Attending a liberal arts college is a great way to get a well-rounded education where critical thinking is at the top of the list as far as “skills learned.” It’s also a good way to get talked out of your faith.
While taking a writing workshop class, a student brought in a fiction piece based on the question, “What if God was fallible?” The result was something like Gomer Pyle with superpowers—the first few times God put planets into motion, the alignment wasn’t quite right and there were a few collisions. It was a fairly humorous piece, especially when I knew the guy writing it was being sarcastic the whole time (granted, he’s an atheist, but he wasn’t trying to diss Christians per se). I walked into the class thinking that this was just going to be another discussion on character development, plot structuring, and transitions. I was wrong. I was surrounded by people who were all too happy to criticize the incredible stupidity of Christians for believing something that cannot be proven, seconded by our tendency to “purposefully ignore holes in the Bible.” I protested. This wasn’t a religion and philosophy class. The purpose of this course was to talk about writing, not bash belief systems. My classmates were only too eager to remind me that the Bible was “writing,” and informed me on just a few of the nuances where the Bible contradicted itself or caused us to be hypocrites. While this discussion included many examples, the one everyone liked the best was a quote out of the Old Testament. Although they didn’t know the verse citation, it wasn’t hard to find.
Genesis 8:1 “And God remembered Noah…”
Just these four words had clinched the argument that our God was fallible despite our and the Bible’s claims to the contrary. After all, if you are remembering something, you must have forgotten it at one point. They claimed that other versions of the Bible translated this as “And God forgot Noah,” literally proving their point.
What these graduate students, after years of studying literary theory, linguistics, and foreign languages, had conveniently forgotten was that language was never and can never be taken 100% literally. Think about the last time you told someone “go jump in a lake” or “that tickles me.” You don’t actually want the person to go swimming or mean that some idea reached out with invisible fingers and wiggled them against your ribs. So much of language (it varies by the individual language) is figurative, composed of idioms, metaphors, and slang expressions. We have been schooled in this for years. When you study foreign languages, you have to remember that not everything translates perfectly. I am sure that there were constructions of the original Greek and Hebrew that meant something very different during Biblical times than they do now. Think of the word “gay”—sixty years ago it meant “happy; joyful.” Not the immediate connotation we have now, is it?
The Bible isn’t saying that God forgot Noah—God is just giving His full attention to Noah. He’s focusing in on a particular person (and since there were only seven other people alive on Earth at that time, admittedly it’s not that hard of a task even for humans). When you think about it, it’s not just a symptom of language changing. It’s also in how we use the word “remember” in the English language. I can remember what a strawberry tastes like—that doesn’t mean that I ever forgot; it’s just that I haven’t thought about it lately for a multitude of reasons. God remembering us is just putting us in direct focus—and since He’s omnipresent and omnipotent, we’re always on His mind. Was this verse, then, just stating the obvious? Perhaps. I’m no Biblical language expert. The phrase is also a great transition, and let’s face it—the craft of writing is pretty darn fabulous in that old text.
In that moment in that classroom, I could have prayed for the right words to say (I’m assuming they would have been around these lines) and corrected the misconception. It was clear, though, that my audience wasn’t receptive to any contrary ideas. I chickened out. To keep the peace, and keep myself from being ostracized any more than I already was, I bit my lip and let my inner self cry and cringe throughout the blasphemous discussion. It was an understandable and even logical decision. I missed a valuable opportunity in order to save my Earthly reputation. In hindsight, it was a very human response and not something I’m proud of.
I know there are a lot of people out there like me. We are afraid of losing the few “friends” that we have. We want to be accepted and liked in our workplace. We want to keep our jobs. We want to be included. The question for us is damning: at what cost? I probably wouldn’t have won any souls that night, but I might have planted a seed. In the long run, what matters is our Heavenly business, not if we got invited to this party or had an extra friend request on Facebook.
It’s part of my challenge to start being Known. I want to be Known as the Christian who is strong in her faith. I want to be Known as a woman who puts God first. I want to be Known as someone who isn’t afraid to stand up and say, “Yeah, I’m a well-educated person who fully relies on and believes in God. Want to talk about it?” It’s not going to be easy—Satan knows that needing social validation is a huge struggle for me. My prayer for today is that God would help me to remember that the only validation I need is from Him, and I have that already from the day I first was saved.
So…are you Known?
While taking a writing workshop class, a student brought in a fiction piece based on the question, “What if God was fallible?” The result was something like Gomer Pyle with superpowers—the first few times God put planets into motion, the alignment wasn’t quite right and there were a few collisions. It was a fairly humorous piece, especially when I knew the guy writing it was being sarcastic the whole time (granted, he’s an atheist, but he wasn’t trying to diss Christians per se). I walked into the class thinking that this was just going to be another discussion on character development, plot structuring, and transitions. I was wrong. I was surrounded by people who were all too happy to criticize the incredible stupidity of Christians for believing something that cannot be proven, seconded by our tendency to “purposefully ignore holes in the Bible.” I protested. This wasn’t a religion and philosophy class. The purpose of this course was to talk about writing, not bash belief systems. My classmates were only too eager to remind me that the Bible was “writing,” and informed me on just a few of the nuances where the Bible contradicted itself or caused us to be hypocrites. While this discussion included many examples, the one everyone liked the best was a quote out of the Old Testament. Although they didn’t know the verse citation, it wasn’t hard to find.
Genesis 8:1 “And God remembered Noah…”
Just these four words had clinched the argument that our God was fallible despite our and the Bible’s claims to the contrary. After all, if you are remembering something, you must have forgotten it at one point. They claimed that other versions of the Bible translated this as “And God forgot Noah,” literally proving their point.
What these graduate students, after years of studying literary theory, linguistics, and foreign languages, had conveniently forgotten was that language was never and can never be taken 100% literally. Think about the last time you told someone “go jump in a lake” or “that tickles me.” You don’t actually want the person to go swimming or mean that some idea reached out with invisible fingers and wiggled them against your ribs. So much of language (it varies by the individual language) is figurative, composed of idioms, metaphors, and slang expressions. We have been schooled in this for years. When you study foreign languages, you have to remember that not everything translates perfectly. I am sure that there were constructions of the original Greek and Hebrew that meant something very different during Biblical times than they do now. Think of the word “gay”—sixty years ago it meant “happy; joyful.” Not the immediate connotation we have now, is it?
The Bible isn’t saying that God forgot Noah—God is just giving His full attention to Noah. He’s focusing in on a particular person (and since there were only seven other people alive on Earth at that time, admittedly it’s not that hard of a task even for humans). When you think about it, it’s not just a symptom of language changing. It’s also in how we use the word “remember” in the English language. I can remember what a strawberry tastes like—that doesn’t mean that I ever forgot; it’s just that I haven’t thought about it lately for a multitude of reasons. God remembering us is just putting us in direct focus—and since He’s omnipresent and omnipotent, we’re always on His mind. Was this verse, then, just stating the obvious? Perhaps. I’m no Biblical language expert. The phrase is also a great transition, and let’s face it—the craft of writing is pretty darn fabulous in that old text.
In that moment in that classroom, I could have prayed for the right words to say (I’m assuming they would have been around these lines) and corrected the misconception. It was clear, though, that my audience wasn’t receptive to any contrary ideas. I chickened out. To keep the peace, and keep myself from being ostracized any more than I already was, I bit my lip and let my inner self cry and cringe throughout the blasphemous discussion. It was an understandable and even logical decision. I missed a valuable opportunity in order to save my Earthly reputation. In hindsight, it was a very human response and not something I’m proud of.
I know there are a lot of people out there like me. We are afraid of losing the few “friends” that we have. We want to be accepted and liked in our workplace. We want to keep our jobs. We want to be included. The question for us is damning: at what cost? I probably wouldn’t have won any souls that night, but I might have planted a seed. In the long run, what matters is our Heavenly business, not if we got invited to this party or had an extra friend request on Facebook.
It’s part of my challenge to start being Known. I want to be Known as the Christian who is strong in her faith. I want to be Known as a woman who puts God first. I want to be Known as someone who isn’t afraid to stand up and say, “Yeah, I’m a well-educated person who fully relies on and believes in God. Want to talk about it?” It’s not going to be easy—Satan knows that needing social validation is a huge struggle for me. My prayer for today is that God would help me to remember that the only validation I need is from Him, and I have that already from the day I first was saved.
So…are you Known?
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