Opus 2025-560: Make It Fit

Sometime in the last couple months, I wrote about the necessity of getting the entire creation account into a limited document, constrained by writing materials and vocabulary.  Today, my thoughts were going to God communicating with us and of course I was grateful that we have a Bible now that tells us literally everything we need to know for salvation and for living our lives in a complex world.  It wasn’t always that way.

I got to thinking about how even in the days of Noah there was probably very little writing. I think the scholars have concluded that by the time of Abraham written communication was going on, but the number of people who could read would’ve been very small.  Then you think about the lack of words to describe things.

Take Genesis 1:1,

(Gen 1:1 KJV)  In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.

Just look at the concepts that had to be conveyed there.  The verse says “in the beginning”.  I doubt if they had words for infinity, singularity, atomic mass, speed of light and so many other technical terms that I might recognize, but I can’t come up with on my own.  They had a word “beginning”.  They knew what it meant.  The fact that it meant a lot more than may have occurred to them is just part of the miracle of God communicating what needs to be known.

As you continue down, it says that God “created”.  That was a very specific word.  At least it is to us now.  The whole concept of creation by fiat is simple to understand if you don’t know the big words.  The concept is there, grab it and go.  The only two areas mentioned are the heavens and the Earth.  I think that pretty much covers it all for them.  They didn’t know about nebulas or dark matter or black holes.  They didn’t need to know.

And then you get to the Earth being “void” in the next verse.  These are concepts that even people with a limit vocabulary could grasp.  As their knowledge increased and the vocabulary deepen they were probably able to add things, but they didn’t really need to.

Which brings me, I guess, to the point that finally occurred to me.  As God went through the process of editing, assuming He had to proofread, He probably found things He could throw out because they weren’t necessary.  Since God is God, He probably got it first shot.  Things are left out because there is not a need to know.  When I was in the army one of the topics they dealt with was security.  There are two basic factors:  First is the level of security clearance and second is the need to know.  You may have the clearance, but no need to know it and so it is withheld from you.

I have recently commented on wanting to know more about the conversations between Moses and God.  We have been given what we need to know . We’re quite free to speculate and reason and look for theological principles, but what we have is what we need to know.  We don’t know where Adam and Eve’s children got their wives.  We don’t know how many wisemen there were.  We don’t know what happened to the unicorns.

We know what we need to know.  There might even be a few extra facts in there.  I know there’s a lot of stuff that’s thrown in just to confuse the issue like why the Lamb had all those eyes, but we know what we need.

Wasn’t it frustrating when our parents told us we weren’t old enough to know that yet?

homo unius libri