The life of every creature is its blood. That is why I have said to the Israelites, “You must not eat the blood of any creature, because the life of every creature is its blood; anyone who eats it must be cut off.”  Leviticus 17:14

 

It is said that in 1861 the French Academy of Science printed a brochure stating that there are 51 incontrovertible facts that are direct contradictions of the Bible. Today there is not one reputable scientist who would believe a single one of them.  Why?  Has the Bible changed!  No, but science has, and especially in what is considered to be a scientific fact.  A fact is an axiomatic truth which can be proven anywhere, under any given set of circumstances.  A theory, however, is a plausible explanation of a phenomenon, but it cannot be proven; otherwise, it would be a fact, not a theory.

The Bible is not a textbook on science; it is a textbook on life and living; yet, the Bible is accurate in the scientific statements it makes, which gives it a ring of authority today.  This is an awesome fact when you realize that Moses wrote the first five books of the Bible, not a thousand years ago, or even two thousand years ago, but almost 3400 years ago.  Almost all of the writers who made comments about the earth and our universe, made statements which were contrary to what was commonly believed in their day, statements that now square with what we know to be scientific facts.

Take, for example, what Moses said about creation.  The New Testament quotes Stephen, that Moses was schooled in the wisdom of the Egyptians (Acts 7:22), and from secular history we know that the Egyptians of the 12th to 14th century B.C. believed that the earth was hatched from an egg.  If you question that fertility model, check out the number of eggs on ancient sarcophagi and tombs in Egypt.  Moses, though, didn’t advance the egg theory.  He said, “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth!”

Again, Moses contended that the life of all flesh is in the blood (Leviticus 17:14).  Even Hypocrites, the father of Greek medicine, would not have agreed with Moses.  It actually took science 3000 years to catch up with that one.  In 1628 Sir William Harvey discovered the principle of circulation, and his contemporaries scoffed at him, but he eventually proved it.  How did Moses know that the life of all flesh is in the blood if it was not that God revealed something to him, which was eventually borne out by science but was contrary to the thought of his age?

Isaiah lived about seven centuries before Christ during a period when the Persian astronomers were convinced that the earth was flat, but not Isaiah.  He pictured the earth as a circle and recorded that in the book that bears his name (Isaiah 40:8).  In a written statement, Columbus said he got the idea of a round earth from reading Isaiah’s writings (www.firstbaptisthenderson.org/10reasons.html).

The Apostle Peter said that the heavens would pass away with a great noise and the elements would melt with fervent heat (see 2 Peter 3:10), and for centuries men scoffed at Peter’s wide‑eyed imagination.  But no longer.  The Italian scientist Enrico Fermi and his colleagues at the University of Chicago split the atom, and since then, nobody doubts that the heavens could pass away with a great nuclear noise.  All of the firepower of World War 2, including the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, equaled only 3 megatons of nuclear power.  Three hundred megatons of nuclear power would destroy every major city in the world; but, today only God knows how many megatons of destructive nuclear power could be unleashed in our world.

The point is simply this:  The statements the Bible makes of a scientific nature stand century after century. What a powerful message speaking of the integrity of God’s Word.

Resource reading: Romans 1:1-17