Tremble before him, all the earth! The world is firmly established; it cannot be moved. – 1 Chronicles 16:30

Today’s Scripture Reading (March 14, 2016): 1 Chronicles 16

On June 23, 1633, Galileo Galilei was officially arrested and placed under house arrest. He was no longer free to do what he wanted or to write what he wanted. His movements were curtailed and he was ordered to cease and desist in his absurd theory of Heliocentrism – or the idea that the earth and the other planets revolved around the sun. His book on the subject, Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, was banned and any further publication of the works that he had written in the past or might write in the future was strictly prohibited. For Galileo, his life had just ended. He was 69 at the time of his imprisonment and would remain imprisoned for the rest of his life. Galileo Galilei would die just over a month before his 78^th birthday.

While the church found his theory of Heliocentrism absurd, today it is hard to believe that someone could be imprisoned just because of a scientific belief. At no time did Galileo stop believing in the faith of the church, however, he did argue that the Bible was essentially a book that spoke about issues of faith and not of science. For the church, Galileo was trying to reinterpret the Holy Scripture which brought back fresh images of the Protestant Reformation, and the church simply was not in the mood to endure a second reformation battle over what the Bible did or did not say. It would defend the geocentric view that the earth stood at the center of everything – and that it could not be moved.  

While the issue may be settled for us (although I did meet someone recently who insisted that the Bible was right and that the earth stood motionless at the center of the universe), the question remains what do we do with passages like 1 Chronicles 16:30 which stand out against what we know as scientific truth. Is it enough for us to agree with Galileo that the Bible is a book about faith and not about science, or is there something more.

I stand with those that agree that there might be something more. The first thing that we must realize is that the Bible was originally written in a specific time period, and it will reflect the beliefs of that time. My favorite example of this is the answer to the question was Jonah swallowed by a big fish or a whale? The actual answer is that the question doesn’t make any sense. We might understand that a whale is not a fish, but rather is a mammal living in the sea, but when the book of Jonah was written, a whale looked like a fish, swam like a fish and smelled like fish, so it was a fish. While the Bible may say that Jonah was swallowed by a big fish, at the time that the story was written a whale was a big fish. And we would expect Jonah to characterize a whale that way, and not by ascribing a modern understanding of a whale to ancient writings. All of the Bible was written both for a purpose and in a specific time period. For Chronicles, this is true. The book itself was compiled somewhere around 400 B.C.E. as the Jews were returning from the Babylonian Exile, but the story and this poem, in particular, are from an Era during the reign of David almost 600 years earlier. We would expect it to retain characteristics of that day.

But the genre is also important. The passages of an “immovable earth” are all poetic in nature. And with poetry, we speak the heart and not the mind. Consider the opening lines to the classic 10cc hit “The Things We Do for Love” -

Too many broken hearts have fallen in the river,
Too many lonely souls have drifted out to sea.

Do we really mean that? Do broken hearts literally fall into a river, or do lonely souls drift out to sea – or are we trying to describe a feeling with the limitation of failing words. Most would agree that that describes poetry, the description of a feeling that we find hard to put into words. The Bible’s poetry does exactly the same thing, it describes feelings that are often hard to put into words.

So we need to feel this passage rather than look for literal truth. We need to understand that the world is firmly established. That in God’s mind we are important. We are the center of his focus, important enough that God would send his Son to us to die for our sins. And nothing can or ever will move us away from that focus. God loves us, and that places us at the center of the universe poetically, even if we are not at the center of the universe physically.

Tomorrow’s Scripture Reading: Psalm 95 & 96