Saturday, November 1, 2014
When Will Sci-Fi Catch Up with the Bible?
At work this week I found a copy of a magazine whose cover portrayed the earth as one big city. This reminded me of something from a series of sci-fi books that I read years ago, The Foundation Trilogy, by Isaac Asimov. The capital of the universe in that trilogy is a planet named Trantor, which is actually one big city (remember the "Death Star" from the original Star Wars trilogy?). What a thought! A planet that's one big city. But is that thought original to Asimov? Note Isaiah 5:8 in the King James Bible: "Woe unto them that join house to house, that lay field to field, till there be no place, that they may be placed alone in the midst of the earth!" Beginning with Cain, who built the first city (Enoch; Gen. 4:17), fallen man craves to join house to house for self-preservation. Cain is succeeded by Nimrod, who rules over multiple cities (Gen. 10:10), and later in Genesis (ch. 13-19) we see five cities of the plain (Sodom, Gomorrah, Admah, Zeboim, and Zoar) adjacent to one another. The city of Nineveh in Jonah's day took three days to walk through (Jon. 3:3-4), probably due to expansive suburbs. Even today, as some cities expand, they actually join with other cities into a population region (e.g. Atlanta). My thought: if men were not checked by God, they would turn the earth into one city, since by nature they want to avoid the curse of sweaty, agrarian labour imposed on them with the fall (Gen. 3:17-19) and live together in cities (the pre-flood, Cainite world!). So Asimov's thought is not original. Every thing that man comes up with can ultimately be traced back to the Creator and his thoughts recorded for us in scripture. If man could come up with something outside the scope of God's thought, then he would be the Creator, but the fact that he cannot proves that he is a creature and not the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
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