Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Commentary

I have been wanting to write a whole commentary of the Bible for a number of years. I don't know if I will ever pull off such a feat, but I am going to try to put out bits of commentary here. Hopefully it will encourage and enlighten you.

My first section comes from Genesis 1. I have a Bible with some commentary within it, and it just kind of got me started, so I quoted it here.

Lifted from Zondervan NIV study Bible 2008:
Commentary on Gen 1:1-2:3;
“In the ancient Near East, most of the peoples had myths relating to how the world came to be. Prevalent in those myths were accounts of how one of the gods triumphed over a fierce and powerful beast that represented disorder, then fashioned the ordered world that people knew, and finally was proclaimed by the other gods to be the divine “king” over the world he had created -- a position ever subjected to the challenge of the forces of disorder.”

In Genesis we find a very different approach. The God we serve didn’t have to overcome anything. It is apparent that He is in total control. Much of the rest of the Bible rests on the truth that God is God and before Him there is no other.

Humanity does not handle the idea of ‘a supreme god being in control’ very well. From the earliest religions onward humanity has sought after weaker gods. Even after the revelation of an all powerful gods, humanity’s tendency has always been to depart from this simple truth: We serve an all powerful God. For the Israelites it was always the idolatrous religions of their neighbors. Today we trust the created world more than the creator of it; hence the phrase, “I’ll believe only what I see.” An effective warrior must decide early on that our God, though invisible is, was, and always will be supreme.

1 comment:

  1. It occurs to me that if we 'only believe what we see' as stated above, then we will not experience the miracles that take place around us. If we put limits on what we will accept as reality, then we will rationalize the events around us to fit our accepted reality. Only when we are free to accept anything that God does will we ever begin to see what He can do. We all too often only seek enough of God to get us through the day. Jesus proclaimed that we would perform greater miracles than He had done. Obviously, that's for His glory and not our own, but have we seen the reality of His statement? If not, why not? And, if not, then how? We need to seek God with all that is within us. He will reveal Himself to us if we earnestly seek Him. To God be the glory. =D
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