THE COSMOS AND GOD

In the beginning, the elohim created skies and earth.

Welcome back.  Let's think about the elohim.

It's the first verse of the first chapter of the first book in the Bible that gives us a plural noun for a god of Israel.  This is not Yahweh of Garden of Eden fame.  

This is the elohim, a group of sky dwellers who formed our world by committee, and they come to us from the priestly lore of ancient Israel.

Now, as far as building anything complex goes, it takes a lot of engineers. Think of the elohim in that way even though as a plural noun it was used as a singular name.

They put lights in the sky: the sun, the biggest light, but not much bigger than a quarter.  The moon, also big, and with its own light ruled the night.

The elohim decorated the sky with lights, called stars, and they were often compared to grains of sand.  They were really tiny and certainly not suns.

All this dazzling display was fixed within a dome, a vault, or a firmament.  

Beyond the dome was water.  Windows were put into the sky so the water could fall to earth as rain.

The earth itself was a flat disc.  Its foundation was fixed and it could not be moved according to several verses in the Hebrew Bible.  

The sky's foundation rested on mountains.  There were four winds and one land mass.  By the way, our side of the planet was not envisioned in that land mass, neither was Australia or Japan.  

The elohim lived beyond the sky and beyond the water to the heavenly realm. This heavenly host could visit our planet whenever they wanted via a stairway.  

Indeed, they often did visit.  Sometimes they dropped in to warn us of impending doom.  Sometimes they visited to have sex with human women.  

Once they became nervous when humans began building a tower that nearly invaded their space.  

El, the primary Canaanite deity, ruled the heavenly host.  Note the first two letters of the name elohim.  For Israel (note the ending of that word), Yahweh would become the one God. He too would visit the earth.  Once he spent some time with Abraham near the Oaks of Mamre.

This cosmos, I just described, was the cosmos of the Bible for hundreds of years until the Greeks came along.  

Those annoying Greeks always have to Hellenize everything they touch.  They certainly touched up the Hebrew cosmology. Eventually, a new domain was added:  Hades, the land of the dead. Hebrews called it Sheol.

Within Hades was a special torture chamber for the wicked souls in history.  This was called Tartaros.  Eventually, Tartaros would expand its meaning and replace Hades in Christianity.  Tartaros is mentioned in 2 Peter as the place where fallen angels are punished.

Of course, I am writing about Hell.  Its location was under the earth.

Thus, the cosmos of the Bible became the heavens, earth, and the underworld.  See the chart below.

  

This was the cosmos for Western Civilization until Copernicus, Bruno, Galileo, Brahe, Kepler, and Newton--all the way through all the scientists to this day--led the Enlightenment.  The only thing missing is Sheol.

Let's fix that.

Presently, this is the cosmos which underlies Christian theories of salvation.  

God sits on a throne.  Jesus sits next to him.  Jesus comes down to earth.  Jesus is crucified and rises again from the dead.  Jesus flies up (ascends) into the sky to go home and sit at the right hand of God. 

Eventually, Christians begin to argue with one another and murder one another over whether or not Jesus was the same substance as the god he sat beside. 

This was very tricky.  If he was the same substance then he sat beside himself. The Trinity clarified that confusion.  (Not really.)

Tonight, the show Cosmos returned with a new host.  Neil deGrasse Tyson showed the infinite vastness of what we know the universe is with the possibility that ours may not be the only universe.

It is a mind boggling infinity that is much greater and boundless that the tiny-sand-lights world of the ancient Hebrews.

To think that all that is and ever will be lives, breathes, and has its being in God.  We must match the infinity of our theology with the infinity of the cosmos, so that faith will remain true and eternal.

That’s what I am trying to do here.

Blessings…