A WORD TO THE WISE: vocabulary

Monday, August 1, 2016

Days 4& 5, Blogging Genesis: PAINT THE SKY

Genesis 1: 14 Then God said, “Let there be lights in the expanse of the heavens to separate the day from the night, and let them be for signs and for seasons and for days and years;

15 and let them be for lights in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth”; and it was so.

16 God made the two great lights, the greater light to govern the day, and the lesser light to govern the night; He made the stars also.

17 God placed them in the expanse of the heavens to give light on the earth,

18 and to govern the day and the night, and to separate the light from the darkness; and God saw that it was good.

19 There was evening and there was morning, a fourth day.

In Genesis 1:3, on the 1^st Creation day, God speaks forth light (day and night), but He doesn’t create the stars, sun, or moon until the fourth day, verse 14. How could there be light without the sources of light? It doesn’t make sense; except that it does.

No human body witnessed Creation in real time. The first chapters of the Bible, like the last chapters of the Bible, had to be delivered by supernatural revelation. God showed the original author of Genesis a vision.

By the 3rd day, the author of Genesis (traditionally considered to be Moses) could see vegetation spreading, sea creatures, birds, and birdlike creatures, not to mention the unseen microbes all breathed. The respiration of billions of living beings ascended into the firmament and transformed the sky.

Oxygen and carbon dioxide displaced other elements in the air. Water vapor exchanged between sky and sea, pushed back the prehistoric haze. From evening to morning on the 4^th day, the sky became clearer and clearer. Stars appeared in the dark expanse of night. The larger light of the now clearly visible moon ruled the night. The Earth turned, the firmament lit, and the sun rose.

On the 1^st day of the Creation vision, Moses saw light coalesce in space and watched night vaguely shift to day under the thick canopy of Earth’s early atmosphere. On the 4^th day, Moses saw what the lights in space looked like when the firmament above was clear enough to refract their light through an oxygen rich atmosphere filled with water vapor.

Scripture doesn’t provide properly technical explanations of oxygenation, atmospheric optics, or light refraction. In the Biblical text, Moses didn’t distinguish between the astronomical movements of the sun as an independent star in space and the optical illusion of the sun’s progress across the sky created by the rotation of the Earth in orbit. Apparently God didn’t explain that to him in 1352? B.C.

I don’t fault Moses for that. Nobody explained it to me until 1979 A.D.

The “evolution” of light in Genesis isn’t a contradiction. It’s the accurate testimony of a witness by vision who did what every scholar has ever done, what scholars today still do: Moses used the words he knew to accurately describe the world God showed him.

Life yet to come would enjoy sunsets, sunrises, starry nights, and moonlit skies because on the 4^th day, the breath of life painted the sky.

Oh, yeah. That was good.

---Anderson T. Graves II is a writer, community organizer and consultant for education, ministry, and rural leadership development.

Rev. Anderson T. Graves II is pastor of Miles Chapel CME Church in Fairfield, Alabama; executive director of the Substance Abuse Youth Networking Organization (SAYNO); and director of rural leadership development for the National Institute for Human Development (NIHD).

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Monday, March 30, 2015

EPITAPH or EPITHET

When I was an English teacher I pushed my adolescent writers to expand their vocabularies, but sometimes, while trying to impress me, my students would stretch their word choices beyond their grasp of definitions. They’d use big words, but the wrong big words.

For example, sometimes students would confuse the words epithet and epitaph.

An epitaph is “something written or said in memory of a dead person; especially : words written on a gravestone.” (Merriam Webster online)

An epithet is a word or phrase, often “an offensive word or name that is used as a way of abusing or insulting someone” (Merriam Webster online), as in “a racial epithet.”

In the Bible, when a prominent character died, Scripture often gave a one verse summary of his/her life --- an epitaph. Epitaph not epithet.

But then, there was King Jehoram of Jerusalem. The summary of his life is in 2 Chronicles 21:20.

He was thirty-two years old when he became king. He reigned in Jerusalem eight years and, to no one’s sorrow, departed.

The King James Version says that Jehoram died without being desired. That English phrase is a single Hebrew word.

Jehoram’s epitaph is kind of an epithet.

How sad.

Remember that other people will bury you. Someone else will decide what your tombstone says. Even if you have the stone carved while you’re living, someone else will still decide.

How sad it would be for you or I to attain great titles, to gain positions of power and personal prosperity, and then die “to no one’s sorrow.” To be remembered as an epithet.

Live daily the verse you want carved on your grave. Be now the person you want preached in your eulogy.

By your actions, choose an epitaph that is not an epithet.