Friday, November 17, 2006

The purpose of this blog is not to affirm or deny the existence of God. The purpose of this blog is to discuss the Old Testament and why it was written. I would like to try and stick to facts and ideas that most everyone can agree on. I know total agreement is impossible but what the hey, I'll try.

First let's make it clear on who wrote the OT. I don't think that anyone believes that God wrote it personally, with the possible exception of the stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments, which are currently lost and therefore not subject to examination. We can all agree that the OT was written by humans. I won't go into whether they were inspired by God because I want to stick to something everyone can agree on and some people do not believe that they were.

So, the thing that stands out to me is that whoever wrote the OT did so in order to convince the tribe of Israel that it was something special. They did this by saying that a god chose Israel as its own and was going to guide and take care of them as long as they obeyed it.

Some people believe that the OT claims there is only one God but if you read carefully you will see that many times it refers to God in the plural. Some Christians talk of a trinity but we will ignore that at the present because not everyone agrees with this.

So, I think that we can agree that however many gods there may be, one of them, which we can refer to as LORD, adopted Israel as its own. Whether this is true or not I don't know. The only thing we can say for sure is that this is what the writers of the OT are trying to convince us of.

No comments: