Remember now thy Creator in the days of thy youth, while the evil
days come not, nor the
years draw nigh, when thou shalt say,
I have no pleasure in them; While the sun, or the light, or the
moon, or the stars, be not darkened, nor the clouds
return after the rain: -- Ecclesiastes 12:1-3
IN THIS UPDATE
Lunar Eclipse -- Thursday, March
13
Hi Friends,
Another quick newsletter. Turns out there's a lunar eclipse this week and I didn't even know about it. Getting old and not paying attention like I used to! I also
forgot to tell you all about the opposition of Mars and its interesting retrogradation near the stars Castor and Pollux in Gemini. Hope all you long time readers have been following the sky and saw the recent dance of Mars on your own without the newsletter. My apologies to all the new readers who may not have been around for the last Mars opposition cycle, which happens every two years.
This flat earth issue is not gonna just go away! I know it will eventually because these things always do, like the intermittently popular "Gospel in the Stars" heresy and the "Blood Moon" and "Rev 13 Sign" hoaxes of recent memory. Flat earth-ism is lately proving quite persistent. Here's a few Scriptures to illustrate how this issue is misrepresented by flat earth hoaxsters.
These verses are among the ones most relied upon by Christian flat earthers:
Fear before him, all the earth:
the world also shall be stable, that it be not moved. -- 1 Chronicles 16:30
The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty; the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved. -- Psalm 93:1
Say among the heathen that the Lord reigneth: the world also shall be established that it shall not be moved: he shall judge the people righteously. -- Psalm 96:10
Who laid the foundations of the
earth, that it should not be removed for ever. -- Psalm 104:5
Hmmm, things look pretty bad for the round earth side, based on those verses, don't they? Until you come across this verse:
The Lord reigneth; let the
people tremble: he sitteth between the cherubims; let the earth be moved. -- Psalm 99:1
Uh oh, is there a contradiction in Scripture? Not at all. We need to keep a few things in mind. For one, these passages are metaphorical, to declare the power and majesty of the LORD. They do not
suggest that we err unless we adopt a micro-literal reading of Scripture. Also, we need to always keep in mind that English translated words may not carry the full connotation of the source languages. The word "world" above is the Hebrew tebel (תֵּבֵל) which, according to Strong's, can correspond to either the Greek oikoumene (οἰκουμένη), or the inhabited part of the world, or kosmos (κόσμος), the entire universe.
Either way, hope we can all agree that we'd have bad problems if either the inhabitable world or the
entire universe would move! The "foundations of the earth" in Psalm 104 might refer to the Earth's crust, and we'd also have bad problems if that were removed forever. But perhaps such verses refer to the Earth's orbit, which is established and very stable. There is nothing of which we know that could cause the Earth to move from its orbit.
But in any
event, whether or not the Earth moves, there's nothing in these verses to suggest that the Earth is flat. So these verses might be used to challenge heliocentrism but offer no help to flat earth-ism. It's important to note the distinction.
These issues were hashed out by Christian theologians in centuries past who held that either the round Earth sat in
the center of a geocentric cosmos, or else that the round Earth is a planet circling the Sun in a heliocentric cosmos. In both cosmologies the world was round. And the geocentrists lost the argument three and a half centuries ago.
Here's some more verses that also do not bode well for a micro-literal reading of Scripture:
The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. -- Psalm 46:6
The above verse is in the past tense. I don't know when the Earth melted, but we would not be here now if it did! Do you suppose
maybe we really can read such verses as simply metaphorical? Or this one:
Then the earth shook and trembled; the foundations of heaven moved and shook, because he was wroth. --2 Samuel 22:8
The Earth shakes and trembles during an earthquake, but whatever might be entailed with moving the foundations of heaven, that also sounds like it would be a catastrophic event!
I've always been fond of this verse:
The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. -- Ecclesiastes 1:5
IMHO this verse is the best bet for flat earthers since it says that there is a "place" of the sunrise -- an actual literal place
-- where the Sun rises. That could not happen on a round Earth. But this teaches directly against the current flat earth model which has the Sun perpetually circling above and only giving the illusion of rising. Well, flat earthers can't argue micro-literalism on one hand and then resort to optical illusions on the other! They need to choose! This verse also calls the Sun "he" so, by a micro-literal reading of this verse, the Sun is a boy! Or else maybe
this passage is just Koheleth expounding on the vanity of things and not giving a science lesson?
Friends, I think we find surest footing if we just hold to the inerrant truth of Scripture for the things which are directly taught, including historical
narratives, in Genesis and elsewhere, such as the creation account. But we can go off on all sorts of tangents if we insist upon micro-literal interpretations of Hebrew words in English translation as found in metaphorical passages such as the Psalms.
