A Nice Story

  When Columbus sailed the ocean blue in 1492, people were fearful that he would just sail right off the Earth. But Chris proved them all wrong by discovering the new world and convincing everyone that the world was indeed round. At least that is the story.

  But that is all it is a story.

  More specifically it is a story written by Washington Irving. Irving’s most famous stories might be Rip Van Winkle or The Legend of Sleepy Hollow but his most enduring one might have been his 1828 history book about  Columbus. In the first chapter, Irving described a dramatic confrontation in which Columbus sought to win over a gathering of disbelieving Spanish scholars who argued that the world was flat. 

  Only that isn’t what happened. The truth is that Aristotle proved the earth was round two thousand years earlier by pointing out the curved shadow it casts on the moon. By Columbus's time, virtually all learned people took that for granted.  Columbus really did meet with the scholars, but the argument he had with them was about something completely different; the size of the globe. In this Columbus was wrong. He imagined the earth was small enough that it would be a short sail to India.

  That tale, however, wasn’t as marketable, but a romanticized version making Columbus the enlightened hero overcoming myth and superstition that’s what people wanted to believe and that's what became enshrined as history

  It is important to know the difference between tales and truth.

For we did not follow cleverly devised tales when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of His majesty.

2nd Peter 1:16 

  Even today folks struggle to do this. We like our tales to fit our perceptions instead of letting the truth shape our views. We try to make God in our image instead of conforming to His. Paul warned about this in 2nd Timothy 4:3-4: “For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but wanting to have their ears tickled, they will accumulate for themselves teachers in accordance to their own desires, and will turn away their ears from the truth and will turn aside to myths”.

  Our faith needs to be based not on some story but on history. Truth matters. We need to be sure our beliefs are based not on cleverly invented stories but on timeless truths. Instead of searching for what we want to hear, let’s look at what we know to be true!