MOPE FASAKIN

During my study tonight, I counted 75 patriarchs between Jesus and Adam. Assuming an average lifespan of 100years, that brings us to a rough estimate of about 7,500 years from when the promise was given, and 4,100 years from David’s messianic prophecy. Yet, the word of God did not fail with the passage of millennia. And that was the selah moment for me. God’s word cannot fail and it is not subject to our understanding of time.

I decided to study further and I came across this thesis.

Contradictory Genealogies in Matthew and Luke

This is a carefully researched, very brilliant read, and I encourage you to read it.

It reminded me of the days of the early church where people would challenge the apostles at council meetings, and the apostles would defend their convictions, leading to a massive explosion of faith in the face of great persecution. Gone are the days the church and the society freely debated and challenged facts in faith and science. Convictions were probed and driven down to roots that held firm. Little wonder faith withstood storms and moved mountains back then. Faith that produced great epistles from prisons and dungeons, powerful hymns in the face of fatal disasters, and soul-lifting poems when nothing made sense to the author.

Today, if you pointed out obvious discrepancies between words and actual events in the Bible, Christians would eat you up with –

“All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness.” 2 Timothy 3:16

and

“I testify to the one who hears the words of the prophecy contained in this book: If anyone adds to them, God will add to him the plagues described in this book.” Revelations 22:18

– quoting both with shallow historical and biblical knowledge, and possibly out of chronological context. It is almost as though people have assigned themselves defenders of God’s word, whose mission is to uphold it, because they are silently afraid that it might fail if questioned. This reminds me of Uzzah – who sought to assist the Ark of the Covenant because he was afraid it might fall. Yet, it is not us who uphold God’s word. Rather, we are upheld by His word. Everything is, whether you have faith in Him or not. What is worse? Believers today do not only display their deficient knowledge of what constitutes doctrine and infallible truths of scriptures, they vehemently defend pastors preaching obvious heresies. What could they be afraid of? The truth?

Evidently, you cannot even challenge science today. Earlier this evening, I wondered what would have been had the early scientists not propounded the theories of science in the days of yore. They wouldn’t have been able to propound expanded and improved theories like the Atomic theory, Boyle’s law, Charles’ Law, and even Gay-Lussac’s law of combining volumes. Most assuredly, physics would have suffered. There would have been no consensus on anything. Acceleration due to gravity would have been 8.6m/s in China, 9.2m/s in Nigeria, 10.6m/s in the United Kingdom, and 12.4m/s in Canada. It would have been difficult to agree on what standard temperature and pressure means. Everybody’s error of parallax would hold firm as your truth, my truth, and their truth, as each person insists that their perspective is sacrosanct and there is no objective position of THE TRUTH.

It is important to note that the error of parallax is not what happens when you set out to lie, but it is the heresy you arrive at when your perspective of the truth is altered, leading to a wrong conclusion. Parallax error occurs when a measurement is taken at an angle, rather than directly facing the measurement scale, resulting in a misinterpretation of the actual reading. Today, we call it “my truth”.

Yet, documenting history is an arduous responsibility, carefully handled by historians who are committed to documenting their accounts. Which is something the great author and physician, Luke, laid bear in the introduction to his account:

“Many have undertaken to draw up an account of the things that have been fulfilled among us, just as they were handed down to us by those who from the first were eyewitnesses and servants of the word. With this in mind, since I myself have carefully investigated everything from the beginning, I too decided to write an orderly account for you, most excellent Theophilus, so that you may know the certainty of the things you have been taught.” Luke.1:1-4

Thus, with this understanding, we are not thrown off by the discrepancies in the genealogical accounts of Matthew and Luke, as with other discrepancies in the Bible. In considering many accounts of the same event, we have a multi-sided view of the event when extracting the nucleus of the event. Like in a titration experiment, we take a couple of readings to validate the titre value. And therein is the wisdom of God: out of many accounts of the life and times of Christ, four independently and carefully written accounts were consolidated in the Bible to give us different perspectives but the same nucleus, and help us avoid the error of parallax when drilling down to the nucleus that is Christ – THE TRUTH.