Frameworks that work can shape our thinking and keep emotions from deceiving us. Understanding these four chasms can be used to interpret history, literasture, and even scripture. They aid us in determining the truth because we know how easily we can be deveived. Multiple passages in the Old and New Testaments admonish readers that the heart is easily deceived.
Jeremiah 17:9 The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
2 Timothy 3:13 while evildoers and impostors will go from bad to worse, deceiving and being deceived.
Galatians 6:7 Do not be deceived: God cannot be mocked. A man reaps what he sows.
With that in mind:
Our framework starts at a finite beginning and travels to a finite end, across the Bible Mosaic of the Scarlet Thread.
Before we begin to weave the Scarlet Thread, I want to mention four chasms that seem to generate a lot of Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt (FUD) when it comes to understanding scripture. We warn you that this will not be a pedestrian sidewalk strole through Sunday School coloring books.
The books of the Bible were written many centuries ago. It defines a finite beginning and a finite ending. For us to understand what God communicates between this beginning and end, there are several chasms that must be bridged (This comes from John MacArthur’s Study Bible preface in the section – How to Study Your Bible):
- Language Chasm
- The Bible was originally written in Hebrew, Aramaic, and Greek. Often, understanding the meaning of a word or phrase in the original language can be the key to interpreting a passage of scripture.[1]
- Cultural Chasm
- The Culture Chasm can be tricky. Some people try to use cultural differences to explain away the more difficult Biblical commands. Realize that scripture must first be viewed through the lens of the culture in which it was written.[2]
- Geographical Chasm
- The Geography Chasm makes the Bible come alive. A good Bible Atlas helps one comprehend the Geography of the Holy Land helping you tactically ‘walk the ground’.[3]
- Historical Chasm
- Unlike scriptures of most other world religions, the Bible contains the records of actual historical persons and events. An understanding of Bible History will help us place people and events in it in their proper historical perspective. [4]
We deal with these chasms throughout WOKE but in this section, we want to particularly zero in on a problem that occurs in each Chasm. When I was earning my Master’s Degree in History, my favorite professor, Dr. James Matray at New Mexico State University, introduced a term; ‘Presentism.’ I believe his wise insight is a flavor of Uniformitarianism in which yesterday is like today and tomorrow will be like today. Dr. Matray hated the mangling of history by Presentism, in which historians deceive the uninformed by applying the norms and cultural standards of the present to the past before first trying to understand the past through the eyes of the people and authors living in the past. Therefore, we want to examine Genesis through these 4 different lenses. In other words, yesterday is like today.
Yet, time to God is something that is not a relevant limitation. The Psalmist wrote:
Psa 90: 4 For a thousand years in Your sight Are like yesterday when it is past, And like a watch in the night.
God is outside time and He picks his insertion points. For us, however, time has a different, self deceptive quality. Peter wrote:
2 Pe 3: 3 – 6 knowing this first: that scoffers will come in the last days, walking according to their own lusts, and saying, “Where is the promise of His coming? For since the fathers fell asleep, all things continue as they were from the beginning of creation.” For this they willfully forget: that by the word of God the heavens were of old, and the earth standing out of water and in the water, by which the world that then existed perished, being flooded with water.
Even Peter, writing under the inspiration of God, linked the last days to the Great Flood in his analysis of the hearts of men. In my mind, Presentism is a deceptive fulfilment of Peter’s prophecy in all four chasms. We want our readers to fully awaken to Satan’s subtle sceme and consider understanding the four chasms as you interpret and apply the Bible, or any other literature. As we walk through WOKE, we will take on each of the four chasms in the framework of the Scarlet Thread.
This issue could not be more fundamental to everything because it comes as a shock to many to discover that every major theme and doctrine in the Bible has its doctrinal roots in this “Book of Beginnings:”
- Sovereign election
- Salvation
- Justification by faith
- Believer’s security
- Separation
- Disciplinary chastisement
- Divine Incarnation
- “Rapture” of the church
- Death and resurrection
- Priesthoods – both Aaronic and Melchizedekian
- Antichrist
| Like every good textbook, the answers are always in the back! |
Each of these roots straddel the four chasms and has their consummation in the Book of Revelation.
If this is confusing, Paul summed up the relevance of life and time in a classic Infantry statement related to charging the ambush:
I Cor 15: 32 If, in the manner of men, I have fought with beasts at Ephesus, what advantage is it to me? If the dead do not rise, “Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die!”
Paul is being ironic, here, because those who die in Christ do rise to new life in eternity. Even so, lets charge the seeming Language, Cultural, Geographic, and Historical chasms of scripture like good infantry… In the framework of the Scarlet Thread.
To be fully WOKE, one may say you must ascribe to a certain political party but our politics come from God.
Protect the innocent
Defend the defenseless,
And rescue the poor from wickedness.
This comes from Psalm 82: 3 – 4 and are what the love filled God of creation tells us to do. Not some fallen political party or ideology with a fallen, man made agenda. We have an individual responsibility to live this outas best we can. We can not relinquish our to an impersonal, over-reaching government. Christ said it best:
Luk 6:38 “Give, and it will be given to you: good measure, pressed down, shaken together, and running over will be put into your bosom. For with the same measure that you use, it will be measured back to you.”
[1] Macarthur, John, The Macarthur Study Bible: New King James Version “How to Study the Bible”, pg xxi
[2] Ibid
[3] Ibid
[4] Macarthur, pg xxi