (John 3:22) and then to his church (Acts 2). The Spirit of God is always present with us and in us but He is not ours to control as if we are in the cockpit of a JCB. What is God doing? I need to keep in step with the Spirit. Learn to discern what He is doing as I walk into different situations and contexts. I am so struck by people like Kathryn Kulman who were so reliant on the presence of the Holy Spirit in their ministry.

We had our church prayer meeting recently and at times there was a tangible feeling of God's Spirit hovering over us as we worshiped. I think we will sense that more and more.

Gen 1:1 The Sound of Music

Gen 1:1

Time to make a start. It's now or never. The bible. Chapter 1. Verse 1. "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth".

Last term at King's we preached through the first few chapters of the book of Genesis. I had the privilege of kicking it off with this verse. I remember the excitement. I thought "I may never get to preach on this verse again in my life". There are so many verses in the bible, 31,103 in fact, and all of them God's word and therefore worth preaching but surely there is something extra significant about the first. I really wanted to do the best I could with it. I started with a very familiar song from the sound of music. Julie Andrews introduces it like this:

Let's start at the very beginning
A very good place to start
When you read you begin with A-B-C
When you sing you begin with do-re-mi

She was right, the beginning is a very good place to start and that's why the bible starts there. I decided to leave the controversial stuff about the evolution of female deer, and the arrival of drops of golden sun to Toby the following week and linger on this first amazing verse in this amazing book. It declares the most basic truths that are as simple and as fundamental as ABC. If we don't start here we get nowhere.

This passage tells me several things. The main one though is that it's all about Jesus. God is the Hero of the story and as we read through to the NT we discover him fully revealed in the person of Jesus. It's not "in the beginning Marcus" although I can sometimes think as if it did. It doesn't start "in the beginning money" although I sometimes spend like that, or even "in the beginning my family" although they are so important to me. All these things, me, money, marriage find their proper place as I focus on Jesus. "In the beginning God".

I read a brilliant thing by John Piper recently: "keeping first things first makes second things better". (He was actually talking about marriage and how "staying in love is not the first task of marriage", its keeping the promises we made before God to one another. As we do that staying in love is "the happy overflow of covenant keeping for Christ's sake."). It's a great principle and means that as I put Jesus first and focus on him everything else gets to be the best it can be.

Everything was made by God, and for God, or as the NT puts it "by Jesus and for Jesus" (Col 1:16). That includes me except that now I belong to God not just because he made me but because he bought me back with his blood. This Jesus who made me for himself, was prepared, even after I had forsaken him, to buy me back with his very life. The one who created me was prepared to become a man himself and step into his creation to rescue me.

What a start!

Aim High

Before I set off I should be clear in my aims. Why am I doing this? Well, it's not simply because it's there, although that phrase is probably more appropriate for reading the bible than climbing a big pile of dirt and rock. It's not for the challenge, though I'm sure it will prove to be challenging.

Scientists recently discovered signs of ancient civilisations in a region straddling the border of Brazil and Bolivia. As the rain forest was cut down vast ditches and enclosures  became visible from the air. You could walk over these bumps and dips on the ground without realising their significance but from the air their large scale regularity becomes apparent and testify to the existence of a previously unknown civilisation in the Amazon basin. As I climb, verse by verse, book by book, I want to see Jesus more clearly. More of his magnificence and his majesty.

More and more God has impressed upon me the significance of taking in the whole of his word. I have experienced something of an epiphany recently when I realised that taken as a whole the bible leads me to the incontestable conclusion that, as a church, we will see many more people healed.

So my aim is to get an overview of the whole vista of God's word as it points to Jesus. It's something that Systematic theology attempts to do by grouping and analysing and summarising what the bible says about different subjects but there is no substitution for reading the whole story from cover to cover. Taking on not just the specific verses about healing or heaven or marriage or manna but their context in the whole breadth of God's word.

Oh, and how long will it take? Well it would be nice to think I could do it in a year but given that I'm already a few days into January, and that to do that I'd have to take it in chunks of several chapter at a time I don't think I'll commit myself. I remember setting out on a holiday on the Broads at top speed (around 7mph) and suddenly realising that it was more about the journey than the destination. After that I slowed down, stopped eroding the bank with my wash, and enjoyed the country side around me. I'm going to take a leisurely pace through the bible and enjoy the sights.     

So here I am. Base camp. I need to get a good night's rest and then tomorrow I will start.  I think. Actually I'm off to pray in the prayer room now at our church where we are doing a 24/7 prayer week.

Base Camp

I've just had a great idea! I am going to read through the bible and blog as I go. Suddenly I feel like an explorer about to climb Mount Everest!

First question is what route should I take? The bible is not put together in the order that the events happened so to make it a bit clearer I think I will try using my "NIV in chronological order". I've never read the bible that way and I like its layout so I think I will give it a go. The first few books are more or less in chronological order anyway, so I can always change later. Incidentally, the order we have in our OT bibles is different to that in Jesus' day. The first 7 books are in the same place but the others have been moved about a bit.  That explains why Jesus says in Matthew 23:35 "from the blood of Abel to the blood of Zechariah". Abel's death is documented in the first book of the bible, Genesis, which is still the first today, but Zechariah's death is found in 2 Chronicles (24:20-22) which in Jesus' day was the last book.

Second question is what supplies should I take with me? Well I have a book case full of commentaries and an entire world wide web full of information on the bible. Two books are perhaps worth a mention at this stage and sit beside me now. One is the excellent "ESV Study bible" and the other is "The bible for dummies". The former is as good as you would expect from the likes of J I Packer and Wayne Grudem who are in the Editorial committee. The latter I have found to be surprisingly good. I knew it would be well laid out and engagingly readable but its content is pretty spot on too. One little bit of info from their bible trivia inserts: Shakespeare, who was an employee of King James turned 46  at the time his version was being written. Now go to Psalm 46 in the KJV, count 46 words from the beginning and then 46 words from the end. You actually get Shakespeare. Sensibly they say it's probably a fluke but you never know!)

Third, good as these are, I also need a knowledgeable companion with me on this journey. I don't think I would go up Everest on my own without an experienced guide so I need the Holy Spirit with me on this expedition. Since He  inspired the bible, working wonderfully through human authors to cause to be written down just exactly what God wanted to be written and so is well equipped to help me through it.

Fourthly I may need a bit of modern technology to help me document my expedition. My arms don't like typing as much as they used to so I'm going to use a speech to text program. I'm telling you that because it tends to make a few odd mistakes that could baffle you if you didn't know.  It spells things right (I'm not using it yet BTW) but can mishear. My favourite mistake was when I got a bit flashy and said 'raison d'être' ('reason for living' in French). My digital assistant  who amazingly seemed to know less French than me, dutifully typed out "raisin deckchair". I want one!