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Listen to The Rooted Podcast for in-depth conversations about the Bible and how we can apply it to our lives. Join the team behind Rooted, Bible Society's devotional journal, as we dig deeper into a theme or book of the Bible in each series and explore its message for us today.
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You're listening to The Rooted Podcast from Bible Society. In each series we take a closer look at a theme or book of the Bible and explore its relevance in our lives today. Hey everyone, welcome back to The Rooted Podcast. I'm Noelle and I'm here with Mark and Esther. We are going to be answering some of your hardest Bible questions in this episode. Earlier this year, Bible Society, go to quite a few festivals over the summer and we were at New Wine Festival this year.
and we asked some of our great supporters at New Wine if they would give us some of their questions for us to answer. If you do have any questions that you want to send into the podcast at any time, you can send them into biblesociety.org.uk forward slash Rudy questions. And maybe we'll do another one of these perhaps in the future. The first question that we have is, the creation story real or is it just a parable? I think this one's really interesting. I think
When, until I basically was an adult that started reading the Bible for myself and thinking for myself about it, I probably thought that it was. But now I don't really read it that way at all. I sort of read it not as something that's meant to be a scientific explanation about the way that the world was created. Because if you look at it in that way, it doesn't actually make sense a lot of what you read. But I more just see it as sort of an account of the people of God thinking about the creation of the world, but not necessarily something that
I'm taking literally as I'm reading it. This is exactly how the world was formed. But yeah, I don't know. What do you guys think? Yeah, I agree with you. Only I came to that a bit later, I think, because I grew up in a church which was really, it was very, very hot on biblical creationism, you know, is one of the things that marked that church out. And it was a, you know, it a very big church. It was a very sort of flourishing and successful church. you know, you could sort of exist within that church and not really think
too hard about how things stacked up. So I, you know, I took, but I did come to the same conclusion as you really that this was not meant to be taken as a literal account of, account of how the world began or anything. But I kind of take issue a little bit with the question because it says, is the creation story real or is it just a parable? From my point of view, I mean, this goes back to, I suppose, my experiences growing up because
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we were sort of taught, well, either you believed that it's literally true or you don't believe the Bible at all. I think that's a really sad way of dividing those two things, to be honest. And in fact, I remember talking to a school friend who wasn't a Christian at the time. And he said, I'm perfectly happy to think about
believing in God. if you tell me that the world, that I've got to believe that the world was created in six days in 4004 BC, I'm just not going to do it because I don't think that's true. And I think it's really sad when people get put off the gospel and don't have that sort of life changing encounter with Jesus because they're, you know, because they're told that they have to believe something which, you know, I don't think we do have to believe.
And I think what I mean by, you know, it's not just a parable is that if you take it non-literally, that doesn't mean you don't believe it in a different sense. You know, it doesn't mean that you don't have amazing things to learn from it. It doesn't mean that it hasn't got amazing things to teach us. It's just that it teaches us as a story rather than as a history textbook. Yeah, I mean, I think
what I would say as well is just, you know, the first five books of the Old Testament, they're attributed, aren't they, to Moses. Well, Moses was not there at the dawn of creation, sort of scientifically observing and noting all of this down. So it's a creation account. And I mean, it would be interesting to find out more about, you know, how consistent is this creation account with the sort of scientific understanding
that people in Moses's day had, you know, because it could be that it is very consistent with what they could observe, what they could know based on the experiments they could do and, you know, that kind of inquiry. So, yeah, I think it's clear that the main point of this, why it's in the Bible, why Moses...
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and the people of God wanted to keep this in there is because it's pointing out that there is a creator. You know, there's a creator and we can know something about that creator. That creator has revealed himself to us. He wants a relationship with the humans he's created, with his creation at large. It has a purpose. You know, there is a plan for it. And it was created good.
you know, all these sort of details that we can pick up from the story that are not, you know, that's quite aside from the did it happen in seven days. This is about revealing who the creator is and what that means for us. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about that. And I think it's really interesting what you said about comparing that story with, you know, the other stories that might have been around at the time. And that's that's very instructive, actually.
because the Babylonians, for instance, a bit later than this, they had a myth about the creation of the world, which involved, you know, gods fighting together and various bodily fluids and all that sort of thing. And they believe that human beings were created as the gods' slaves. They needed people to work for them, so they created people as slaves. Think about the Greek myths where I think it's, was it Zeus who
ate his father, something like that, something ghastly like that. But, you know, again, there's a lot of bloodshed, a lot of mayhem, and it's all about blood and conflict and all of that kind of thing. And so you have those stories, and then you have the Bible stories where the world was created good, and God just says, let there be, and the world comes into existence. I think that's a tremendous, you know, if you think about the
the difference it makes to a culture, if you believe that fundamentally the world was created out of violence, or fundamentally the world was created good, these are two completely different ways of looking at the world. And what the Bible tells us is that, well, as you were saying, Esther, that God made the world and God loves the world. And I think that's amazing. I think one of the things that comes to my mind when I
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think about this though is that if we're saying that some parts of the Bible can be taken literally, but then other parts were not taken literally, obviously that opens up a whole conversation about which parts should be taken literally and which parts shouldn't. For example, after the creation story, we've got the flood, which is another crazy story in which people debate whether that really happened or not. So think it's interesting even if we think about the gospels and how there's four different accounts and a lot of the times those accounts don't add up really.
What do you guys think about that, about how we read the Bible and which parts we take literally and which parts we don't? I guess I even think about the book of Genesis. It seems to change a lot when Abraham comes into the story. That's how I always read it. Abraham, are strange after Abraham, let's be honest. But before Abraham, time almost works really differently. And I think it slows down a lot when you get to Abraham. It becomes more of like a linear story.
not linear, but time seems to change a bit. But I guess I was just thinking, how do I work out which parts I should take literally and which parts I should say aren't? think the first 11 chapters of Genesis are, it's fairly obvious that they're a different type of writing. It's sort of primeval prehistory and there's a lot there that I wouldn't necessarily take literally. I mean, think one thing is that
very often we do know which bits are to be taken literally, which bits are. We shouldn't be scared to think like that, I think. When it comes to the New Testament, think the more you read the stories, I think the more the gospels do actually interlock, to be honest. I think you'll see things told from different points of view, but that's not necessarily to say that they contradict each other. I think there are some bits that are really difficult to reconcile, actually, like two different accounts of the deaths of
of the death of Judas. I've never succeeded in fitting those together. So, you know, that says something, I think. But for me, I think that's probably not a terribly important question, you for me personally, because the way I think about it is that the Bible as we have it is the Bible that God intended us to have. know, so the Bible, which is on my desk or on my phone,
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that itself is a gift of God. And so I don't, you know, personally, I don't get very wound up about questions of, you know, who wrote the Bible or whether it's historically accurate in every single detail or anything like that. I mean, I'm more interested in trying to understand it and trying to understand what it says to me because it's God's gift. Yeah. God.
in his word encourages us to love him with all of our minds. That's one of the things he does. And there's so much in the Bible about how creation speaks of God, how you can look at it and learn of God from it and all kinds of things like that. So I think we're encouraged to do it in the Bible. The Bible doesn't tell us, don't look, don't seek, just accept this. And that isn't actually a biblical way of looking at things.
So I also don't really trouble myself over things like that. And I do think that, when we understand when something signals it's a certain type of writing or we know, okay, it was written at that time, these understandings have been gained since then. I think all of that shouldn't trouble us. It's just, you know, it's another thing that we need to kind of grapple with, think through. I think it shows how living and active it is. Yeah, absolutely.
Our next question is when was the Bible written? I think it's safe to say the Bible was written over a period of about a thousand years because it's got all these different authors and all these different books. And, you know, it's got at least 66 different books which were written at different periods. So some of the answers to the question depends on who you think wrote the Bible. So, for instance, if you think that Moses wrote
most of the first five books of the Bible. Well, that probably puts those five books, I don't know, 1300, 1400 BC, something like that. Now, a lot of people say, well, it probably wasn't Moses, they came together a bit later and so on. So that brings the earlier books a bit closer to us. You can tell, or scholars can tell, I can't tell because I'm not really a scholar, by the style of writing, the vocabulary,
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that kind of thing, what the earlier books of the Bible may have been. So I vaguely remember that some people think that Job might have been the earliest book, but they came together, they came together over quite a long period of time. And what we think of as the Old Testament was sort of established finally in the third century BC, that was the Jewish Bible. Christians took that over as what we call the Old Testament.
the New Testament books were, you know, mainly, they were finished by about 100 AD. It was in the fourth century that the canon of scripture, so the agreement about what books made up the Bible was finally established. So it's all a bit vague, to be honest. It's good answer. I don't think Esther and I are going to add anything on to that. We'll just move on.
I wish I could sort of ask further questions of the person who, you know, requested that we talk about this because, yeah, I'd love to know, you know, why that's a big question for them. You know, is it because they're sort of thinking, well, how can this be, if it was written by all these different people over this time, like, how can we be sure that it is this thing that we call the word of God? And I would, the only thing I would add to kind of say to that is that the harmony between
the scriptures, even though they were written by so many different authors over all these years. you know, just if you think about it, as the New Testament things were being written, not all Christians would have had access to all of them, you know, and yet there's this harmony between the messages that are in all of the books of the Bible. So to me, that does speak quite strongly of how this is a cohesive story and it is God's Word.
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Yeah, I think that's so true. really is. There is one big story that runs all the way through it, isn't there? And we've got a Bible Society course called the Bible course, which actually takes you through that journey, actually. It's a video based series. And if anybody hasn't seen that and wants to check it out, it's on our website and it's really worth looking at.
Our next question, similar to what we've just asked, who wrote the Bible?
I guess when I think about this, think very basically that there were two, well, I don't want to say two authors, but that the Bible is inspired by the Holy Spirit. We get that from 2 Timothy 3.16, all scriptures God breathed. But then also that there were many authors, as we've said, across all of that time. Obviously, some of the books that we don't know who wrote them, or at least the church tradition doesn't acknowledge those books as having known authors. But I've read about 35 authors.
total that we know of? Yeah, I've read about 40. Again, I think probably people don't really know. But I'll tell you what, there's another way of looking at that question, who wrote the Bible? And you could kind of rephrase it as what kind of person, what kind of people wrote the Bible? So yeah, above everything, there is God inspiring people to write. But
You think of Ecclesiastes, for instance, that was written by a very well-educated person. There are other books where you can see, well, this must have been a scribe or a lawyer or a trained historian or something like that. And then some of the prophets, mean, Amos is a shepherd, you know, he didn't move in high society or anything like that. And you go to the New Testament and, well, Mark's gospel was probably based on Peter's.
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memoirs or Peter's of the life of Jesus and he was just a fisherman. So there's a whole bunch of people who are responsible, humanly speaking, for writing the Bible.
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Yeah, but all of them really felt that this was worth that effort of writing down, of preserving, of having this record. Like Luke says at the beginning of his gospel, my dear Theophilus, or have you pronounced that name, I've put this down so that you can know. So yeah, it's not just who the authors were and what type of people, but the reason they did it, especially back in the day when writing materials
All of that had been incredibly expensive and I don't know what the literacy levels were, but I'm imagining that many, many people could not read and write. But there was this desire because this was so important in their minds and so key to understanding the world, living in the right way. They wrote it down and they preserved it. And I think that's really important to remember. next question is, will there be a sea in heaven?
they've written in parentheses the beach. Can we go to the beach in heaven?
Well, I think, so I'm just going to flip to Revelation chapter 21 because I think that's why this question is here. Basically, it's in that very, dear, I've so many articles at the back of this Bible. So Revelation 21 in the very famous passage about the new heaven and the new earth, it says, then I saw a new heaven and a new earth.
for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away and the sea was no more. So perhaps this person is asking the question, so they're like, but I rather like the sea. I hope they'll be in heaven because, you know, that sounds great to me. And I think, think something that's really key to understanding this is to get the idea that in scripture, the sea is often taken to sort of represent chaos.
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and disorder. So even right back in the Genesis account, you've got God hovering over the water and then he brings order. He separates land from sea and things like that. So there's that sense of maybe the water was this kind chaotic thing and then he brings order to it. But then much later in the Bible, we've done the Daniel series on this podcast where we went through the book of Daniel now.
Daniel's vision in chapter seven, it describes how he sees the four winds of heaven stirring up the sea and these beasts emerge from the sea. And it's the symbolism here is of sort of rebellion against God, chaos, forces that are against God. And you see that again in Revelation 13, where you have a beast, which some people think it's the Antichrist.
the man of lawlessness, I think that's in Thessalonians somewhere, rises up out of the city and it's about this rebellion against God, forces of evil. So I think maybe in that sense, the mention of there being no more sea in Revelation 21, it's not saying there will be no bodies of water. I mean, later there's talk of the spring of water of life or something like that. So it's not like there'll be no water.
But it is saying that this potential for chaos and rebellion against God will not be a thing anymore. And the perfection of God's creation will not be threatened. Yeah, I absolutely agree with that. I think that's what it is. And I would not like to think of a heaven without any seeds, to be honest. I'm very fond of that. And the other thing is that there's a really important New Testament reference there as well, which is when Jesus calms the storm.
know, he's out on Galilee, the sea is rising, they think they're going to die, but Jesus says, peace, peace, still. So that's another, just an example of the authority of God over the symbol of chaos, over the symbol of everything that's opposed to him, basically. So I think that's what it's getting at. So if our question is a surfer, for example, I don't think you need to worry.
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Our next question was, was there anything that Bezalel and Aholiab couldn't build? So this is referencing Exodus 31, 1-6. These two are filled with the Holy Spirit for a specific purpose, which is to build the tapernacle. So this person has asked us, is there anything they couldn't do, basically? Which I guess, I think the question they're really asking seems to be, did they have the Holy Spirit for this specific thing?
they have had the Holy Spirit and then done other amazing things with the Holy Spirit? I guess that's what I kind of thought that they were getting at with this question. And maybe that's interesting to the person who's asked because if I'm right, these two are the first people to be filled with the Holy Spirit in the Old Testament that we see. So maybe this person is wondering, was that special in some way? Yeah. What do you guys think?
I do think you've sort of hit the nail on the head there just by saying that they were given these gifts for a specific purpose. I mean, basically from Exodus chapter 35 verse 30 through to Exodus 39, the end of it, all of that is describing how the tabernacle was constructed and it repeatedly talks about Bezalel and Aholiab and not just them.
but other craftsmen who are sort of under their tutelage. know, the Spirit of God gives them these amazing skills and abilities. And not just that, but it says they had the ability to teach others and the other craftsmen were gifted too in order to do this very specific work. I mean, I think we've got to say that there must have been limitations because, you know, there's even in this account, there's sort of mention of the fact that
the Israelites came and contributed like gold, linen, yarn, all the things that would be needed to actually like make, you know, the clothing of the priests, like the everything, the tabernacle. Like, so they had materials, God knew what they were. He gave very specific instructions about what he wanted them to do with them. And actually the whole community, not just these very gifted people,
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bought the stuff together and made it. So yeah, I think it was for a specific purpose and I'm not sure that it was just this unlimited thing that then they were like the world's best builders and craftsmen forever in whatever they turned their hand to.
Good. Our next question is, what is the law of the spirit in Romans 8?
Well, that reference, I think it's Romans 8, 2, which says, there's now no condemnation for those who are in Christ Jesus, because through Christ Jesus, the law of the Spirit who gives life has set you free from the law of sin and death. So, the law of the Spirit who gives life. And I think that's what's behind question. I think where I landed on this, having looked at a couple of commentaries, was that law is something that
that sort of constrains you and it stops you from doing things. Law provides you with guide rails so that there are things that you can do and things that you don't do. And one of Paul's things is that the law which just tells you what to do is always going to kill you in the end. It's always going to lead you into sin. But the law of the spirit kind of frees us from that slavery to a written authority.
It's how you should live, it's how you should love God, it's how you should love your neighbor. And the law is there as a guide, but it's not there as a sort of, you know, a taskmaster or anything like that. Yeah, I think, you know, it does sort of say free in Christ Jesus. And I think that is pretty key, isn't it? It's because of what Jesus has done.
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for us on our behalf and Romans chapter eight really dives in a lot of detail into that, how we've been set free through Jesus. I think, you know, there's that. I mean, I thought of see the law of the spirit of, sorry, yeah, the law of the spirit of life. I see it as being connected to the Holy Spirit who Jesus, you if you read John 14,
He requested that his father send the advocate to, or the helper to his disciples and that he would then in that sense, in his spirit, be dwelling within them. They were sort of freed from the consequences of the law through Jesus. And then we have this spirit inside of us, which leads us into all truth. I think there's a place where it is called even the spirit of truth and helps us to kind of like obey
you know, follow Jesus, obey his commands. Yeah, I think that's good.
Our next question is an interesting one. If Jesus can do anything, can he lie or die? I think the more interesting one here is lie, because obviously he can die, because he did. I know he resurrected obviously, but can he lie or die? For me, I think yes. I think yes, he could have lied when he was on the earth. The reason I think that is because, so I would look to something like Philippians 2, I would look to the Christ hymn.
so that he was fully God, but it says, being in very nature God did not consider equality with God something to be used to his advantage. So when I think about Jesus, I think of someone who was fully human and fully God, but who set aside his divinity, meaning that he could have lied, he could have sinned, he could have done all these things. And that is what makes it so beautiful and so amazing, the fact that he was tempted, like Hebrew says, but he didn't sin.
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I think that's powerful for us too, because if Jesus did all of those things because he was God, then what hope do I have? Because I'm not. But if Jesus loved the poor and healed the sick and did all of these things as a human and loved his enemies fully human, then I've got a chance. I guess that's the way that I think about it. But what do you guys think? That's so interesting. Because when I was playing this, I was like, yeah, no.
Jesus couldn't lie because he is God. So even though he is fully human, he's also fully God, truly God, and that would be completely against God's nature to lie. In fact, when we hear about lies in the Bible, Satan is described or the evil one is described as the father of lies. It's the opposite of what it means to be God because he is
So, yeah, in that sense, was like, Jesus couldn't have lied. But I see what you're saying that if we're truly going to say that in his human form, he could be tempted and yet not sin, then yeah, the possibility for him to tell a lie must have been there, but he did not. Because if he had, then he would have been guilty under the law, like we've just been describing, talking about Romans 8.
or couldn't have been a perfect sacrifice for us, you know, all of those things that we believe about him and why he came. I think that's true. And I think I'm with you, actually. I think that this thing about, you know, temptations being real temptations, I think that's really important. Otherwise, he's just pretending to be a human being, isn't he? And there are times for all of us when we're tempted to do things wrong, you know, we're tempted.
And sometimes we give way to the temptation and we do lie and we do all sorts of things. it's like you said, the beautiful thing is that Jesus chose not to. He could have done, but he chose not to. I think it's really important.
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Our last question that we're going to answer today is, how do you reconcile the God of the Old Testament, and they've put in parentheses wrath and violence, with the God of the New Testament in parentheses peace and nonviolence? Well, I'm just going to say I think this just isn't true, to be honest. I think there is a huge amount of
peace and loving kindness in the Old Testament. think that throughout it, you can see that God's desire is for peace. And if you look at the historical books, well, they tell stories about bloodshed and violence because that was the history of the time. That doesn't mean that God wanted that. Doesn't mean that God approved of that. it's in the Old Testament that we have those lines, which I don't know, in this country anyway, we read every remembrance Sunday.
about beating swords into plowshares and, you know, there being an end to violence and an end to warfare. You you've got Isaiah's prophecies as well about every warrior's boot rolled in blood shall be fuelled for the fire, all that kind of thing. It's all about peace. It's all about peace and God's love and desire for an end to all that kind of thing. So it's not just the Old Testament. It's not just the New Testament. It's the Old Testament as well.
Yeah, I think you have to ignore so much that we learn about God in the Old to say, to just boil it down to, he's a God of wrath and violence. But equally, I think you have to ignore quite a lot about what Jesus says in the New Testament if you say that he is just about nonviolence and peace, because he does speak a lot about judgment. He does talk about how there will be wars and rumors of wars and things like that.
Yeah, I think it's too simplistic a question to just say, Old Testament this, New Testament that, and there's clearly such a continuity between those two testaments. You know, I don't think you get a picture of a different God. But like, why did he send Jonah to Nineveh? They were Assyrians, like, and say, repent, come back to me. Like, why would God do all of that if he's just about wrath and violence?
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And he doesn't just show kindness to his people, and through his people, he promises to bless the whole earth. Yeah, I agree. I think it's important to remember that they're the same God. They're not different in the Old Testament and the New Testament. But I do think that we're meant to look to Jesus as the final revelation of God. That when I am thinking about violence and nonviolence, I am meant to look to him, not to the...
not to David, not to things that happen in the Old Testament, but to what Jesus says about loving my enemy. I don't know that they mean that though, do they? Because if they're talking about wrath, do they mean, for example, like the judgment that, you know, the way the Bible describes some of the judgment against other nations? I was thinking they would be thinking about verses or chapters in which God instructs people to go wipe out entire
entire nations. That's what I would think they're referring to. I think this comes down to questions of justice, doesn't it? God is loving, God is good, he's righteous, he's holy. He has given people a law. He said this is the way to flourish and to live rightly. But then if people choose not to live that way, there has to be, well, what is the justice? We want justice.
Perhaps you've heard people say it, like Martin Luther King said, without justice there can be no peace. And you hear people marching on the streets in protest saying, no justice, no peace. And I think there kind of is a biblical truth to that. We can't have a God with a law and who's defined as being righteous and good without there being, well, what do we do when someone is not good?
rebel against him, there has to be, that there is a cost to that. There is a consequence. So I think those are really troubling passages because we don't like thinking about that. You we don't like thinking about the consequences of rebelling against God. But is God right to ever to show wrath? Well, you know, I think that's a question we have to grapple with.
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If he sets the tone of what is right, then it can't be wrong for him to deal with it when people flat his laws. think that's really interesting. I've never thought about that in terms of the consequences being death for those people, and that's why God would have done that. But it's interesting when you think about the fact that in the New Testament, we're saying that death is no longer the consequence because of what Christ has done.
I don't think I've ever thought about it like that, so that's interesting.
That's it! Those are all the questions that we're going to answer today. So hopefully that was interesting. yeah, maybe we'll do this again in the future if we have some more questions. Thank you to everyone who sent these questions in to us. And that's it. That's end of our series on the parables. Thanks so much for listening. We're going to be back with another series very soon, which is going to be all about the book of Hebrews. So we're looking forward to that and we'll see you.
very soon. If you love the podcast, you can give us a rating or a review and we would really appreciate that and we'll see you for the next series. Thanks for listening to this episode of The Rooted Podcast. To find out more about Bible Society's mission to invite people to discover the Bible for themselves in England, Wales and around the world, visit biblesociety.org.uk.