03 April, 2008

So The Bible is Out of Date, They Say?

Don't we hear that all the time? The Bible is no longer relevant to the lives that we live. The Bible could not have expected the civilized and complicated lives that we live. This, of course, is all untrue. The Bible speaks volumes to today's culture.

Think of the Book of Ecclesiastes:

Ecclesiastes is the most contemporary book in the Bible. The so-called negative sections of the book amount to an exposé of the very things which dominate modern culture: sex, work, education, fame, drink. The writer creates a rogue's gallery of satirical portraits of the hedonist (2:1–11), the workaholic (2:18–23), the plutocrat (5:8–17), the fool (7:1–8), and the unfaithful woman (7:26–29). Ecclesiastes stands as the ultimate critique of secular humanism.

-J E Smith, The Wisdom Literature and Psalms

2 comments:

Mark said...

Ecclesiastes is great. I like to read through it every so often, the structure is fascinating. It's remarkable how much of Biblical wisdom comes to applying principles as opposed to a strict test. (Not that there are no strict tests, of course!) Internalizing and believing what we're taught makes the applications clear(er), I think.

Marc Driesenga said...

I love the line that is so appropriate: "There's nothing new under the sun." So true on so many levels! Vanity, vanity, everything is vanity....