What is Biblical Truth

Yesterday I was strolling around the internet and came upon an interview with Richard Dawkins.  For those of you who don’t know Dawkins, he is a big name in the religion debunking business and what I could call the cult of atheism in popular social media today.  The title of the interview, which says a lot about Dawkins, is Outgrowing God: Richard Dawkins in Conversation and can be found at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9Sf2eNVWVs.

Now from my observation of Dawkins, his approach is to set up straw dogs of fundamentalist religious beliefs so that he can make a splash of knocking them down.  In this case, Dawkins was describing a discussion two people were having about the creation story in Genesis and disagreeing about whether Adam and Eve were tempted by an apple or a fig.  Dawkins dismissed this out of hand and stated his concern was that the Garden of Eden story never happened implying that the details of the story didn’t matter.

As it happened, this was a great example of what I was preaching about yesterday at St. Alban’s Anglican Church in Souris PEI.  Dawkins uses the facts of the biblical account as a straw dog to try and destroy people’s belief in God.  The Gospel Reading for the day was the account in Mark of Jesus feeding 4000 men with a few loaves of bread and a few small fish.  I believe that when dealing with miracle accounts in the bible, it is not constructive to engage in issues of facts i.e., did the events in the biblical account happen the way they are recorded.  Rather, I think that we can find common ground in why these accounts - these stories are part of our scriptural heritage.  In other words, what is the message in these stories that are important and necessary for our understanding of who Jesus is and how God works in the lives of the people in the bible and in our lives today.

St. Paul addresses in 1 Corinthians this way of understanding those things which God gives us including an approach to scripture, “Those who are unspiritual do not receive the gifts of God’s Spirit, for they are foolishness to them, and they are unable to understand them because they are discerned spiritually.”  If we approach the accounts of miracles spiritually – as a gift of God’s Spirit we can begin to understand what these miracle stories mean for us.

With that let us see what the spiritual message is for us in this account of the feeding of the multitude.  The account tells us that Jesus began with seven loaves of bread and a few small fish.  There is not a lot to work with in in terms of food for such a large number of people.  However, with this beginning, they are fed – we can assume they were filled to the point of their appetites were probably more than satisfied.   In fact, there was more than what they had to start with.  From seven loaves and a few fish they ended up with seven baskets of leftovers – I wonder who got to take some of that home?  We can look at the number seven and if we investigate this, we find that seven is a number which signifies perfection or completion.  There is the seven days of creation and the seven seals in the book of Revelation for example.  We could say from this that the followers of Jesus were completely fed with spiritual food.  Those followers and by implication, we are offered by Jesus, food for our souls which will completely satisfy us.

This is reminiscent of the account in the Gospel of John in which Jesus meets the Samaritan woman at the well:

Jesus said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again, but those who drink of the water that I will give them will never be thirsty. The water that I will give will become in them a spring of water gushing up to eternal life.’ The woman said to him, ‘Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty or have to keep coming here to draw water.’

Jesus gives to that Samaritan woman and to the four thousand people gathered to hear him the bread of life and the water of life.  If we eat that bread and drink that water we will be fed spiritually.  Our spirit will never again be thirsty in a dry and barren land and will never be spiritually hungry.  Therefore, let us follow Jesus for he offers us the bread of life to eat and he offers us the water of eternal life to drink.

May you be blessed to receive the bread of life to eat and he offers us the water of eternal life to drink on your journey.