New Year, New Reading Plan · 7:46am Jan 8th, 2020
Okay, so, as part of the New Year, I decided to start a 100-day Bible reading plan focusing on the first five books of the Old Testament. Yeah, I don’t know what I was thinking either, but I’ve made the decision to follow through with it. Anyway, the first book of the Old Testament and, by extension, the whole Bible is Genesis. As part of the reading plan, each book comes with overviews from a YouTube channel called The Bible Project, and the following are the ones covering Genesis:
Anyway, I normally reserve my more Christianity-heavy posts to the forum of the Christian group that I’m part of, but I felt as if what I was reading so far was worth risking hate comments for. So, for the people who watched the attached videos, the overviews for the book of Genesis are pretty heavy on the doom and gloom. I’m not even a quarter of the way through the book yet, and I can already see why. Even Noah and Abraham (two of the Bible’s “heroes” according to Sunday school teachers) made messes that were honestly pretty painful to read about, and any good that they were able to accomplish was only possible because they had chosen to put their faith in God and live out that faith as best as they could. But maybe that’s the whole point.
I’m not saying that only Christians are capable of being good, but what if whatever good humanity is capable of is only possible because God is good and He made us? Sure, life has gotten better in a lot of ways since the days of ancient civilization, but at the end of the day, we really are no better than our ancestors.
Now that I’ve thoroughly depressed you, why don’t I get to the good news? So, you know how the Old Testament gets a reputation for having God make a bunch of rules and then wrathfully punishing anyone who breaks them? Well, it’s an oversimplified reputation at best and a totally unfair one at worst. Why don’t I use the Flood as an example? So, God decides to wipe out humanity because it had become wicked and evil but spares Noah and his family because Noah was faithful to Him and continued to walk with Him. Yeah, well, here’s how the beginning of that story’s ending goes: “Never again will I curse the ground because of humans, even though every inclination of the human heart is evil from childhood.”
So, the way I’m reading this is that God pretty much says that not even faithful Noah was good enough to deserve saving, and what Noah does after the Flood is evidence of this. God being who He is knew this but decided to save him and his family anyway. Let’s not forget that Abraham messed up in some pretty huge ways that I will not go into detail here, but God still blessed him by keeping His covenant and His other promises. If I can sum up what I’ve learned so far, it’s that we may be no better than our ancestors, but God has always been and still is good, and that is very good news indeed.
Huh... if you think about it, even though we Humans f#ck up, God's still here for us. (Which is more that can be said about any other god, just saying)
Human beings lead messy lives. Very, very, very messy lives. Racism, homosexuality, crime.............yep.
But no matter what, God will always be there for us...
It is kinda amazing that for all the faults in humanity, some of us still find salvation with God.
Testify sister, testify!!!