Mining the Metaphors

My dad liked figures of speech. "Any female dog can have pups," my father told me when my parents divorced, which made me a real son of a bitch.

The Bible metaphors should consolidate into one big picture. Each one by itself will fail to reveal the gospel truth. The unified picture was unveiled to humanity for the first time, in the first century. It was then that God began to live with His people without regard to nationality or location. This mystery was revealed two millennia ago. It united the people of God; who are called: the church, the temple, the bride, the nation, the holy city, the human body with Christ as head, the household of God and the children of God. It was then that God's people were about to receive the kingdom and rule in the millennium with Christ. So what happened? What's the literal truth? How can we make sense of it all? We even restarted our calendar to signify the dawning of this new creation. Which brings us to the most contentious church topic to date; eschatology.

Obviously eschatology verses contain plenty of hard to nail down word pictures. If they were all scientific snapshots, we would all see eye to eye. The requirement to be born again in order to see the kingdom is a graphic illustration that Nicodemus analyzed scientifically. He could not enter back into his mother's womb and be born again could he? And newborns can't see anything anyway. Are we supposed to just throw up our hands and say, "With God all things are possible". After all, a miracle by definition defies science and God is the God of miracles, therefore we can and should take everything scientifically, just like Nicodemus did. Isn't God primarily concerned with science as the way to rule creation with Him? Or should we search for the intended truth behind the figures of speech? Being born by the Holy Spirit was not covered in biology 101.

Hyperbole is like hyperrealism whereas a metaphor is an abstraction. A parable is then an extended metaphor and a story is an extended parable. But a story can be real, hyperreal or abstract and still convey a rational truth. It doesn't always have to be a scientific fact or historical story to convey a cognitive truth.

The undeveloped mind of a child deals only in the concrete facts of the matter. A child is not born with innate ideas from which he can develop principles. He or she must first of all be introduced to certain hard facts based on the world around him, by the people who raise him. Appreciating the arts comes with maturity. Jesus expected adults to be able to think abstractly and He expected children to have great faith in those adults. When He told the woman at the well that He could give her water that caused her to never thirst again, she noticed that Jesus didn't even have a bucket and the well was deep. When He said tear this temple down and I will rebuild it in three days, they thought He meant the concrete temple of the Holy Spirit, but He meant the body of Christ.<...