Skip to main content

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!
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I Know All Those Words, But That Sentence Makes No Sense To Me

  Let’s say you travel back in time six hundred years or so.  Luckily, you happen across a fellow that speaks English.  Upon hearing your tale, he describes you as nice, smart, and handsome.  Wouldn’t you feel good?   You shouldn’t.  As Sol Steinmetz in his book, Semantics Antics , explains; Nice originally meant someone who was foolish, ignorant, senseless, or absurd (middle English 1300). Smart for the first 300 years of its use meant causing pain, sharp, cutting, or severe, a sense that survives in the idiom "smart as a whip.” Handsome wasn’t complimentary. When coined around 1425, it just meant easily handled; it didn’t have its current positive connotation until 1590.   You might think he said you were a kind, intelligent, good looking bloke, when in reality he said you were a foolish pain easily dealt with.   Words have an annoying habit of changing meaning over time in the same language and it becomes even more compli...
Post a Comment
Read more

Master Your Self

  In a contest for the toughest president of the United States, it would be hard to go against Theodore Roosevelt.  He was known for his “manly” pursuits hunting big game, climbing the Matterhorn, participating in boxing match while president. (These weren’t play fights, he lost the vision on one eye because of them!)  Once before he was about to give a speech an assassin shot him in the chest.  Roosevelt refused to go to a hospital and insisted on giving his speech, still wearing his blood-soaked shirt!   Teddy might have become tough but he wasn’t born that way.  He was a sickly child that suffered from severe asthma that almost proved fatal.  As was a young boy, doctors discovered that he had a weak heart, and advised him to get a desk job and not strain himself.  He was homeschooled because of his many illnesses and spent most of his time indoors.   But then as a teen his father, whom Teddy Roosevelt revered, told his son, “ ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Until Midnight

    In Acts 20, there is the tragicomic event surrounding a young man by the name of Eutychus. He did what a lot of folks before and after him did, he fell asleep during a sermon. Unfortunately, he was setting in in the third story window at the time. So instead of nodding off and hitting the pew in front of him, he fell to his death. The good news was the apostle Paul was delivering the sermon and had the ability to bring him back.       I don’t know, however, if we can judge Eutychus too harshly. The sermon had gone on till midnight. Paul wouldn’t finish it up till daybreak. That’s a long lesson. I know some folks that might want to jump out of a window if I had a lesson that long, yet these Christians wanted to be there to hear Paul.   Don’t get me wrong, I’m not pushing for all night sermons but I think we might need to adopt these folks' dedication. They knew that Paul was only in town for a limited time only and they were determined to ...
Post a Comment
Read more