Truth In The O.T.

FRI., JUNE 18, 1993, 6:04 AM
FARM, STUDY

It was good that you carried out My suggestion on Wednesday, and it was good that Dorothy followed up, in a decisive way. So now your breakfast group will spend a few mornings on three great myths that present truths in unique forms. This use of the term myth doesn’t mean that the events didn’t happen ( 6:15 / 6:51 ) as they are described. It just means that the way the story is told is a better way ( 6:55 / 9:05 ) to express truth. (You’ve had a hard time getting settled for this. Perhaps this is the quiet time and place.)

The first story is actually a double one, telling about creation in two ways. The basic truth is that I was, and am, the Creator, the way and ways are not knowable by your humans, even those who call themselves scientists. Did it all begin with matter, or was the sun created first? It is obvious now that I created in a systematic enough way to make scientific study possible and fruitful. All of this original creation took place outside of time, and when the attempt is made to put it all into the present time frame it produces some inconsistencies.

Life was created, which meant that some forms then became food for others. The greatness of creation was not individual species, like the human, but the whole complex web of life. And how long it has taken for scientists to grudgingly allow the science of ecology to be recognized, with the “awful truth” that the whole is always greater than the sum of its known parts.

Having said this I must now comment on a “balancing truth”: that humans are My greatest single creation, and they were first, not last. The Adam and Eve story seems to say that males were before females and therefore more important. But then from a single part of that man I created a woman. He came from the earth, and she came from him. Yet henceforth all babies, male and female, would come from women. That from which humans are made are elements found in the earth, and in death these should return. Humans come from one another in a process that should be seen as a dance, balancing life and death.

The fact that this “original family story” implies that other humans were present in the earth suggests that I created in even other, different ways. Be assured, also, that the crucial act of creation was not the body, or even the mind, but the infusion of an immortal soul, a part of Me, the Holy Spirit. This soul is what really completed the creation of the human, and most of those who appear to be human do have these essential souls, whose continuing existence is not finally dependent on the life of the body.

The Noah story is another family story, but the central truth is that I can destroy as well as create. Humans have attributed to Me a motive, but that was not necessary. Life was not greatly different from now, in terms of human conduct and a sense of relationship with Me. It just needed to be documented that I can take away life as well as give it… and that I devise ways for life to continue and be reconstituted after such a disaster.