Hinge Points of History. John Hunsuck
Copyright © 2014 by John Hunsuck
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Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved.
Scripture quotations marked NKJV are taken from the New King James Version. Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
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Chapter I
Creation To Covenant
Creation Story To Abraham And Moses
If you study the several theories of the origin of the universe, you will find only one without fatal flaws: the Creation story. If you are an atheist, at this point you may scream a series of epithets and throw this book down. If you are a Christian, you may shout, “Hallelujah” and read on! If you are of any other persuasion, then search with the author for the truth.
Creation was by design and by a Master Designer. This book will show you that all of history points to that fact. Proof: Belief cannot be proven because it is internal to the believer and thus hidden from discovery except by personal experience. God is. God has attributes described in Scripture and required for Him to be able to do all the things therein described and currently existing. Those attributes are: omniscience, having all knowledge and wisdom, or omnipresence, being everywhere all the time, or omnipotence, having all power and all control of all power. He is also infinite in holiness, justice and goodness, infinite in truth, immutable or unchanging, and He makes Himself known by His acts and fellowship. Therefore, He can do a thousand years’ work in a day or give us a thousand years to do a day’s work.
An artist named D.J. Wolf, who lives in Albuquerque, made the point that stuff that man makes gets more ugly and coarse as one examines the details, but God-made stuff gets more beautiful and intricate as one magnifies and examines tiny details. Note that within man’s body are about a trillion cells and within each cell there are a trillion tiny engines constantly working to keep the cell alive and functioning. Within the nucleus of each cell is the design for every one of those cells and each engine, plus the process required to repair, replace or replicate each cell while keeping each function discrete.
I present here events, inventions, discoveries and related times. I selected those events, inventions and discoveries as evidence that God is still working with His creatures in His Creation to complete the vignettes. Some inventions and discoveries have no specific time because the event was not recorded or the record is lost.
Make up your own mind about what is presented here, but know that this old world came from somewhere, some way and can only exist for a finite time. And then, where will it, and we, go? Don’t cast away the saving experience of knowing God’s plan for you.
The Inventor (if you will: God) began invention with the Creation. He knew how to make a steam engine when He started. He knew how to make an atomic or thermonuclear bomb when He started. He knew how to make a 545 MHz lap-top computer and the internet when He started. He already knows how to make the most phenomenal invention of this era, maybe controlled fusion or the medical cure for all cancers ... who can tell?
Examine this: We have found that Einstein’s formula (Ref 1) for conversion of matter into energy, E=mC2, really works. We have observed this taking place in stars, in our sun and in our inventions, such as nuclear reactions in reactors and warheads. Now hear this! Nowhere have we observed energy being converted into matter! If Creation was truly an accident of time and random forces, we should be able to observe this reverse process, or find proof that it is a “prohibited transformation.” There is your challenge. Remember, matter requires order, and energy exists as both ordered (like laser beams or modulated radio waves) and disordered (like light and heat from a fire or a nuclear reaction). Note also that the Bible says God created light first and then time. Radiation and its time base are the two characteristics of Creation that are as immutable as God Himself! Then came everything else ... in order, of course! ( Ref 2)
Now to the task! Pre-history is full of fables and oral accounts of great events. Some of these are unsubstantiated, but some have the golden thread of fact based on irrefutable evidence to support them. This chapter will present no argument to support the choice of Creation, but present Creation as an article of Faith that will continue throughout subsequent chapters: God made the Universe. It belongs to Him. God continues as part and engine of the Universe and God alone has set the End of the Universe: Man cannot change the time or manner of the Apocalypse.
Now
Shift with me to a murky period when history was emerging as recorded stories. Sometime around 3000 years Before Christ (B.C.), the earliest writings appeared. Pictographs and Hieroglyphics are both found in this era. The “cave art” that is found on cave walls in Europe, Africa and Asia may be earlier pictograph communication in the form of stories. They may be the real “first writings” of history; some 3000 years older than the currently accepted “writings,” placing the earliest writings date about 6000 B.C.! One day soon, we could translate these crude efforts. What stories they may tell!
Cuneiform may have preceded both the Oriental characters and the earliest alphabets. It appears that glyphs gave way to phonic alphabets in western Asia but, with notable exceptions like Korean, were transformed into the ordered East Asian characters in the Far East. Sumerian writings, using cuneiform, included the earliest Creation stories that have survived and may predate the Bible writings by as much as another thousand years. The flood described in Genesis is also mentioned in these Mesopotamian artifacts. Some students have used these early writings to debunk the Bible as a mere copy of earlier “fables.” So, if the stories were so widespread and considered so important as to require recording (at great cost: We know that at the time of the life of Jesus on Earth, a single page of writing cost about $50 in 1990 $US), then it seems to lend greater credence to the actuality of the stories.
The man, Moses, who is credited with writing Genesis, is noted to have been “educated in the wisdom of the Egyptians.” This probably included speaking, reading and writing in Babylonian, Syriac, pre-Phoenician and Hebrew. He was about 40-years-old when he began the process that led to the freeing of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. He knew of and had full access to most of these old writings, being a “prince” of Egypt. We know that the most complete library of ancient times was at Babylon. Except for a few clay tablets, the whole inventory of that library has been lost. Moses may have had access to it or portions of it during his life. It most assuredly had documents gathered from Sumeria and its predecessors, as evidenced by the discovery of multiple language obelisks such as the Rosetta Stone.
The author notes here that the man, Jesus, never took issue with the acceptance of the Old Testament as fact. If anyone knew of error in the Scriptures, it was He (Proven to the believer!)
There is common and nearly universal acceptance that Moses wrote the first five