(February 21, 2014 at 11:43 am)discipulus Wrote:(February 15, 2014 at 11:56 pm)catman Wrote: If the Bible is the word of God then why is it only focused on one specific region of the entire planet? Was there nothing going on outside of the Middle East worth mentioning? The Han Dynasty maybe?
(P.S - the same holds true for all religious texts)
Good morning catman.
I have not posted here recently but after coming across your thread, I want to.
Let me begin by saying that I think your question is a very good one! It is a question I have never really thought about but one that is good and is worthy of a thoughtful, sincere response. There is much I do not know about God's reasoning behind His methods. I am a fallible human being who even after walking with God for some time must confess that there are many things I am ignorant of regarding God and His methods.
I must also declare up front that whenever someone claims to speak for God I am naturally skeptical. I think this is the way God has made us! I think a proper amount of skepticism is healthy, especially when it comes to claims of divine inspiration. Too often we have seen the negative effects of people accepting what others have claimed to be from God without examining closely what has been said. So I beseech you to bear with me as I attempt to do your question justice.
I will begin by agreeing with your underlying sentiment, i.e. that if the Bible is the inspired word of God, then we should expect to read about not only one specific people group but rather, we should at least in some fashion read about the various people groups that inhabit the earth. For in Paul's words: is God a god of the Jews only? Is He not God also of the Gentiles? Yes He is. Under these two broad categories are all of the world's people groups encompassed. Therefore it stands to reason that the Bible, if it is the word of God, must not only speak of one select people group but ALL people. If the Bible does not in some fashion meet this criteria then I think there would be an argument that it is in fact not the word of God.
On this you and I can agree for the sake of substantive, irenic discussion.
If we start at the beginning and survey the book of Genesis, we see several things. One, God creates a man and a woman who eventually have children. These children in turn grow up and have children and from these the world is populated. This happens in the region which we now commonly refer to generally as the middle east. Why did God choose this particular geographic location? I honestly do not know. Maybe the fertile crescent was the most conducive portion of land God had made for human flourishing? What we do know is that Adam and Eve were not in China or North America or Australia or Antarctica or Russia etc.
From this locale we then read of the spread of people outwards. This takes place primarily after the Tower of Babel account. Noah's sons are then recorded to have had children which in turn had children who would eventually migrate to become the fathers of the Chinese and Russians and Europeans and etc etc.
So we can see in a sense...God zooming out and out and out as He gives us the account of a growing world population. So far this is exactly in line with what we would expect if Genesis was inspired by God. No one is left out or ignored here.
An interesting thing happens next. God stops telling us about the other people groups and focuses or rather, zooms back down onto one man, Abram. Why did God choose Abram, an obscure desert dweller as opposed to lets say....an obscure asiatic eskimo or an obscure nomadic man who dwelt in the northern most regions of the world? It was because God chose Abram. Its that simple. He could have chose anyone I think. But God had a plan.
Before I go on, it is necessary to emphasize here that God intimately revealed Himself to humans at the very outset! This is keeping in line with what we would expect. He does not make man and woman and then hide and leave them as orphans. No no. He gives them instruction. He cares tenderly for them and gives them everything they need, chiefly, Himself. Even after they rebel in a perfect setting He still is there clothing them and protecting them. After this men begin calling on the name of the LORD and praying to Him. He hears their prayer and honors their sacrifices. These "fathers" of the nations knew God. He was not some obscure imagined thing, but rather a living person with whom a relationship could be cultivated. Over time, as people spread apart....things changed. Fathers and mothers no longer desired to have this intimate relationship and kind of just drifted along, eventually allowing their knowledge of God to become distorted. There remained some remnant of this knowledge of God, but time, and evil desire had so distorted this knowledge that people began creating their own gods according to this distortion. This is what is referred to as the noetic effects of sin. Here we also see that the one's responsible for this is not God, but rather the men and women who did not see fit to acknowledge God aright. This is what the beginning of the epistle to the Romans is all about! It is not that God ignored anyone. It is that people began ignoring God. The further people moved from where it all began the more distorted and twisted their concept of God became.
Maybe God chose Abram because he was one of the few who still had a somewhat accurate conception of who God really was? I do not know. But that is not so unreasonable a suggestion now is it?
And who is to say God did not reveal Himself intimately to others at this time? In fact I think He did. It may not be recorded in Genesis for pragmatic reasons, but that does not mean God ignored His beloved creation. God sustained the Chinese the Russians etc. the same way He sustained Abram and eventually the Israelites.
The reason why we have a record of God's dealings with Israel specifically is because once again, God chose Abram who would become Abraham. It was through the Hebrews that God's "oracles" would come. It certainly was nothing in Abram or his decendants themselves that merited this for God Himself said that they were the smallest and least of the nations!
God certainly could have revealed Himself to every single Chinese person the way He revealed Himself to Abraham. But in His divine wisdom He chose not to. That is not to say that the Chinese or Russians at this time were "ignored" or abandoned!
At this point I must conclude this post due to constraints placed on me by my work but I will take up this discourse when I am able. I hope you have been encouraged and edified by what is written thus far.
I was unable to edit my post due to the 120 minutes having expired and thus will conclude it here. I apologize catman, if this makes it hard to follow. Please bear with me.
Before having to break, I had been speaking about how it is recorded in Genesis that God called Abraham out of Ur of the Chaldees which any student of geography will know is believed to have been located approximately 100 miles west of the Persian Gulf near the southern most portion of the great Euphrates river.
Up to this point, mankind had been multiplying upon the face of the earth and spreading outward not unlike how the ripples in a body of water spread outward from the point where a stone has been cast. As people spread they gathered into groups or "societies" or "civilizations". These civilizations eventually came to have their own particular cultures unique to them. Over the centuries as these people spread, the knowledge of God and the intimacy that was once cherished by their forefathers was diluted and distorted and people began fashioning and crafting their own gods and or crafting accounts of how things came to be by taking what their ancestors had passed down by way of oral tradition and or written histories. With each generation, a little bit of the truth was lost.
The book of Genesis does not go into any details about this nor of these people but rather, as has been stated earlier, zooms down, down, down, from the overall picture of the world, to a nomadic desert dweller by the name of Abram. It is interesting that the book of Genesis even provides us with a rough geneaology of this man, tracing it all the way back to Adam.
As has been stated, God could have most certainly chosen someone else. He could have come down in a flaming fire and revealed Himself to a whole group of people.....(He actually does this a little latter on!), He could have revealed Himself to the Egyptians, the Asiatic peoples, the northern most dwellers of what we now know to be Russia etc. etc. and in fact it is my view that He did reveal Himself to individuals who sincerely sought Him, regardless of their geographical location, for God never ceased from revealing Himself to them that desired Him.
It is also quite obvious that Genesis is setting the stage for us. The primary purpose in God inspiring the authors of the Bible to write what they did was to give us an account of man's origin, man's fall, and man's redemption. We have the origin of man, we have the fall, and now God begins with the plan of redemption. It is through Abraham that a Redeemer will come. A redeemer to redeem fallen man and restore right relationship with God. This redeemer was to come from the descendants of Abraham, so the account goes. This redeemer does not come out of China, or Russia, or North America, or South America, or Australia, or Antarctica, but the middle east, specifically Zion. And so this is what is recorded. It simply is immaterial to the account the goings on of the Chinese or those in Russia or South America. What is written was written to give us knowledge of how God's plan of redeeming HUMANITY unfolds. Notice here this redeemer is not to be a redeemer of JUST Abraham's descendants, but rather, the redeemer of ALL MANKIND. Of the Chinese, of the Russians, of the Australians, of the South Americans, of the North Americans etc.
This is in keeping right along with what we would expect if this indeed was God's word. And God gives us the record of how this unfolds with a history of the evolution of the Israelites. The Israelites lived in what we refer to broadly as the middle east. They did not live in China, or India, or Antarctica, or North America. They lived in a specific geographic location. It would not make much sense if God while giving us an account of the Israelites, threw in for flavor, the goings on of the Han Dynasty! That would be quite out of place and immaterial unless it had some type of bearing on Israel.
The Bible gives us a record, a historical account of those events that are pertinent to the unfolding plan of the redemption of the human race. It is not an anthology on world civilizations (although it does contain books that are historical in nature which speak when necessary, about other nations), but rather, the Bible is a collection of books, letters, poems, historical narrative, didactic passages that all point to in some way to Christ, the promised Redeemer!
The Bible was not compiled with the intent of telling us about what every society or nation or civilization was doing at various times in history. The Bible was compiled with the intent of giving us an accurate account of God's dealings with mankind and His dealings happened to be primarily with a nation of people he chose of His own accord.
All of this is in keeping with what we would expect to see if the Bible was the word of God. We have a collection of books that were written with a specific purpose in mind and anything that did not in some way relate to that purpose was omitted.
Yes, Israel was the focal point of God's dealings with mankind. However, through this, the whole WORLD and all nations have been blessed and even now are being blessed by the fruit that has come from this work of God.
I pray my friend, that this in some small way helps you to understand why the Bible was written the way it was.
Respectfully yours....
