Monday, July 13, 2009

Today's Passage: Joshua 15-16

These two chapters are a written map, for lack of a better term. They describe how part of the promised land west of the Jordan River was divided among God's people. The ideal way to study this passage would be with a map of Canaan so that we could trace the boundaries that Joshua is describing. However, while reading all of the very detailed boundaries in this passage I was reminded of a great piece of information about the composition of the Bible.

I am sure that many of you know people who think that the Bible is not completely true. Others of you may know people who think the stories in the Bible are just as mythical as Zeus and Hercules. I recently learned some interesting facts about the Bible while reading the book The 10 Most Common Objections to Christianity by Alex Mcfarland. One of the things that jumped out to me was that if you take the Bible and compare it to both ancient historical text and ancient mythical text you will find that it is written almost exactly like a historical text and nothing like a mythical one. The important fact to take in to account here is that it wasn't until the last 500 years or so that real places and people in history were frequently used in fictitious or mythical stories. Before that all fictional stories were made up almost completely from scratch. So for someone to claim that the Bible is fiction they must agree that its writers were centuries before their time.

So next time you are reading a passage that is a list of someone's descendants or the boundaries of someone's land, remember that those details are just one more proof in the authenticity of the scriptures.