Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire What's wrong with church

antlers,

You say Jonah was not real. Jesus say he was and uses him to illustrate his death, burial, and resurection.

Matthew 12: 38-41

"Then some of the scribes and Pharisees said to Him, 'Teacher, we want to see a sign from You.' But He answered and said to them, 'An evil and adulterous generation craves for a sign; and yet no sign will be given to it but the sign of Jonah the prophet; for just as Jonah was three days and three nights in the belly of the sea monster, so will the Son of Man be three days and three nights in the heart of the earth. The men of Nineveh will stand up with this generation at the judgment, and will condemn it because they repented at the preaching of Jonah; and behold, something greater than Jonah is here.

You say Genesis 1 is allagorical. Consider this language expert.

Dr. Steven Boyd of The Master�s College conducted a statistical study on the historicity of Genesis 1:1�2:3 as a part of the RATE project. Since the RATE scientists based their thousands-of-years timescale on the Genesis account of Creation, it seemed appropriate to more firmly establish that this passage in Genesis should be taken literally. Dr. Boyd pointed out that there are three approaches typically taken by theologians to interpreting Genesis 1:1�2:3:
� Reading it as an extended poetic metaphor, in which the plain sense of the words does not correspond to reality.
� Reading it as a pre-scientific document that is filled with error.
� Reading it as a historical narrative that accurately portrays reality.

Unfortunately, the majority of preachers, teachers, and biblical scholars today believe that the Bible should be read and interpreted as poetic metaphor or error-filled narrative. Yet if the Bible is to be relied upon for truth, it is critical that option three�reading Genesis 1:1�2:3 as accurate historical narrative�be the correct approach.

Dr. Boyd�s statistical study concluded that Genesis 1:1�2:3 is indeed a narrative passage, not poetic, based on the relative frequency of the preterite verb form in the two types of passages. There is less than 1 chance in 10,000 that Genesis 1:1�2:3 is poetry. If Genesis is narrative, then it is not allegorical but historical, with the plain sense of the words corresponding to reality and the sequence of events corresponding to real time.

Combining the statistical study on Scripture and the evidence for accelerated decay justifies the conclusion that Scripture is reliable.