Church Hopping

There has long been a belief that many of the themes in Christianity were taken from Greek mythology. Many claim that Samson and Delilah reflect Hercules being betrayed by Deianeira. An even larger similarity is claimed between Dionysus and Jesus. Both born of a mortal woman, both turned water into wine and both returned from the dead. Whether or not this is true, I will leave up to your own investigation. Of course if I were a betting man, I’d put my money on the Jesus.

However you can see one resemblance to mythology if you look in 2 Peter 2:4.

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Have you ever looked at the table of contents in your Bible and just thought, now why in the world is it ordered like that? Many people think that since Genesis is creation and Revelation is the end, then the Bible must be laid out chronologically, but I’m afraid that you couldn’t be more wrong. The books of the Bible are not chronological and at sometimes the chapters in a book don’t tell the story chronologically. The books of the Bible are primarily organized by the content or type of book.

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This post contains all of the Old Testament References to giants. Check out Part One and Part Two for more about the giants of the Old Testament.
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At the end of part one, the Nephilim were wiped out in the flood, but their legacy goes on through the Rephaim, the Emim and the Anakim. Unfortunately, that legacy does not go on in very great detail. We have only a few verses about each of them and they were all driven out or killed eventually by Moses and Joshua.

It would seem, a la Deuteronomy 2:11, that the Rephaim were the common ancestor of the Anakim and Emim. Except that we see very early in Genesis 14:5 that the Raphaim were defeated alongside the Emim, so maybe Rephaim became a generic term for all giants. The only specific Rephaim that we know about is Og the king of Bashan, who was the last of the Rephaim. The Israelites captured all sixty of his cities and for some reason Moses seemed in Deuteronomy 3:11 to be amazed by his bed which was made of iron and 13.5 feet long by 6 feet wide.

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The story goes that the champion of the Philistines, Goliath from Gath, stood just shy of 10 feet and he challenged Israel, only to be defeated by a young man named David. Goliath, though the best known, is not the only giant found in the Old Testament. The groups of giants we come across are the Nephilim, the Rephaim, the Emim and the Anakim.

The Nephilim are generally seen as the oldest and possibly the founding race of the other three groups of giants. We run into the Nephilim first in Genesis 6:1-4 which proves to be a very difficult passage to understand…

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In the 1990s, Michael W Smith released a compact disc that not only helped us find our place in this world, our place in the world…but he also told us to “Go west young man”. Even though his music makes every post-modern, sarcastic Christian blush with embarrassment now, Smitty may have stumbled onto an interesting trend found not only in the Bible, but in Christian history.

For some reason, the Bible always tends to associate going west as going towards God’s will, and of course that generally leaves going east as the opposite. For example, after Cain killed Abel he fled to the east. And when the men decided to get to heaven via the Tower of Babel, they built it in the east. When Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans for Canaan per God’s request, he was heading west. Years later he and Lot went their separate ways and Lot chose to go east towards Sodom and Gomorrah (a bad choice), while the ever faithful Abraham went west. Isaiah 24:14-15 says those in the west are singing the joy of the Lord and they should be in the east too. Israel rebelled against God so he sent them into exile in Babylon, which is to the east.

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One of the more common arguments against Jesus is that all of the evidence for him is found in the Bible, which of course is going to support him. In rebuttal, you might direct them to a book written by Jewish historian Flavius Josephus called Antiquities of the Jews and a passage that has become known as the Testimonium Flavianum.

Now there was about this time Jesus, a wise man, if it be lawful to call him a man; for he was a doer of wonderful works, a teacher of such men as receive the truth with pleasure. He drew over to him both many of the Jews and many of the Gentiles. He was [the] Christ. And when Pilate, at the suggestion of the principal men amongst us, had condemned him to the cross, those that loved him at the first did not forsake him; for he appeared to them alive again the third day; as the divine prophets had foretold these and ten thousand other wonderful things concerning him. And the tribe of Christians, so named from him, are not extinct at this day.

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