Uninvented: Can Moses See God’s Face or Not?

Uninvented: Can Moses See God’s Face or Not?

Jul 14, 2022 | Uninvented

Some Uninvented arguments are stronger than others, meaning certain passages and stories in the history of Israel can appear more easily made up, while others would require a leap of faith to believe they were. Much is in between, or simply doesn’t apply, like Proverbs, Psalms, and Ecclesiastes, the non-historical books. I would say Exodus 33 fits somewhere in the middle. There seems to be a blatant contradiction which needs to be explained in some way, and we’ll find the Uninvented explanation is much more plausible.

In verses 7-10 we read about the Tent of Meeting, where Moses went to talk to the Lord, and the people went to place their inquiries of the Lord. The pillar of cloud guiding the Israelites through the desert would park in front of the tent so the people knew the Lord was there. Then we read:

11 The Lord would speak to Moses face to face, as one speaks to a friend. Then Moses would return to the camp, but his young aide Joshua son of Nun did not leave the tent.

At the end of the chapter, though, this face-to-face meeting possibility seems as if it’s completely contradicted:

18 Then Moses said, “Now show me your glory.”

19 And the Lord said, “I will cause all my goodness to pass in front of you, and I will proclaim my name, the Lord, in your presence. I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion. 20 But,” he said, “you cannot see my face, for no one may see me and live.

21 Then the Lord said, “There is a place near me where you may stand on a rock. 22 When my glory passes by, I will put you in a cleft in the rock and cover you with my hand until I have passed by. 23 Then I will remove my hand and you will see my back; but my face must not be seen.”

As we read this chapter through Uninvented eyes, we think this has to be true because it’s a total contraction on the face of it, pun intended. Since Moses wrote the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible, he had to see the apparent contradiction. In one encounter he’s sitting down with the Lord as with an old friend, and in the other such an encounter will kill him. Yet Moses reported it this way because it really did happen, and he saw no need to not report it even with the apparent contradiction. In other words, someone making up the story would never report such a contradiction because it would destroy the credibility of the story. That’s the argument, anyway, and to me it’s a powerful one. We might file this under the criterion of embarrassment. This is a crucial concept to understand if we’re to read the Bible through Uninvented eyes.

I was originally going to call my book “Psychological Apologetics,” but nobody would have had a clue what that meant. I was thinking one of the ways we should train ourselves to read Scripture is through human psychology, so the mental and behavioral characteristics of both the authors and the characters they write about, how they think affecting how they act. When we read the Bible, we can ask ourselves, does this read like real people doing and thinking like real people from what we know of human nature? Or does it read like the myths and legends its critics have claimed it is for the last three hundred plus years? (Spinoza, 1632-77, was the first thinker in Western history to claim the Pentateuch was not written by Moses). One of the key ways to identify if it was made up or not is the criterion of embarrassment.

If you are trying to write a story you want people to believe is true, generally you will not want to contradict yourself, at least not in ways too obvious to the reader. When Moses wrote Exodus 33 the contradiction was so obvious that it must be true because a writer doesn’t want to contradict himself so obviously if he wants to be believed. Unless, of course, it’s only an apparent contradiction, as we have in this case. From what I’ve read, there are plausible explanations for this. One comes from Numbers 12, where Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ sister and brother, are challenging his authority because he married a Cushite woman. How dare he! She could possibly have been a dark-skinned woman, and while we might immediately think of the word “racist,” skin color in the ancient world wasn’t “a concept.” That came much later with American antebellum slavery and its aftermath. People have always been and still are threatened by cultural differences, and the ancient world was no different.

The Lord is not happy with Moses’ siblings for questioning the one clearly chosen by God to lead his people out of bondage to the promised land, and in no uncertain terms he calls them on the carpet. It is a scenario that reads real, as Scripture always does. He says, having declared Moses a prophet two verses prior:

8 With him I speak face to face,
clearly and not in riddles;
he sees the form of the Lord.

How this worked is described earlier in Numbers 7:

89 When Moses entered the tent of meeting to speak with the Lord, he heard the voice speaking to him from between the two cherubim above the atonement cover on the ark of the covenant law. In this way the Lord spoke to him.

We can see “face to face” as an idiomatic usage like it is in the first part of Exodus 33, and not literal as later in the chapter. Whereas here the Lord is communicating information to Moses, the latter is an ontological encounter with the fearsomely holy God. Moses had asked of the Lord, “Now show me your glory.” It must have taken some serious chutzpa to ask such a thing of Yahweh, but Moses wanted to see, visually, the true nature of Yahweh. For sinners, before Christ, that was not possible. Now, in him, we can see Yahweh’s glory, as Jesus said, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father.”

Notable Quotation

Notable Quotation

Jul 11, 2022 | Notable Quotations, Uncategorized

Semantics, like skepticism and empiricism, is a direct consequence of the disappearance of epistemology and the subsequent discovery of the inadequacy of rationalism. The rationalists believed that the truth could be found by the use of reason and logic alone because they had assumed that the world was rational and logical. Because the world is not rational and logical, they had failed. The skeptics accordingly doubted the capacity of the mind to know; the empiricists rejected the use of reason and tried to deal with the world by the senses alone; the semanticists tried to deal with the world by bringing its lack of logic and rationality into the mind itself. They did this, not by rediscovering the rules of epistemology but by changing the rules of logic. To them the old logic—Aristotelian logic, as they called it—was the source of all modern confusion, error, frustration and insanity. Accordingly, they tried to replace it by a non-Aristotelian logic whose basic innovation was that it rejected the principle of contradiction. The abandoning of this principle—which they called the “either-or principle”—meant that they rejected all rigid categories or definitions and were prepared to act with vague, variable and over-lapping definitions whose content varied during use in order to reflect the admitted dynamic quality of the external world.

—Carroll Quigley, “Epistemology, Semantics, and Doublethink”

 

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Libertarians are Not Conservatives: Dave Ruben and Same-Sex Surrogacy

Jul 10, 2022 | Culture

We live in very strange times. For all recorded history the peoples of the world, no matter what their view of the universe and religious outlook, from the most rank deranged heathens to the most pristine moralistic religious people, believed in the fundamental duality of biology. In other words, there is man and there is woman, nothing in between, two sexes. I used to wonder why certain conservative intellectuals warned us against using the term gender. I didn’t understand what they meant until the transgender insanity broke out of Western academia into wider Western culture. Since gender is a sociological construct and not tied to biological reality, it is ultimately malleable. The concept would have mystified anyone who lived before the current post-modern generation, as would a related concept unknown in all of human history until now, same-sex “marriage.” The two ideas are connected by the same moral framework, which does not, cannot, include our Creator God.

The inspiration for this post is a piece in Life Site News about popular conservative political and cultural commentator Dave Ruben, and the decision he made with his “husband” to have a baby. Thus, same-sex surrogacy, meaning a woman has agreed to have “their” baby. The title of the piece was click bait for me: Why is the Daily Wire promoting same-sex surrogacy? That is a very good question! The subtitle of the piece reflects my opinion as well: “Same-sex surrogacy is a grave distortion of the family, and intrinsically evil.” Surrogacy is morally problematic in general, but to put a child into a “marriage” without a mother and father is morally reprehensible. And in case you don’t know, The Daily Wire is a conservative website founded by Ben Shapiro and film director Jeremy Boreing, and I wanted to know why they were promoting something that is clearly not conservative. I was surprised to find out this promoting came during an interview with none other than Jordan Peterson, who I gather is a new contributor to The Daily Wire. Before I address the moral framework, I stumbled upon this short video of Doug Wilson basically eviscerating the arguments of both Ruben and Peterson:

I’ve known since I first realized I was a conservative when Reagan was elected (just between you and me, I voted for Carter, but not a word to anyone) I was not a libertarian, but I’ve struggled ever since to explain exactly why. The debate between conservativism and libertarianism has existed since the dawn of the modern conservative movement with the founding of National Review by Bill Buckley (RIP to both). Out of that came something called fusionism whcih held traditionalist conservatism and libertarianism together for decades. It’s been a marriage of convenience, but something fundamental separates the two so the marriage could never be consummated. The author of the Life Site piece in critiquing the argument Ruben and Peterson make explains why fusionism ultimately doesn’t work. The justification they are making for same-sex surrogacy comes “from the faulty libertarian emphasis on choice over morality.”

The reason libertarians believe choice is more important than morality is because, they argue, without the choice to be moral or immoral, one’s action can’t have any moral meaning. This is of course true. If someone points a gun at my head and threatens to kill me if I don’t walk the little old lady across the street, my doing so has no moral value; I was coerced. We are, however, rarely confronted with any kind of coercion to be moral or immoral, but constantly confronted with choices whether to be moral or not, do right or wrong, be good or bad, tell the truth or lie. Putting my self-interests and self-fulfillment over the interests of children is deeply immoral, and that is exactly what Ruben and his “husband” are doing. Wilson’s assessment of their arguments demonstrates their weakness, and futility, but also why there is nothing conservative about them. As the author of the Life Site piece points out, “there is no conservatism when you eschew moral tradition and natural law,” and both come primarily from one source, The Bible. Without God there is nothing to conserve. Libertarianism, to the contrary, can do just fine without God because the liberty to choose is in effect their God, their highest good.

The founders of America were most definitely not libertarians. They fought a revolution, gave their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor for the cause of liberty, but it had nothing to do with libertarianism. They knew without “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” there could be no liberty, and they held “these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Every person who read these words at the time had no doubt Jefferson, maybe the most Deist among the founders, meant the Creator God of the Bible. He knew without the moral compass of Christianity there could be no “nation conceived in liberty,” in the words of Lincoln. The supreme law of the land depended on Christianity as it’s moral North Star. As John Adams, the second President of the United States declared, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” He too meant the religious people of the Old and New Testaments.

I’m grateful for the many liberals, like Ruben and Peterson, who have moved to the political and cultural right over the last five or ten years, and who believe in truth over “The Narrative.” I’m happy to be co-belligerents with them against the Marxist woke left and the globalist elites who despise our liberty, and hate America as founded. That, however, doesn’t mean we call evil good, and good evil, even if it comes from those who claim the mantel of “conservative.” The homosexual and transgender agenda come from the same evil source, the same (im)moral framework, and you can’t accept one and reject the other; they are a package deal. Conservatism without the package is not conservative.

Uninvented: Exodus and the Building of the Tabernacle

Uninvented: Exodus and the Building of the Tabernacle

Jul 6, 2022 | Uninvented

I recently finished eight years of a “walk through the Bible,” a very slow walk indeed. I also recently finished a book called Uninvented: Why the Bible Could Not be Made Up, and the Evidence that Proves It. Having spent so much time mining for gold in the infinitely rich soil of God’s word, I decided I needed a big picture view again, so I started at Genesis 1 and have been reading 2 or 3 chapters a day. I had become so addicted to writing about my thoughts on the Bible, it has been hard not to jump on to my computer and type away. I have resisted that temptation, until now. However, I’m not going back to a daily grind of chapter-by-chapter analysis, as tempting as that is. Rather, I’m going to connect Uninvented to my current reading so I can continue to write about Scripture and promote my book as well.

Speaking of promoting, I would be grateful if you might share my posts on social media and with friends and family, if you think they’re worthy, because promoting a book when you’re a “nobody” is really hard, even a book as worthy of the attention as Uninvented. There is nothing like it out there, and most Christians don’t know why uninvented as a concept is such a powerful defense for the veracity of the Bible. If you’ve read it, a comment on Amazon would be much appreciated as well.

In Uninvented one of my objectives is to encourage Christians to read the Bible apologetically, specifically related to the psychology of the characters and the authors. That means in layman’s terms for those who are not “into apologetics,” that the veracity of the text, it’s truthfulness as history, is revealed in what the characters do and say, and how they act. In the book I encourage readers to see the verisimilitude in the text, which simply means does this read real, like it could have actually happened, as real people thinking and doing real things, not like fiction merely made up to further a religious agenda. And we must remember as we’re reading our Bibles that fiction (historical or otherwise) didn’t exist in the ancient world. Myths and legend did, as did epic poems like The Iliad and The Odyssey, but the Bible reads like none of those.

As I’ve been reading through the Pentateuch, as in the rest of Scripture, I see verisimilitude everywhere, including how many times the author (traditionally, Christians believe it is Moses) refers to the Lord, or Yahweh. According to biblegateway.com the numbers in each book are as follows:

  • Genesis (183)
  • Exodus (354)
  • Leviticus (281)
  • Numbers (358)
  • Deuteronomy (442)

If my math is good, and my fingers and iPhone work, the Lord is referred to 1,618 times in the first five books of the Bible. If these references are not true, if the Lord did not in fact speak to Moses and his people, then we must believe whoever wrote these books is a liar, or are liars because going all the way back to Spinoza biblical critics declared Moses didn’t write the Pentateuch, but numbers of people did much later in history. This came to be called by liberal biblical scholars the documentary hypothesis. I find this hard to believe given one of the Ten Commandments is, “You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.” Yet, if we’re to believe the critics over the last three hundred plus years whoever wrote the first five books of the Bible were in fact liars. Does that pass the smell test to you?

The reason these references to Yahweh stood out to me was not only that there are so many of them, but that Yahweh is telling the Israelites through Moses what to do. Another word added to Yahweh and repeated stood out to me later in Exodus as the Israelites were building the tabernacle, the place where Yahweh is to dwell. Over and over Moses says, “As the Lord commanded.” Doing a word search we see the following:

  • Genesis (12)
  • Exodus (48)
  • Leviticus (24)
  • Numbers (29)
  • Deuteronomy (33)

Most of these 146 references are the Lord commanding. Again, if as the critics insist this is myth and legend, then all the references to the Lord commanding or doing anything are made up, pure invention, or in other words lies. The reason they would be lies, and not just inspiring stories of a people’s founding, is that the author(s) clearly intend to convey these things really happened.

As I argue in the book, skeptical critics come to the text with a “question-begging anti-supernatural bias,” which means before they ever come to the text, they assume miracles can’t happen. If they can’t, then of course the Lord didn’t actually speak to Moses, or command him to do anything. The entire Exodus narrative would have to be fiction because, well, miracles can’t happen. Understanding where this anti-supernatural bias comes from is important for us to understand so we can see how arbitrary it is. In the first chapter of the book, I do a short historical overview of biblical criticism, and how it is based on philosophies, like rationalism and empiricism, that will not allow even the consideration of something outside of the so-called natural world. Such assumptions are nothing if not arbitrary and should be rejected by any honest observer. If we let the text speak for itself we can draw the most plausible conclusions, and will likley find in the text something historically reliable, and thus uninvented.

Christian Nationalism: To Keep American Independence We Must Get Involved

Christian Nationalism: To Keep American Independence We Must Get Involved

Jul 2, 2022 | Politics & Government

I’ve said numerous times in these posts on Christian nationalism that the easiest thing to do in the destressing state of 2022 America is complain. Most Americans who see things this way also think there isn’t a whole lot we can do about it, but that is not true. God has given us the most incredible gift in America because it is the first nation in the history of the world where the people were given sovereign power to rule their own country. The problem with such a system is that if the people don’t take up the responsibility of their own rule, then tyrants will do it for them. These words of Thomas Jefferson from 1775 speak brilliantly to the responsibility before us:

Honor, justice, and humanity, forbid us tamely to surrender that freedom which we received from our gallant ancestors, and which our innocent posterity have a right to receive from us. We cannot endure the infamy and guilt of resigning succeeding generations to that wretchedness which inevitably awaits them if we basely entail hereditary bondage on them.

Over 200 years later another president, Ronald Reagan, said something along the same lines:

Freedom is never more than one generation from extinction. We didn’t pass it to our children in the bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected and handed on for them to do the same, or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children’s children what it was once like in the United States where men were free.

Too many Christians, not to mention Americans, don’t seem to understand that our freedoms are not the natural state of existence in a fallen world, that freedom is not free. A cursory overview of history will show us that. Yet, we so easily take them for granted, and do not thank God adequately for the blessings they are. The Democrat-left communists depend on the good people of America to do nothing to defend their liberties, so there are no lines they will not cross to keep and achieve power for their ideological, soul crushing, liberty destroying agenda. If we do not push back, our country and our liberties will be lost. If you think the last two years has been misery with the covid scam, stolen elections, and leftists controlling the Federal government, you haven’t seen anything yet if we continue to let them get their way.

In comments sections of some websites I visit, many of those who proclaim gloom and doom think things are so bad that our only option is revolution and war, but that is short sighted in the extreme. The founders gave us legal and peaceful means to fight the tyranny of those who would seek to control us without our consent. All of these include time and effort, and sometimes money. The least we can do if we are not going to run for any office, is to hold accountable those in office. More people than ever have realized the need to do this because of the overreach of government on many levels, and the overreach of the radical left (it is all radical today). How we hold our elected representatives accountable is by showing up. Sometimes that means in person and sometimes via phone and e-mail. It also means we have to educate and inform ourselves about what they are doing. I’m working on getting better at that myself. We should focus local because that is what a self-governing people do, keep accountable government closest to the people.

Locally, cities, towns, and counties have elected officials for legislative, executive, and sometimes judicial branches of their governments. Included in these are mayors, city council members, county commissioners, election boards and clerks’ offices (these are more important than ever for obvious reasons). At the state level, offices are the same as at the federal, including the executive, the governor, the legislative, congressman and senator, and the judicial. We all need to have our state representatives’ websites bookmarked so we can keep up with what they are doing, and call and e-mail when necessary. Then there are school boards, something none of us gave a thought to until the draconian and useless (harmful, actually) covid restrictions brought to light the rot being taught in our public schools. Now parents are holding their county school boards accountable, and many who never imagined themselves running for any office, are running for board seats. I learned about a wonderful organization helping people do just that, Mom’s for Liberty. Check them out. It is yet another opportunity to get involved. There is no excuse not to get involved in some way, unless we just don’t believe in what Jefferson and Reagan said. I certainly hope not.

We also have a political party that is sympathetic to Christianity and the Judeo-Christian worldview, and that would be the Republican Party. I have plenty of problems with Republicans, specifically the RINOs among them, but again, I can complain or do something about it. My activism was slow in coming because when I was younger, I was “involved in politics,” and eventually figured it wasn’t going to change much. I’m just one person after all. No fan of Trump initially, to say the least, I slowly came to appreciate him and what he stood for. Nobody could be as bad as his critics claimed he was. As those critics lied about him endlessly for four years, I figured he must be a significant threat to their money and power. Although I wish he had treated the covid scam differently, the Democrat-left’s response to covid is continuing that eye opening process.

Then when the election of 2020 was stolen, and the J-6 setup was revealed for what it was, I knew I could no longer sit on the sidelines and just vote and complain. Thankfully, I learned about Steve Bannon’s War Room after the election and have been watching it ever since. In February of 2021 I learned about something called the precinct strategy, and I was in. My wife and I were officially sworn in as precinct committeemen a few months later, and we are now voting members of our county GOP. It requires a meeting once a month, with many opportunities to volunteer especially in election years such as this one. The Republican Party is built from the ground up, which allows us a real voice in how it is run, and in due course if enough patriotic Americans get involved, we can drive out the RINOs who always seem to talk a good game, but never fight against the deep state globalists and have no interest in Making America Great Again.