Biblical Cosmology

In preparation for future projects, I wanted to offer a brief formal examination of the cosmology underlying the Bible.
We are fully aware of space and time. We experience them as limitations, and rightly so. Despite how utterly massive and extensive it seems our universe may be, it remains a relatively small bubble within a far larger reality we cannot comprehend. Outside our tiny bubble, there are no such limitations as time and space. God is fully aware of time and space, but does not experience it as we do. For Him, time is no constraint at all. He sees all time as a single entity before Him, and we cannot possibly imagine it.
Most of the bold statements in the Hebrew Scripture which seem to express a cosmology should not be taken with any degree of literalness. The Hebrew people may not have known whether the world was spherical, but they didn’t care. It didn’t matter and the technology to find out didn’t exist for them. So they used common expressions which captured what they did experience at their level of science and technology. It’s not as if God composed the Bible word-for-word because science was not a critical aspect. No, there is no falsehood or error in the Bible, but there sure seems to be a lot of it in the minds of folks reading it with too much false piety. Hebrew language and culture is mystical in nature, and it was more figure of speech than literal.
Digging to find expressions in the Old Testament which might possibly be rendered with some modern scientific accuracy is an abomination.
How about we simply strive to understand the context of what was said, and embrace the moral implications? That there is a vast invisible moral element in this world is the whole point of having those ancient texts carried into modern times. Get the context right and the moral demands on us today become more obvious. I take the Bible seriously, and study daily to understand what it meant to the people who wrote it and published it. They made no attempt to understand much of anything outside the context of their existence. For modern critics to point out perceived errors simply shows their ignorance, and for “faith defenders” to fight them shows more ignorance. That sort of back and forth simply surrenders the ground to a false epistemology. God created all things and has never felt compelled to answer our questions about mechanisms and methods. However, we are most certainly accountable to Him for what He demands of us, His creatures.
God is not to be understood, but obeyed. That is, nothing we humans possess can touch God, except what He gave us in the first place. We have all we need to obey and reap the harvest of whatever best this world has to offer. On top of that, we can discover that there is something far better than this world, and He is all too eager to have us join Him. How that works out is totally individual, because He knows each of us better than any other entity can know. All we could possibly know or understand of Him as humans is what He requires of us. Any other communion has to come from His hand.
So while His Laws do make a kind of sense, it requires assuming from the first He has done all things necessary to reveal Himself to us. We have to embrace that revelation. The written form presumes an intellectual ground to which our modern Western civilization is hostile. When you understand you have to embrace His revelation wholly, including the intellectual assumptions, too, you can begin to understand how He operates in this realm. Until you understand what you experience here is largely a false shadow of Reality, you aren’t going to ever really understand what God requires. What we have here is broken, false, a prison; it bears little resemblance to what we were made for. You won’t get out of this prison alive, but once you are out of it, no part of you will be willing to come back.
Whatever other dimensions of existence are out there, no part of what you are now can want to go there. That is, unless He places something of His Life inside you. Then you will struggle daily to leave this mess and go to that other realm. That is as much as we can understand about biblical cosmology.

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