Thoughts: My Understanding of the Bible.

Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

9/8/24

These are just my thoughts, nothing else. But I want to get them out of my head and written down so I can organize them in my brain so they will hopefully make more sense. I know the premise is true, I just don’t know if I’m telling the story properly. Here goes…

So, I’m sometimes getting ideas popping into my head about the story of the Bible, Jesus, God… all of it. I’m trying to wrap my head around the story because it sounds so preposterous when I articulate it out loud. But it’s true. And we have to accept that. And be grateful because living a life that revolves around your life and daily existance here on earth is so full of nonsense. It doesn’t seem like nonsense at all when we’re living it, all of it seems so very important. We overlook what is really important.

Anyway, now that I’ve found Jesus and He rescued me from not knowing about the nonsense, He is constantly sharing the truth with me. A little at a time. The truth He’s sharing with me is… how to find the way home to Him.

I know now that we are on a journey to get somewhere. Home to God. Home to God and Home to His family. Our family. Every single human is/or has been on the journey, but every single person’s journey is entirely different. Just like your fingerprints and DNA are different and unique, our journey is unique. We can’t even begin to comprehend how we fit into God’s plan for His creation. No human could ever know what His plan for us is. He’s the parent who knows what’s best for each and every one of us… his children, and He tries to help guide us home. But we have free will so oftentimes we get caught up in our humanness and don’t hear Him whispering to us, trying to catch our attention. We’re too busy doing all the things. Some don’t make it home.

But since I’ve been rescued by Jesus, I’m listening. I’m working on listening more. To be always listening. Not easy or even accurate many times. I don’t expect that my life will be free of challenges, but I know now that Jesus is here to get me through them. I know that’s the truth because He’s done it for me already when I was in a bad bad place. I finally found Him. He’s always been there but I didn’t know it. He rescued me.

I realize now that He’s always been there guiding me to where I needed to be. Where He wanted me to be. Even when I didn’t know Him. I knew of Him but didn’t know Him. I was so opinionated and arrogant about religion and all of it. Thinking back it’s gross that I was so ignorant. But then I found Him. He rescued me. He forgave me. I can go home when I leave here because I now have Jesus in me and He is changing me. Every single day. It’s weird to me, but in an amazingly wonderful way.

Long winded and all over the place, I know. Back to the purpose of this post. My understanding of the story of the Bible. Here goes, Here’s my super simple, explain it to a 5th grader, explanation of the story of the Bible.

GENESIS

God is… God is I don’t know. Let’s say a being of infinite power and love. He’s Creator of all things. EVERYTHING in our world. ALL OF IT. He’s a creative genius who created a work of art that He loves immensely. God has feelings. He loves. In fact, He is love. Hard to fathom what that means but I guess it means He is so full of love. God has so much love that He wants to share it. So He creates our world. He is the creator, the artist, the owner essentially, of the entire world that He has created. And He loves this world. He loves loves loves the humans he creates. Imagine the best, easiest, most fun, joyful and most loving relationship you could possibly have with no expectations on either side other than to be loving. Take that times infinity. God wants that kind of relationship with the humans He creates. And it works. At first. Since God is the creator and owner of His world, He gets to make the rules and the law and all of that stuff. He wants the people He creates, Adam and Eve, to be His people to hang with Him, love Him and each other, and take care of the world He created.

He gave them sovereignty (new word for me). They were given the gift of being in charge of themselves and the world that God created. They were the sub-boss there beneath God. He gave them this gift because God knew they were good and He could trust them to do all the right things because they were made in the image of God. Himself. Perfect and good.

God had one rule though. A law that they couldn’t break or they would die. They would lose their connection to God and would no longer have eternal life. They would ruin an amazingly wondrous life with God. The law was: do not eat or touch the Tree of Good and Evil. One rule. That’s it. If you did that you sinned. If you sin, you’ll die. That’s the one and only rule and God was pretty adament about it. Sinning results in the death penalty. Yikes.

While God and His humans were having the best time being together in the the beautiful and loving new world that God created (even all the animals were only allowed to eat the plants… no prey or predators), a virus got in. Not sure else how to refer to it in modern terms. A virus, a cancer, a poison. Evil. It somehow got in (I have no idea how) and took on the shape of a snake or serpent. The snake (evil. Satan aka the Adversary. I’m guessing God’s adversary) charmed Eve and convinced Her to eat the fruit from the Tree of Good and Evil, the one the humans were strictly forbidden to eat from by God. So she did, and she shared it with Adam. They knew better because God had specifically told them, but Adam followed along with Eve and ate it anyway. Their lives changed instantly, for the worse. Long story short, God found out, was so mad, he cursed the snake (evil), and banished Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden. The heavenly place where they were with God. No more. They were sent out into a harsh world and they no longer had eternal life with God, but their bodies would wear out and they would die. They would no longer have the relationship and connection with God. The end of them. They let sin into God’s world, which caused every single human born from them (which is every single human) to have sin in them. Which meant they would die at the end of their lives. And they would be spiritually disconnected from God.

Time goes on, history happens. People live, they die. Over generations some people still believe in God, and worship Him as the one true God. But many others don’t. Whole civilizations of people in some cases. They’d been swayed by evil and the ways of the world and the sin of humanity. Instead humans believed they could do whatever they wanted, and follow and honor evil gods. Which really makes God mad because He made them. He loves them and wants them to want to come back to Him.

9/11/24: Evil, Satan, the serpent in the Garden.

I’m still trying to wrap my head around it all. I just listened to a couple of things on the Bible Brief podcast and the Bible Project which gave me a little clarity about evil. Still ridiculously vague, but maybe as I get it out of my head some things might click and I can then move on to learn more, or even firm up the truths. I’m taking most of this from the Bible Project video series on “Spiritual Beings).

______________

Before God created our universe and humans, He lived (and still lives) in His Kingdom. He’s surrounded by the Elohim (other spiritual beings… angels, demons, Satan..). A spiritual reality that exists alongside ours. This spiritual reality includes beings that contain creatures that God created in the image of God Himself to give glory to God and to serve his purposes. Sort of like God’s spiritual staff team.

God creates humans for his created earth (Garden of Eden) and wants the humans to rule over His creation in the love and power of God. But one of the spiritual beings in God’s spiritual reality doesn’t want humans to rule the world so this being breaks into God’s world, takes the form of a snake or serpent, and tricks the humans into defying God, which makes God so mad. He sentences them to banishment and exile from the garden and from Him. They are  forced to wander the outside earth without God until they die and return to dust (from which they were created). They will endure hardships and life will be hard. They blew it.

(The snake is part of a spiritual rebellion that follows humans outside of Eden. Things get worse. Babylon is when humans and spiritual rebels team up to try to take back their former glory from God. Things get progressively worse throughout history from there.)

Spiritual Beings | Elohim

Spiritual beings and God inhabit the heavenly realm which is parallel to our earthly reality, and even overlaps with it.

Elohim is a title that means all of the beings in the heavenly realm. It’s a category title. Like Mom can refer to many differnt people and types of people, Mom is a certain role in a family. In a family everyone would refer to the same person as Mom, but in another family Mom would be a different person to different people. But throughout the Bible God is referred to as the Elohim of elohims. Top elohim..

Only one being is the source and creator of all things, including the elohim.  Yahweh. He rules over all of the other elohim.

Spiritual Beings | The Divine Council

Spiritual Beings | The Divine Council

There’s more…