by Keith Bassham
One of my Bible college teachers — I believe the course was Christology — was relating to us the unlikelihood of a Hebrew prophet’s ability to foretell the place of Messiah’s birth and getting it right merely by guessing. We are speaking, of course, of Micah’s prophecy: “But thou, Bethlehem Ephratah, though thou be little among the thousands of Judah, yet out of thee shall he come forth unto me that is to be ruler in Israel; whose goings forth have been from of old, from everlasting.” (Micah 5:2, given about 700 years in advance of the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem.)
Our lecturer said that the chances of this happening as foretold (humanly speaking) were roughly the same as picking out one grain of dark sand in a pile made by a convoy of sand-hauling dump trucks. Examples like this help one visualize the concept better than using numbers with lots of zeroes to make the point. But not everyone appreciates the effort. My teacher went on to say that he was giving this example to a group of senior church members when one of them said he wished the preacher would quit talking about dump trucks and get back to preaching the Gospel!
In this issue, I am risking similar wrath in an essay, “Stars. Sand. Seed.” The point I make is different, but we are talking about some pretty large numbers and their relation to the birth of Christ.
Incidentally, as I was writing the article, I came across some information about synagogues in Jamaica with sand floors. Why sand floors? No one knows for sure, and there are several explanations. One thing is certain, the sand is there on purpose, as it is poured into a wood base (somewhat like concrete in a form) which overlays brick. And over time, the sand has to be replaced and replenished.
Some think the origin is the landscape itself: sand is everywhere. Others believe that when the island was under Spanish/Portuguese rule, Jews, who had come back to their faith after a forced conversion, met stealthily in places with floors covered with sand to muffle their movement and worship noise. Still others like to say the sand is a reminder of the wandering of the Children of Israel across Sinai during the Exodus.
And then some believe (as I would like to) that the sand is a symbol of God’s promise to Abraham, that his seed would be as multitudinous as the sand of the sea, a promise recalled in the New Testament, “Therefore sprang there even of one [Abraham], and him as good as dead, so many as the stars of the sky in multitude, and as the sand which is by the sea shore innumerable” (Hebrews 11:12).
Steve Van Winkle’s “Hopes and Fears” and an Afterwords column by former Tribune editor Mike Randall round out our Christmas features in this, our last Tribune for calendar year 2014. We trust and hope your Christmas will focus on the promises of God fulfilled in the Savior of the world.