Why should God Care Less? part 7

This carries on from the post below:

Now, when you read that word, earth – arretz [phonetic spelling only], don’t think of the blue globe spinning in space, that’s not what that word means. It means homeland. God created the heavens and the place where I belong. Not some generic planet. That’s not what it means; it means ‘the place where I’m rooted.’ Read Genesis 1 like that. This is where I think the first nations people have got it over us. They understand some of that. God created the heavens and the place in which I am rooted. Eh? Beautiful.

Well, let’s go to the content. A few questions about this. Now, I don’t mean to be facetious here, though, it’s going to come out a little bit. Sorry. I’ll try to keep it filed back a bit. But we’re going to ask some questions of this text because I think the kinds of questions we ask of a text help us to understand what it’s trying to say and what it’s not. So the first question: How come it takes God the same amount of time to make such vastly different things? I mean, the universe is mind numbingly HUGE! How come it takes him the same amount of time to do that as it does to separate the waters above and below? That’s one of those ‘have you ever seen a tiger explode?’ questions. Do you see, if you were reading this as a regular person, without some pre-commitment to what Genesis 1 was saying, you’d go, ‘gee, it’s really odd that it takes God the same amount of time to do all of that as it does to do this.’ That doesn’t quite make sense. Well, some other things. Why just twelve hours? It doesn’t say twelve hours but its morning and evening so we’re kind of assuming it’s a twelve hour day. Why doesn’t it take him 11 ½ hours one time and a 135.6 hours another time? Why exactly twelve hours? Ever thought about that? Didn’t that strike you as odd? In fact, why any time at all? Why can’t God just go, bazzing, and there it is? Jesus can do miracles like that, can’t he? I mean, the blind guy sees. He didn’t have to wait 12 hours. Jesus says: ‘Well, wait ‘til the next morning. Morning, evening then you’ll see.’ Right? It doesn’t happen like that. Why should it take God any time at all? When you start asking these kind of questions and get kind of embarrassing answers like this, what’s it telling you? It’s probably telling you that we’re miss-reading the text. It’s not trying to tell us those kinds of things. ‘I wonder what kind of disease Marg Simpson is suffering from to get hair like that. We should send her to the doctor.’ Ah no, no, it’s ridiculous. Don’t ask that question. That’s not what it’s on about. Well, same with Genesis. Does God need to talk to the U.S. marines? Does he need night vision goggles? Can’t he see at night to create? Why only during the day? Absurd – the very suggestion. Something else must be going on then. What about the amphibians? What’s the Emu doing? Blubblblblblbublblblblub. Maybe that’s why it grew a long neck – kind of evolving as ... come on! This is highly stylized. Something’s going on here, I’m committed to the truth of it but please folks, no way is this a blow by blow account of what actually happened. Everything is telling us ‘Don’t READ me like this!’ The form, the content and then Genesis 2. Oh! Big problem now because Genesis 2 tells us plants were not created until after humanity and Genesis 1 says they were created before. So, brilliant western scholars say ‘Well, we have two versions of the Genesis account and these guys hadn’t talked to one another, didn’t get their facts straight, and then someone didn’t know what to do with them and so just plunked them both in Genesis and let the two contradictory things stand.’ Well, that’s one option. The other option is, maybe we don’t know what we’re talking about. But that doesn’t occur to scholars. [laughter]