The Wonder Springs Chronicle

Why Me? Stupendous Change

17 February 2010

Volume 12, Issue 7

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Barack Obama ran for President of the United States promoting a vision of “Change We Can Believe In.” Much to the chagrin of many of the people who voted for him, the true meaning of that catchy phrase was, “Change He Can Believe In.” What Obama was able to tap into during his campaign, is that all humans seek change that they can believe in as one of the prime goals in their lives. The underlying paradigm of this change however, relies on the ability of me to understand what is happening and to control, or at least find the outcome sympathetic to my desires for happiness. For me to see anything to be really positive change of the first degree, it needs to be achieved without risk, pain, suffering, or just about anything I could define as negative or undesirable.

So many Americans, especially those who worked hard to find their security in traditional American values, are grossly disappointed in the reality that when the candidate Obama said change, he really meant that unsettling word, “CHANGE!”

Oh, the audacity of that strange change fellow! We asked for warm feely change, and would you believe it, he really wanted to deliver change that was bordering on what most people would consider stupendous change. This angst is especially true because they elected George W. Bush twice, and he could not deliver on those warm fuzzy desires either. In fact Bush tried so hard by the end of his second term he had basically crashed all of our retirement security, in the names of freedom and unsustainable spending.

“Oh Jesus, what are we to do?”

Of course to bring the words of Jesus into the lyrics of a somewhat contemporary country song: “I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden!”

That brings us to our topic of stupendous change in this week’s article – history. We left off last week at the close of the Tower of Babel myth, which occurred sometime before we have verifiable historic records. By verifiable I mean two or more historical records that point to a very similar occurrence at a somewhat consistent time frame. That history goes back about four thousand years or on the Biblical timeline of what is now considered the Middle East, the time of Abraham or Abram.

What we find in that timeline from Abraham to the present day, in the traditions of the Judeo-Christian worldview, about every four to five hundred years, God brings about some stupendous change event that shakes the peoples sense of security to the core. To use a computer term, God reboots the culture. Then after the shaking subsides, which most of the time take decades to a century, the people do rather well within that culture, essentially creating positive change. Then when they become comfortable in these new circumstances, entropy and slothfulness take over and it is all downhill until the next reboot.

The last reboot and where we will stop our journey this week was the Protestant Reformation, which began just about five hundred years ago. So back to Babel and the stupendous change that the diversity of languages caused to all our human self anointed desires.

The timeline we will use from Abraham until the birth of Jesus Christ will be a typical Bishop Ussher six thousand year progression used by Adventists or Dispensational Evangelicals since the middle of the nineteenth century, copies of various models are available for free, or for funds, on the Internet. I chose one of the free examples, probably of the Adventist persuasion, which doesn’t have a date for the Tower of Babel, but after all, part of God’s reason for Babel beyond the myth, is the attempt for humans to figure out God and God’s workings, so that in the no myth sense, we can understand everything. Furthermore as we pointed out last week the Tower of Babel discussion utilizes only the first nine verses and 235 words of Genesis 11 in the King James Version. In a book of over a thousand pages, it really doesn’t occupy that much space, especially when it tells us about something, we have absolutely no desire to understand.

Biblical timelines really were not all that important in Christendom until about the time that Bishop Ussher was rediscovered, simply because it really wasn’t all that important because before the enlightenment of Darwinian Evolutionary spin, pretty much everyone believed in a God created universe and frankly there were other much more important things to worry about, like surviving continual stupendous change.

Over church history many Biblical scholars have created young earth historic chronologies, but none fit as well with the Ussher perfection of the Blessed The Rapture, or the Hope of Jesus return at 6000 years, and after the millennial reign of Jesus on earth of a thousand years (Revelation 20) the end of the age after the White Throne Judgment. The number seven signifies God’s perfection, at least as we try to make God’s transcendent perfection subject to our common understanding.

Today February 17, 2010 is really Adar 3, 5770 on the Jewish Callendar, also today is when the second temple was completed in 349 BCE (Before Common Era). The Noah Flood began on the 17 Cheshvan 1656 from creation and ended on Cheshvan 27 the following year. The Tower of Babel was built in 1765 BCE.

Our modern science really cannot get us to either of these levels of a young earth, but it does show the fundamental truth that if God really wanted us to know how old everything is, instead of numerous series of begat from begat, he could have just stated a date that we could understand and then we could have build all sorts of ingenious ways to use that date, so that we could understand, recreate God in our likeness, rather than the other way around. So the best we can do as wise and thinking Christians is to state thousands rather than millions and billions of years, and look to Jesus the author and perfecter of our faith to keep the earth’s true history secret until the time when that date will only be a means, rather than an end of our desire to overcome any stupendous change at all.

But there still are some of those primitive knuckle-dragging religious people out there that are so stupid and unenlightened that they cannot grasp the intellectual honesty of a faith that shows totally material quantum leaps in informational complexity which can easily take place by undirected random chance over billions of years. To those people the Institute for Creation Research has found radioactive carbon 14 in diamonds. There are other creation science research concepts out there that could question the evolving paradigm, but just as with global warming research, they lie outside the convention of open inquiring scientific thought and therefore we can only research something the status quo has settle as truth. To question the elite establishment cannot be science, because science has become again a substitute religion, with priests and laity.

For those without any acceptable scientific knowledge and still wish to pursue your unproductive primitive worldview, you might ask yourself a simple question, “Where’s the dirt?” What is meant by that is if you look at all the tremendous geological phenomena that occur on this planet and were formed over millions and billions of years, it is really a stupid question to ask what happened to the dirt that is no longer there that makes the feature, a feature, and if the feature has been that way for billions of years why hasn’t the sandstone decomposed into sand? If it blew or washed to Somewhere or Nowhere you probably should be able to go there and look at it. The only other opportunity for that to happen is that primitive thought, that the primitive really isn’t that old. We could pursue that further, but it would just make you see that human enlightenment really sometimes isn’t all that much enlightened.

So in verifiable history we are suddenly transported back to Abraham about four thousand years ago. According to our Biblical timeline it was 470 years from God’s covenant with Abraham (Genesis 11:29-12:4) until the Jewish people reentered the Promised Land after their exile in Egypt and their 40 year wandering in the wilderness of Sinai. According to our chart that covenant began in 1917 and the Jews crossed the Jordan in 1447 BCE.

There was another 480 years until Solomon finished the first temple in Jerusalem in 967 BCE. As we look through stupendous change, events are generally marked as highlights in the telling of history, but the struggles leading to those human triumphs are marked with complex difficulties that force people and especially their appointed, or other leaders, to forgo comfort for the betterment of the people.

From that first temple completion, it took until 349 BCE for the first temple to be destroyed and then the second temple rebuilt according to today in Jewish history above. This era of course included a seventy year exile in Babylon for Jewish rebellion as God’s people, before they could even begin to return to the Holy Land. According to our timeline, Nehemiah in 408 BCE finally finished Jerusalem reconstruction. Furthermore the final Old Testament Book of Malachi was finished about that time, meaning that there was no further prophet of God in Israel until the time of John the Baptist and Jesus of Nazareth.

Of course the birth of Jesus is the major reboot of the world’s cultures since we now measure time from his birth either as AD (anno domini: year of the Lord) or CE (Christian era or common era.) For Christians the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ (Anointed One) signifies the fulfillment of that Abrahamic Covenant of grace that God accomplished about two thousand years earlier. In that first covenant with Abraham, God sacrificed an animal as the representation that God would perform all that was required to bring and be a blessing to Abraham’s descendants.

In Jesus, God not only fulfilled that covenant of God’s grace with Abraham’s Jewish descendants but also adopted as his children all the people of the earth. Thus began the church age and the continual ascendancy of western culture as the dominant culture on planet earth. This blessing goes back to a promise of Noah to bless Japheth, one of his three sons. The other Shem was blessed as the forefather of the Jewish people, and Ham the other son was cursed (Genesis 9:20-27).

The next event from our timeline comes in 530 AD with the Pope establishing his headship of all churches brought about by the moving of the headquarters of the Holy Roman Empire from Rome to Constantinople. This change was somewhat brought about when the Vandals sacked and burned Rome in 455. In the intervening years from the ascension of Christ, the church had to overcome many heresies that denied not just Jesus’ propitiatory atoning sacrifice, but also either his deity or his humanity, or still present in our day, he was just another wise religious teacher among others, or other gods.

Leaving our timeline the next occurrence was the schism between the Orthodox Church from Rome in 1054. Until this time a true catholic church existed in which bishops from throughout the major cities of the church world formed essentially a leadership council. On that date Roman legates traveled to Constantinople to require that their Patriarch Michael Cerularius accept the view that Rome was indeed the head and mother of all churches. From this we find the true birth of a separate Roman Catholic Church, which assumed Christian authority over western Europe.

Then on October 31, 1517 the Protestant Reformation was launched when Martin Luther nailed 95 Theses to the door of the church in Wittenberg, Germany. Next week we will go into more detail about The Reformation and the stupendous changes it wrought to bring into existence the world we know today. Today as we move forward with “Why Me?” we are beginning to see another change as profound as what has happened about every five hundred years as God reboots human culture.

A time of prolonged stupendous change is at hand, some natural, some political, some cultural. For the time being there will be many who think we can handle this all as enlightened human beings, trying to bring order to chaos beyond our understanding. They will be proven wrong. The United States is unique in the world, for about midway from The Reformation until the present, a group of disagreeable revolutionaries decided they could agree on a new form of government based essentially on the grace of God, working through normal common people to build a somewhat just society, here on a fresh continent.

In the last year we have seen the beginnings of rebooting. We really cannot understand the amazing grace of that rebooting, for we are still trying to hold on to the inherited material stasis we built through most of the twentieth century. Through it all we will restore our faith in God and learn to rely again on human potential under God, not as babel to become gods over each other or over creation. This stupendous change is not going to come without risk, and some will grow weary and quit, so be it. For those who preserve, with God’s help, we will again understand that life is much more that our stuff and our struggles to hold it tightly as our sole reason for living.

We are seeing doors beginning to open here at Wonder Springs and would like your help to make these opportunities a reality for leadership, which leads through stupendous change into the new future.