IN THE BEGINNING

Time began two million, two hundred sixteen thousand, five hundred twenty-two years, seven months, three days, four hours, thirteen minutes, and forty-two seconds ago. How sure am I? It is as absolute as anyone who believes the Bible makes the claim of ten to twenty thousand years and that it happened to have begun in literally seven days. Make sure you note that “they” think the Bible makes that claim and that I believe it does not and therefore the Bibles integrity, not infallibility, remains intact. Additionally, the two million years I suggest as a starting point is about time and not the formation of oxygen and minerals that make up most of the rock and liquid that is earth. I believe in the “old world” theory that is set up by a premise that suggests earths age matters little on the measurement or beginning of time as we relate to it, that the earths surface may as many as four times been nearly or completely covered by ice during which the “big bang” may have not yet completed its work of aliening the units, including our star (the sun), of finding their places in the galaxy. One might consider, as I do, that God was not even ready for the “seven days” let alone humanity and that the completion of His work was a detailed, drawn out process, best analogized by a young child being released on that last triumphant push by a proud father teaching the skill of bicycling, being watched by a bystander who hadn’t seen the other hundred attempts. The analogy builds for creation the idea that the final outcome, humans and life, was preceded by thousands of years of work, and an evolutionary process not beginning with some catastrophic event of chance but by an unknown and undefined power and intellect centered in natural science, invented and nurtured by this higher power that we call God and which is synonymous with nature here and far beyond our galaxy, and farther beyond and that this evolution is easily exemplified by the most recent freezing of earth that began some 70,000 years ago and likely covered at least half of the United States scouring out the basins of the Great Lakes. Because so much of earth’s water was trapped in ice, parts of the ocean floor were exposed and sea level was as much as 390 ft. below what it is today. About 11,500 years ago, this latest advance of ice ended and life as we know it began, not that life began, but that it did as we know and have documented it and also that it might well be one catastrophic event, that of a small meteor, that eliminated dinosaurs, a segment of the food chain higher than ourselves that initiated God’s “six day work week” and ended with a big sigh of relief on the “seventh”. So, if you will, as I do, enter Moses.

Moses was about eighty years old at the time of the Exodus from Egypt and for much of his first thirty years was well educated in science, namely alchemy, widely practiced in Ancient Egypt. Alchemy at that time refers to the investigation of the natural and early philosophical and spiritual disciplines, combining elements of chemistry, metallurgy, physics, medicine, astrology, semiotics, mysticism, and spiritualism as part of one greater force connecting the human soul to the Devine. More specifically, and a great example, is sacred geometry, a sample of which is the Great Pyramid, which shows the insight of the Egyptians about the mysteries, including electromagnetic energies and laws of the universe. Moses was subjected to all of this and the education was easily transferable and incorporated into the Hebrew concept of God. Egyptians were the first to use a 365 day calendar and they also were able to determine a north and south pole defining the earth as a globe, only able to do so as the correct star alignment occurred about 2467 BC and allowing the Egyptians the knowledge to construct the Great Pyramid at Giza, one of the Seven Wonders of the World, nearly a thousand years before Moses birth in about 1527 BC. During the first third of Moses life, his education centered, by observation in the palace of the Egyptian King, on how to govern a nation. The second third was learning wilderness survival from his father-in-law Jethro. The last third of his life was the application of his knowledge as he led the Israelites through the Sinai Wilderness at the beginning and formation of a great nation. It was during their forty-year wandering, which began about 1462 BC, that Moses wrote the book of Genesis.

You can find hundreds of liberal “religionist” writers offering their insipid religious convictions or their atheistic counterparts who so eloquently, at length, attempt to dismiss the Bible as a fraud, both displaying their lack of appreciation and understanding of the deliverance, by what I believe to be, human inspiration, of God’s will in our lives. Liberal Bible seminaries who question if Moses even existed and who approvingly teach the “documentary hypothesis” or “JEDP hypothesis”, that assigns authorship to various anonymous writers who gathered myths and legends from many nations and added them to the “camp fire stories” of the Hebrew Nation. Then there are the “deniers”, and none more aggressive and articulate than Darrell W. Conder or Christopher Hitchens. I do not belong to either camp, though most conservatives question my sincerity due to my lack of interest in salvation, but that is another day’s topic. The words of Christ bring me to my understanding of The Law and no where else can they be so explicit than those from the Sermon on the Mount, the radically different message of not just acting righteously but thinking righteously as well. The only way to understand how, is by a set of commands and written into that set of commands is creation, done so by a man named Moses, the nation builder, who had a direct connection on a line from Abraham right through himself to Christ. Jesus spoke to us on this down to earth personal level that taught us as individuals to love each other and “do unto others” based on the ten commands that were not at odds with “the sermon, as with the sixth; “Thou Shalt Not Kill”. It allows a nation or person to defend, and as a last resort to kill, but not to murder. Christ referred to slaughter and murder and so did the command. To find creation in the commands you need only look at the forth and the Good Book is tied together with an author at the very beginning, explaining what is an easy endeavor in logic and lies with the discernment of time and ultimately, the truth about God.

When you extend the equations of general relativity to include space and time, the result shows that time has a beginning (ie The Big Bang). (See Stephen Hawking’s “The Beginning of Time” and essays by Rodger Penrose and George Ellis). Overcome by infinity, we can only observe our universe and its 15 billion year age. For awhile, be amazed, then latch on to what is understood, ultimately to find comfort in truth, found directly inside each one of us in our hearts and minds, the combination of which is a soul, isolated from God only by doubt and disbelief, the mistake that the infallibility of the law, dismissed, descends the disbeliever into idolatry and captivity in both the spiritual and physical realm, the undoing of which can only be accomplished by returning again and again after failure, but having a script laid down by the ancients who described the way to lead our natural lives and that God wrote down, through Moses, and passes on to each of us in the same way, the freedom and relief from sin. B. C.