Get Your Own Dirt!
One day a group of scientists got together and decided that man had come a long way and no longer needed God. So they picked one scientist to go and tell Him that they were done with Him.
The scientist walked up to God and said, “God, we’ve decided that we no longer need you. We’re to the point that we can clone people and do many miraculous things, so why don’t you just go on and get lost.”
God listened very patiently and kindly to the man and after the scientist was done talking, God said, “Very well, how about this, let’s say we have a man-making contest.” To which the scientist replied, “OK, great!”
But God added, “Now, we’re going to do this just like I did back in the old days with Adam.”The scientist said, “Sure, no problem” and bent down and grabbed himself a handful of dirt.
God just looked at him and said, “No, no, no. You go get your own dirt!”
Funny joke, right? Bet you’ve heard it before. But in my mind it applies to more than dirt. How many of us once embraced (or know someone who embraces) the “Me, Jesus, and my Bible” philosphy of Christianity and never considered where “the dirt” came from. If you want a “Jesus, Me and my Bible” lifestyle then by golly get your own dirt! First get a set of untranslated ancient manuscripts. Decide which ones are Scripture. Figure out where the transciption errors are. The scribal errors. Without the 2,000 years of Christian scholarship and the thousands of more years of Judaic scholarsip discern the meaning. Ridiculous you say? Well the fact that there was a declaration of the scriptural canon means that it wasn’t self-evident and that just like there needed to be a council called to determine whether or not the Jewish dietary laws and the law regarding circumcision was to be binding on gentile Christians, there needed to be an official ruling regarding the canon. There was disagreement. How is it possible to accept the canon set by the men of the 4th century but reject their interpretation of those very scriptures? To me that is every bit as puzzling as claiming to be as powerful as God because you can manipulate what was done before you but not actually start from scratch.
What if we had to get our own dirt?
