Chapter 3

                        Where Do We Find the Word of God?

As I turn to the Bible to explore this question, someone will certainly cry out, "Attwood, what good is your argument - by reasoning from the Bible, you are just assuming beforehand what you want to prove!"

Well, all right.  We can't just assume that the Bible is the word of God, but let me just run an experiment.  Paul acknowledged that his writings had to "commend themselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God" (2 Corinthians 4.2).  We may confidently hold the rest of the Bible to the same standard - if God inspired it, He certainly comes up at least to Paul's level!  Let's see then whether your own conscience confirms what the Bible says about truth and the word of God.

To hear God is to hear the cry of the poor and the blood of the innocent

Whatever we do to the least of these his brothers we do to Jesus.  So far as we avoid hearing the cry of distress, so far as we hide from the cry of innocent blood, we avoid the cry of the Lord Jesus Christ himself, and in so doing refuse the word of his Father too. If we want to find the word of God, we must decide to hear the voices that the world wants to silence.

God hears the babies murdered in abortion clinics.  God hears the children and old people murdered by embargo in Iraq and the voices of their grieving relatives.  God heard the 200,000 victims of American-sponsored genocide in Guatemala 20 years ago, and He has not forgotten.  In commanding us to remember the poor, He forbids us to forget.  To hear God, we need to hear the voices that He hears and which He commands us to hear.  To shut our ears to them in order not to offend the world, including whatever Christian world we belong to, is to shut our ears to God as well.  When you are being mistreated, you want others to hear you and not turn you away.  God says to do to others what you want men to do to you.

Before reading on, whom do you want to please - your Christian friends and the United States of America, or the God of the poor, who, along with the hairs of our heads, numbers every drop of innocent blood?  What is your decision?

To find the word of God anywhere, we must receive the love of the truth

To enjoy searching for truth is not enough - what do we do with it when we find it?  I had a dachshund many years ago that loved to hunt for a ball.  He'd run madly over the lawn looking for it.  But if his nose bumped into it, he kept on going.  He enjoyed the search, but he didn't actually want what he was searching for.  By searching for the truth we can count ourselves better than other people that care nothing for truth, while avoiding it just as effectively when our noses bump into it - by continuing to search.

Jesus said, "If you abide in my word, you are truly disciples of Mine; and you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (John 8:31-32).  If abiding in his word brings us face up with truth, and if his word brings discomfort along the way as promised, then without love of the truth the capacity to abide in the word of truth - even to understand it - will simply not exist (John 8:43-45).  Those who lack this root in themselves will fall away when trouble or persecution arise on account of the word (Matthew 13:2-21).

We are unable to understand, unable to hear the word of God, because we want to do the desires of the devil, which add up to one thing - suppressing or distorting the truth whenever the truth creates difficulties.  Believing what we want to believe, we reach the point where the one thing we are unable to believe is the truth (John 8:45).  If God's word is truth, then without the love of the truth we become, like that dachshund, unable to find the word of God, no matter where we look.

Jesus explained in this way why everyone is under God's judgment:  "This is the judgment, that the light is come into the world, and men loved the darkness rather than the light; for their deeds were evil" (John 3:19).  When he spoke they had already loved darkness rather than light in the past, just as Job had seen and spoken of this before (Job 24:13, 16-17).  Jesus was not speaking here of their rejection of Him personally, because very few in the world had personally encountered him yet.  Like Job, Jesus was speaking of the light of truth as every person has met it since the beginning of the world, that light which has been in the world since the beginning (Genesis 1:3).

Each of us has justified himself when he knows he is wrong, unjustly blaming someone else in order to do so, and rejecting the truth he knows in his own heart.  We all know this is wrong when someone else does it to us, so in this alone each of us stands guilty before the God of Truth.

To love darkness and reject the truth will make you free in a sense - "free in regard to righteousness," the Bible calls it (Romans 6:20).  But that very freedom is God's penalty for rejecting truth, the freedom of a boat that loses its anchor in a storm.  Jesus said, "For this I have been born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth.  Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice" (John 18:37).  And those who are not of the truth do not hear his voice (John 8:43-45).

Paul warned that God will send a strong delusion to induce each person who does not receive the love of the truth to believe the lie and thereby be condemned (2 Thessalonians 2:10-12).  Moses and the Prophets said the same (Deuteronomy 13:1-3, 2 Kings 22:5-23, Ps. 18:26). The love of the truth is a gift each of us needs to receive, not a quality which anyone develops on his own.

We become people of truth as we realize how much we love the Lie, realizing that we cannot cure this disease ourselves (1 John 1:8-9). Malcolm X put it nicely: Only guilt admitted accepts truth. [1]  There is one condition for being saved - receiving the love of the truth.  One thing guarantees destruction - not receiving the love of the truth.

How hard we try to repeal this ordinance of God, so that people might be saved without actually having to love the truth!  How anxious we are for people to "accept Christ" while truth remains as unwelcome as ever in their daily lives!  But what's the use?  When we're all done, God has promised to keep out of his kingdom those that do not receive the love of the truth: He will make sure that it works out that way.  Whoever believes and calls upon Him will be saved (Romans 10:9-13), but really believing in Him means loving the truth and not the lie (Revelation 22:15).

The God worth finding is the God who wants to find us.  The God worth hearing is the God whose voice opens the ears of the deaf.  It makes sense to trust this God to find us and to open our ears.

For this reason the Bible says, "Whoever will call upon the name of the Lord will be saved."  God does not need our help to determine what His word is - He sees to it that those who want to hear His word do hear and live, while those who would rather hear deceit find what they want as well.

No system we ourselves devise can make us know the truth.  Knowing the truth is a privilege granted to those who actually want it enough to humble themselves, not the wages due to anyone who employs the right set of rules to pursue it.  "Though the wise man should say, 'I know,' he cannot discover" (Ecclesiastes 8:17).

We don't miss God's word for lack of some doctrine about what the word of God is.  We fail to hear it because something else is more important to us than truth – a point Jesus makes in his parable of the wedding feast (Matthew 22).  Lots of people who say, "Lord, Lord," and profess and do the right things will find out too late that what God desires is truth in the inward parts (Psalm 51:6).  If that's what God desires, let's ask Him at every opportunity to put it there - where else are we going to find it?  Is it only other people who need a supernatural work to get truth into their inward parts?

God's first authoritative revelation

Before deciding whether the Bible is the word of God, it sure makes sense to consider how the Bible answers our question, namely, "Where do we find the word of God?"  Most especially if we do consider the Bible to be the word of God, shouldn't we seriously consider what the Bible says about what the word of God is?

Genesis 1:31 says, "God saw all that He had made, and behold, it was very good."  When we read this statement, it's really not a bad idea to ask, "What was very good about it?"   We can't go wrong by talking this question over with God, since He alone knows His mind about this.  To think it over in our hearts is good advice (Philippians 4:8).

For our purpose here, I want to consider just one point - the whole creation was telling the truth about God and about itself.  As God looked it over, it returned truth to Him.  He saw that it all had integrity, it all hung together right, it was ready to be displayed to others like a great picture, or a great book.  God Himself was both the writer and the first reader.  His word of truth was the message.

An essential property of God's revelation in creation is that God designed creation to keep telling the truth, and therefore to continue being very good.  Even the personalities of sinful men accurately declare God's nature - Paul states that the truth of God is evident among them (Romans 1:19), as Jesus had explained in further detail before (Luke 11:11-13).

In this way God insured that all things would work together for good to Himself.  If evil takes place, as when wicked men nailed Jesus to a cross, it furthers His purpose in the end.  If not, as when Jesus obeyed Him in all things, His purpose is fulfilled through that obedience.  Whether present or absent, evil cannot thwart God's purpose, although some foolishly teach otherwise.

God extends this feature to those who accompany Him through life (Romans 8:28).  As we come to see this, we too come to be like Him - unafraid to let bad things happen according to His will, even when we see them coming, and not so quick to anger.

A second vital aspect of God's revelation in creation is that we can't argue about what is canonical.  God made all things in heaven and earth and under the earth, forming each one in His wisdom to proclaim His glory.  The truth which each created thing proclaims by its mere existence is authoritative and therefore canonical.  The only problems remaining are how to discern and understand the message, and this is no more than what we face in the Bible.

Even Moses declared bread to be God's word proceeding from His mouth, as follows: "Man does not live by bread alone, but man lives by everything that proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord" (Deuteronomy 8:3).  While bread is not the only thing, it is one of the things which proceeds out of the mouth of the Lord to sustain life.  Bread alone, and not from God's mouth, does not give life at all - in their unbelief, some perished with God's provision between their teeth (Psalm 78:26-31).  Bread sustains life only when it is a word from God's mouth, as when it sustained the people in the wilderness (Psalm 78:24).

Jesus, understanding this, could not be incited to make bread on his own initiative.  He didn't need bread alone, but bread from his Father.  When tempted in the wilderness he trusted his Father to provide it (Matthew 4:4, 11), as his Father had cared for Elijah before him (1 Kings 19:5-8).

Not all know what they're saying, but Christians do affirm in the communion service that the bread is the word of God telling us about Christ, just as the words of Scripture do.

A third aspect of creation's testimony is that God's creation proclaims not itself, but its creator.  Although bread feeds us, it is temporary, ultimately unable to keep us alive (John 6:49).  The food we eat, even as it feeds us, tells us that it can't really do the job; we still remain somehow empty.  If we try to make it do the job by eating more, we just get fat and die sooner.

In the same way, wine cheers our hearts and tells us about salvation from our troubles.  But when we try to find salvation in it, it actually makes our troubles multiply, so that Ephesians 5:18 says, "Do not get drunk with wine, in which is asotia," which literally means "unsavedness."

My bed gives me rest, but if I expect it to really give me rest, it becomes the center of my life and I wind up being put to forced labor - deprived of rest.  The lazy man finds himself bound to his bed with his life defined by it, just as a door is by its hinges (Proverbs 26:14).  The resulting slavery is as far as you can get from rest (Proverbs 12:24).  The bed truthfully declares, "I am not the place for you to find rest!"

Just as John the Baptist said, "I am not the Christ," the whole creation declares, "I am not God."  If we listen to the creation, we will not worship it, but instead look for its Maker.  If we do worship the creation, it is because we are refusing to listen to it (Romans 1:18-25).

Jesus had a lot to say from creation:

 - Life comes through death and resurrection, because a seed must die to come to life in a new plant (John 12:24).  In this connection, it was on the third day that plants first sprang up from the earth (Genesis 1:11-13).
 - A debtor forgiven a big debt loves the one who forgave him more than one forgiven a small debt.  This shows that we do not love God by doing anything right, but by getting forgiven.  From what is evident in how God created people, not from the Bible, Jesus taught how one is to obey the central tenet of the Law, to love the Lord, and our neighbors as ourselves.
 - All foods are clean, because everything we eat goes out into the toilet.  Defilement results from what comes out of the mouth, not from what goes in (Mark 7:14-23).
 - God seeks and saves those that are lost (Luke 15).

All these issues are of vital importance.  Jesus could have based all these teachings on the Scriptures, but he took pains to rest them instead on the nature of created things, that book which everyone must read and which leaves all without excuse (Romans 10:18, Psalm 19:1-4).

What would be left of the Psalms and Proverbs, Job, or the Prophets, if we took away from the Bible everything which is based on God's testimonies in His creation?

Even the way God makes things happen is clearly taught in creation. Job 26:10 says that God has inscribed a circle on the face of the waters at the boundary of light and darkness.  We see that circle in any satellite picture of the earth (but where did Job see it?)

How did God accomplish this?  Rather than just get out a pencil, as we might, He made a spherical world covered mostly with oceans, and the sun to shine on it - and out of all this the circle arose as a natural consequence.

This example sheds some light on a more difficult issue.  How can God Himself harden the heart of the wicked man, if He tempts no one with evil and takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked (Ezekiel 18:23)?  God shines upon all with the same kindness and forbearance.  Some are drawn to repentance by God's kindness, but others are led by the same forbearance to harden their hearts, just as Pharaoh did whenever God answered his plea for mercy (Exodus 8:8-15, 28-32, 9:27-35, 10:16-20, Ecclesiastes 8:11).

How did the apostles use the created order in their teaching?  Paul was very bold.  He taught from the Olympic games - a religious service to abominable idols (1 Corinthians 9:24-27, 2 Timothy 2:5).  He taught extensively from the Roman military (Ephesians 6:10-17, 2 Timothy 2:4).  He taught the pagans of Lystra from their own religion.  Because their own religion taught that the gods of Olympus which they worshiped had not made the world, what excuse did they have not to serve the God who had made the world (Acts 14:15-17)?

Since God did make "the heaven and the earth and the sea, and all that is in them," creation is to be understood as everything.  This includes not only the things and the people, but the history - everything that happened.  So the Bible writers submit their words to the judgment of history: Did these words overtake the fathers (Zechariah 1:6)? Do the words of the prophet actually happen (Deuteronomy 18:21-22, 1 Kings 22:28)?

In time past, the Roman Catholic Church prevented people from reading the Bible themselves because they might think for themselves and interpret it wrongly.  For precisely the same reason, some Protestants today are afraid to read the creation as the word of God, although creation gives an accurate and complete revelation of His attributes - His power and His nature - and the Bible holds mankind guilty for not paying attention (Romans 1:20). [2]  This of course includes the promise of His redemption in the Messiah, the glory of God, or is it written for nothing, "The heavens are telling the glory of God?"  If the cross and the empty tomb are not revealed, has the glory of God been told?

God's word has authority because it is under authority

Jesus said, "Everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled, and he who humbles himself shall be exalted" (Luke 14:11).  When Jesus said this, he took care not to exalt himself by asserting his own authority.  Instead, taking his own advice, he submitted his statement to the experience of his hearers in daily life.

No Christian should be surprised to find that Jesus learned to be this way from the Bible that he lived by.  The Scriptures defined who Jesus was and how he acted - he had to act so as to fulfill the Scriptures (Matthew 26:52-54), and whatever the Scriptures said about him had to take place (Luke 24:25-27).  Like Jesus, the Bible derives its authority from its subjection to all truth.  Teaching that the Bible is its own authority, denying its essential submissiveness, undermines its witness in the consciences of those who hear us - including ourselves.

Paul wrote, "The spirits of prophets are subject to prophets" (1 Corinthians 14:32).  From the beginning, whenever people have spoken for God, they have submitted to the word of God already revealed to the witnesses before them.

Moreover, "since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20).  Since all who disregard the witness of creation are without excuse, any servant of God is obliged to hear and obey God's revelation of Himself through what He has made.

The Bible appeals to creation as a witness, submitting to its authority.  The Bible writers consistently take a humble approach to God's creation, being instructed by it and likewise inviting others to be instructed by what they can see for themselves.

The Law of Moses was subject to God's previous revelation to Abraham.  Although Moses gave the people a covenant based on the law, when the people fell into idolatry that covenant offered no hope - only the penalty of death.  Moses had to appeal above the law to the promise previously made to Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob - and on that basis God heard him (Exodus 32:11-14).  Moreover, the Law relies on the testimony of creation - Moses called heaven and earth to witness to it (Deuteronomy 4:25-26, 30:19, 31:28).

Throughout the period of the Law, God listened to the just and accepted them as He had accepted Abraham, because of their faith, even when they had not met the conditions given by Moses.  Even when Joshua led them across the Jordan, the people had not been circumcised as the law specified.  Instead, they walked in Abraham's faith by crossing the river to be circumcised at Gilgal, trusting God to protect them in the midst of their enemies for the three days that the circumcision made them unable to defend themselves.

Like Moses, Jesus confirmed the truth already revealed.  In the Sermon on the Mount, he let us know just where he was coming from:

Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill.  For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass away from the Law, until all is accomplished.  Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and so teaches others, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever does and teaches, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven.  For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you shall not enter the kingdom of heaven (Matthew 5:17-19).

He then proceeded to illustrate his statement by contrasting what the scribes and Pharisees taught about the law with what the Law itself really teaches.

Many Christians simply do not believe Jesus at this point.  In opposition to his plain statement, they assert that he was teaching something new and more strict than what Moses had taught.  We commonly hear that the law regulated outward behavior (Do not commit adultery), while Jesus introduced the requirement to be pure in heart.

This is nonsense, as anyone should realize who has read in the Law, "You shall not covet your neighbor's wife."

If we believe the words of the same Jesus who warned us explicitly to "beware of the leaven of the Pharisees," does it really make any sense to take the word of the scribes and Pharisees for what the Law of Moses teaches?  If we stir the leaven of the Pharisees into the words of Jesus, can we hope to understand them correctly?

Jesus always invited anybody to judge his teaching by the Law and the Prophets.  If he had not been in perfect agreement with them, his enemies would have had more to say at his trial.  As it was, they found nothing.  So if you find a discrepancy, chances are that you misunderstand either Jesus or the Law and the Prophets - probably both.

The apostles testified as Jesus did that the gospel must agree with the Law and the Prophets.  Paul declared before King Agrippa, "I stand to this day testifying both to small and great, stating nothing but what the Prophets and Moses said was going to take place" (Acts 26:22).  Acts 17:11 says of the Jews in Berea, "These were more noble-minded than those in Thessalonica, who received the word with all eagerness, examining the Scriptures daily, to see whether these things were so."

The noble-minded way to handle the apostles' teaching, according to the apostles, is to judge it carefully by the Law and the Prophets. We still need to do it that way, if we want to avoid replacing the doctrine of the apostles with our own understanding of the doctrine of the apostles.

Moreover, the gospel that Paul preached among the nations is in agreement with the law of God already written in our hearts, which is why that law makes us responsible to believe the gospel (Romans 2:14-16).  It follows that a teaching which violates that law within us is wrong somehow - Paul says it is not the gospel he was preaching.

Moses wrote, "Honor your father and your mother as the Lord your God has commanded you, that your days may be prolonged, and that it may go well with you."  This one statement says it best.  Anyone who speaks from God will honor everyone, great and small, who has spoken the truth before him, because they are his fathers and mothers - he is standing on their shoulders, and so he will submit to the truth they brought.

The word of God rests on manifest truth, not on dogmatic assertions

"Many a man proclaims his own loyalty, but who can find a trustworthy man?" (Proverbs 20:6).  You don't have to believe that the Bible is the word of God to believe this statement - just watch some television commercials.

Pressure to believe dogmatic assertions because some authority demands it is always of the Lie.  Any pressure not to examine things, any impatience and resentment if you insist, is always of the Lie.  Those who walk in darkness learn to think that God is just like them (Psalm 50:21), so those who are uncomfortable with hard questions often expect God to be offended too when we want to examine His words with due care.  But when the Bible says, "Examine everything," maybe it really means everything.  Why don’t you try it and see?

God can teach humility because He is humble Himself.  In saying, "examine everything" (1 Thessalonians 5:21) God invites you to test it all against history, reason, your own conscience - everything you know is true (2 Corinthians 4:2).  What else can it mean when He says, "test the spirits" (1 John 4:1), and "examine?"  If God really revealed it to the speaker, He will confirm it somehow to the hearer, so that the hearer can only reject it by rejecting what he knows is true, as the Bible says in many places. This is especially evident in how Jesus spoke to his opponents - consider for instance the parables of the two debtors, the two sons, and the Good Samaritan (Luke 7:41-47, Matthew 21:28-32, Luke 10:29-37).

I hear shouted objections - for instance, "If the Bible is the word of God, and the word of God is reasonable, then why does the Bible say, with no support from reason, that the whole creation was made in six 24 hour solar days?"

The question raises a crucial issue.  Jesus reminds us in Matthew 23 that religious people tend to love irrationality.  To the gods of this world, joyful assent of their disciples to known lies is the proof of their loyalty to the god, the sacrifice to it of their good sense and intelligence - of their humanity.  Perhaps the best picture of how this works is George Orwell’s 1984.

Thus the North Korean regime promotes the gushy adoration of "Dear Leader" Kim Jong-il, just as people adored Stalin the more he tormented them and destroyed his people.  The essential cause is not coercion.  Coercion does not explain why people wept in the streets at Stalin’s death.  Coercion does not explain the feeling of religious exaltation of Americans as they assert that their regime is "one nation under God" which affords "liberty and justice to all" - all the more firmly as its godlessness, oppressiveness, and injustice grow ever more flagrant.

Jesus said that those who worship the Father must worship Him in spirit and in truth.  This is radical.  In all idolatry, in everything we ever serve before we answer God’s call, adherence to the Lie is the essence of worship.  Religious people, including Christians, are so addicted to irrationality because we have not realized how completely different our God is, and so our religion is hard to tell from all the others.

It is not stupidity or lack of education that makes religious people go out of the way to understand the Bible as absurdly as possible, clinging to these absurdities as the word of God.  They really believe that intentional stupidity and irrationality - in Orwellian Newspeak, "goodthink" and "crimestop" - are the highest service they can offer.  Indeed they are, if the object of worship is demonic.

The six days of creation

The Bible never says that the days of creation in Genesis were 24 hours long, and in fact clearly teaches otherwise.

24 hours days are defined by the sun, moon, and stars, which were given "for signs, and for seasons, and for days and years" (Genesis 1:14).  Since these are "for signs," the days they give rise to are signs, not the literal realities - and that's how Paul regarded them (Galatians 4:9-10).

However, the days of creation described in Genesis are not signs, but realities, brought forth not by created things but by the word of God itself.  Each day came into being when "God said" (Genesis 1:3, 6, 9, 14, 20, 24).  Unlike 24 hour solar days, the days of creation overlap.  The account clearly states that each of the second through the sixth days begins on the morning of the day before, and we know that on the morning of any day, there is still some way to go.

The word of God, with its days and seasons, is not regulated by the motions of the heavenly bodies, so the Bible gives us no authority to measure the lengths of these days in such terms.  Indeed, since the heavenly bodies appeared only on the fourth day, how could they have been used to measure the first three?

Actually examining the text reveals that the days have to be quite long, at least in some cases.  On the sixth day God made man, male and female (Genesis 1:26-27).  The details given elsewhere (Genesis 2:7-24) show that God first formed the man and planted a garden for him, charging the man to guard and keep the garden and not to eat from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.  Only then did God say, "it is not good for the man to be alone."  In this He was evidently first beholding the results before going on, according to His established custom (Genesis 1:4, 10-11, 21-22, 25-26).

Having said that it is not good for the man to be alone, and that He would make him a suitable helper (Genesis 2:18), God began by causing Adam to name all the animals, determining in each case that it was not a suitable helper (Genesis 2:19-20).  Finally, when it was clear to Adam that no suitable helper existed yet, God formed for Adam a wife.

A lot happened on the sixth day.  Feeling that they must cling to the view that this all happened within a single rotation of the earth, some insist that God miraculously squeezed all these events into 24 hours, but is this how Jesus handled the Scriptures?  To understand as he understood, should we not imitate his example?

Jesus inferred from the famine in the days of Elijah that there were many widows in Israel, even though this is nowhere explicitly stated (Luke 4:25).  On this basis he taught that the kingdom of God would be given to believing Gentiles at the expense of unbelieving Jews.  No one in the synagogue dared to suggest that there couldn’t have been any widows in Israel due to something miraculous about this famine.  Indeed, his listeners evidently found no fault with his logic, because they could think of no better retort than to try to throw him off a cliff!

In brief, Jesus reasoned that great famines result in many widows; therefore there were many widows in Israel; therefore Elijah passed up a lot of Israelite widows to go to the Canaanite widow.  If we reason about the Scriptures like Jesus, or even like his listeners, we do not invent some miraculous way to squeeze all the events included on the sixth day into 24 hours.  We permit those events to instruct us that they took place over far more than 24 hours.

The seventh day, too, in which God rested from all his works, was certainly more than 24 hours.  No end is given to it, and both Psalm 95:11 and Hebrews 4:3 suggest that it continues to this day.

John, modeling his creation account on Genesis, and even beginning with its Hebrew name "In the beginning," described three days of creation (John 1:1-2:1).  The first day begins with Jesus revealed in the creation of all things and continues to the testimony of John (John 1:1-28).  The second day, called "the next day" as in the Law (Leviticus 19:6), begins with Jesus revealed in his baptism by John until he returns from the 40 days of temptation in the desert (John 1:29-51, Luke 3:21, 4:1-14).  The third day begins with Jesus revealed in the miracle at the wedding in Cana and continues throughout his ministry (John 2:1-11, 9:4-5).

Each of the three days of John's gospel was far longer than 24 hours, because they were true days whose light was the true Light of the world, the Word of God (John 1:9-10, 9:4-5, 12:35).  Since the sun is only for signs (Gen. 1:14), the days it shapes are only signs.

In the case of the creation days, as in other matters, the Bible seems like nonsense only when we read it superficially and impose our own ideas on it.  The more literally we read it, that is, the more we actually take to heart all its details, the more sense it makes.

Notes

1.  Malcolm X, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (New York: Grove Press, 1965), 163.

2.  Real Protestant theology does not have this problem.  John Calvin boldly affirms that creation is God's book, just like the Bible.  See Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 1, Chapter 5, Section 1.

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