As I grow older and wiser through the study of the Bible and God’s spirit and grace, I am amazed at some of the atheistic myths I recall hearing in my youth.
One such myth related to the age of the Bible. How could something 2,000 years old be accurate? Think how many times it was translated by mouth or hand? There were no printing presses or computers. How could something be accurately recorded and saved over all those years. The Bible is just folklore, not a real historical document.
I fell for some of this nonsense. I know better now.
For one thing, I know about the Dead Sea Scrolls, one of the greatest archeological finds in modern history.
In 1947, three teenage Bedouin shepherds walked into the Qumran caves in the Judean desert of the West Bank. One stumbled and fell, only to land in a pile of scrolls contained in jars.
They took some scrolls back to their camp and showed them to their tent community, debated what to do with them. Eventually, they took the scrolls to some local antique dealers who said they were worthless. Finally, a dealer bought them for $28.
The original seven scrolls caught the attention of John C. Trever, of the American Schools of Oriental Research (ASOR), who compared the script in the scrolls to that of the Nash Papyrus, the oldest biblical manuscript then known, and found similarities between them.
This amazing archeological find produced over 200 biblical manuscript scrolls from 12 caves, almost the entire Hebrew Bible. The scrolls were a thousand years older than any previously known copies of the Bible.
And most amazing of all, it was 99.9 percent accurate compared to modern Bibles — the best known for any book from the ancient world. There were only 13 minor discrepancies.
This was simply a flat out modern day miracle. Add it to the huge list of miracles that explain why Christianity is believed by 2.3 billion people living in the world today.
Atheism amazes me in many ways. First, atheism is hopelessly arrogant. To think you got here all by yourself and that there is no higher power in the universe is hopelessly arrogant. Second, it is ignorant. Anyone who truly studies the Bible will find miracles and predictions of incredible detail with thousands of witnesses that are inexplicable without a creator.
Let’s not forget that human eyes only see .0035 percent of the electromagnetic spectrum. Truly, as the Bible says, despite all our science, we see dimly through a veil.
If human engineering can produce lifelike video games, surely God can create reality and do with it what he so chooses. Science has proven it’s a reality so fine-tuned that if any of the four basic forces of the universe were off by a fraction, the universe couldn’t exist. That fraction is 1 divided by a billion followed by 200 more zeros. There’s not even a name for such a large number.
But most of all, atheism is selfish. It allows us to do whatever we want with no accountability or repercussions. If there is no God, then we are God and our will can be done. This is a recipe for mankind’s disaster.
On numerous occasions throughout history, God has become so frustrated with mankind that he came close to wiping us out entirely. Thankfully, God’s mercy is bountiful, or I wouldn’t be writing these words.
The First Commandment is to have no other Gods before the real God. I can understand this. If I had created mankind, I’d be really irritated if my very creation refused to acknowledge me. My children may not do everything I say, but at least they acknowledge that I am their father (but not their creator which I am quick to remind them).
Back in the days of the Old Testament, “other gods” were truly other gods — golden calves that were worshiped, the sun and various other engraved idols.
Today, the worship of other gods is more subtle and far more invidious. We worship money. We worship our appearance or our career or our hobbies or children or a thousand other material things that we put before God. Truly, we are as disobedient in our material idolatry as those who worshipped graven images back in the old days. We must be careful about this.
You see it in the way the rest of the nation puts down Mississippi for having the lowest per capita income (even though it’s as high as England, France and New Zealand). Yet Mississippi has more churches and more believers per capita than the rest of the nation, maybe the world. As Jesus told us: What good does it do for a man to gain the whole world and lose his soul?
So here’s a Merry Christmas to Mississippi, the most Christian, most spiritual state in the nation. God’s Country. What a wonderful Christmas it will be.
