Spring City Fellowship
2606007Sunday

      • Psalm 150:3NIV2011

  • Let Us Adore
  • Come And Let Your Presence
  • So Will I (100 Billion X)
  • Here I Am To Worship
  • Earth And Heaven Roar
  • I Stand In Awe
  • How Great Thou Art

      • John 17:22–23NIV2011

  • It’s 2026 and our Theme is “Embrace Transformation.”
    During the months of June and July, I am preaching the sermons that you requested. I call it, “Hot Topics.”
    This morning’s sermon is a question that I thought was rather interesting, “What do you think about flat earth and how it corresponds to the book of John?”
    I’m not sure exactly which passage in the book of John is being referred to here.
    I am assuming that they are talking about a passage in Revelation which was written by John.
    Revelation 7:1 ESV
    1 After this I saw four angels standing at the four corners of the earth, holding back the four winds of the earth, that no wind might blow on earth or sea or against any tree.
    Or a similar passage later in Revelation:
    Revelation 20:8 ESV
    8 and will come out to deceive the nations that are at the four corners of the earth, Gog and Magog, to gather them for battle; their number is like the sand of the sea.
    If the earth has “four corners” doesn’t that mean that the earth is flat?
    “Four corners” is figurative speech referring to four directions, not necessarily limits.
    I know some of you are probably wondering why I am treating this as such a serious question.
    Believe it or not, there is a lot of buzz on the internet these days about the flat earth movement.
    Yes, there are actually people who believe that science got it wrong and the earth is actually flat.
    As the saying goes, “ earth society has members all around the globe.”
    I have met some of these people and they are not all crazy people, they are mostly people who have become mistrustful of scientific claims, especially where science makes claims that seem to contradict with scripture.
    The people that I have talked about are sincere Christians who use the scripture to justify their belief in a flat earth.
    They raise some interesting questions and observations.
    When you look out over the horizon, it appears flat.
    Even if you go up in an airplane, the horizon still appears flat.
    They argue that NASA photos showing the curvature of the earth are either distortion due to the lens or a complete fake.
    Most flat-earthers don’t believe that the moon landing was real either.
    The curvature of the earth is only about 8 inches per mile. That means you would need to be at least 35,000 feet high before you could even begin to detect it with the naked eye.
    I have been in planes at 35,000 feet and all I could ever see was clouds.
    Another observation has been that most international flights follow a northern path over the arctic rather than taking a direct rout across the ocean.
    This has led to flat earth maps with the continent depicted as spokes around a central north pole.
    It is true the the earth is not a perfect sphere - its wider in the middle.
    That makes it advantageous from the perspective of distance and to save fuel to make a light path in a northerly arch.
    And the other reason is because there are rules that airlines need to follow a route that provides emergency landing options.
    This means following the coastline up and crossing where the oceans are narrower.
    Until recently, we did not have planes that were certified to make a direct crossing, though many of the larger planes now have that option.
    There are however some southern flight path routes that would be virtually impossible according to any flat earth map depiction.
    The fact that these flights exist and are commercially available has been one of the simplest ways to debunk flat earth theory.
    I think this question is important to talk about for several reasons.
    Like flat earth theory there is a lot of information available on the internet these days that sounds good at first, but doesn’t hold up to closer scrutiny.
    This question also highlights how we read and understand the Bible, especially in relationship to the claims of science.
    And it is also a good exercise in discerning what is true and how we know the difference.
    Sometimes we believe things because we want to, not because they are true.
    Like I said when we were studying Jonah - God is not the God we want, but the God who is.
    So let me propose some different questions to consider:

    Doesn’t the Bible have all the answers?

    Yes, the Bible is an amazing book!
    It is true that the Bible, even though it was written over a period of more than 1500 years by more than 50 authors is extraordinarily accurate in its truth claims.
    It is true that the Bible contains facts that we know from science even before they were supposedly discovered.
    One of these actually has to do with the shape of the earth.
    Isaiah 40:22 ESV
    22 It is he who sits above the circle of the earth, and its inhabitants are like grasshoppers; who stretches out the heavens like a curtain, and spreads them like a tent to dwell in;
    There it is- the Bible says the earth is a circle!
    Flat-earthers would counter by saying that it is also a flat circle.
    Job 26:7 ESV
    7 He stretches out the north over the void and hangs the earth on nothing.
    See - the earth hangs in space!
    Flat- earthers would say - so, what!- it still doesn’t say that it’s a ball.
    Do you see how unproductive these arguments are?
    The bottom line is that the Bible wasn’t written to teach us about science; the Bible was written to teach us truth.
    And to the extent that science is also revealing truth - they will probably agree.
    But the truth that the Bible is most concerned with is the truth about God.

    The purpose of the Bible is to help us know God.

    First of all the Bible wants us to know that God created the world and everything in it.
    I’m not here to argue about how He did it.
    Or if the days of creation are literal 24 hour days or not.
    The main point - the one we can’t miss - it that God is responsible for the existence of all that we see.
    And as Creator, everything belongs to Him!
    Psalm 24:1–2 ESV
    1 The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein, 2 for he has founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers.
    The beginning of the entire Biblical story is that the earth, humanity and whatever else is around us owe their existence to God.
    Why is that important?
    Because it lays the foundation for the redemption story - that God is restoring all things to the goodness that He originally intended.
    If you don’t know the story - and there might be someone out there who doesn’t.
    God created the world good, orderly and beautiful.
    When Adam and Eve ate from the tree that God told them not to eat from, it wasn’t just about fruit - it planted the seed of rebellion in the human race.
    But God had a plan from the beginning to redeem mankind.
    He would come as a baby, live as a human.
    He would suffer, die and be buried - the consequences of sin.
    But he would overcome death as the first-fruit of a new creation!
    He would show us a new way to live - a new way to be human - which is led by His Spirit dwelling in us.
    That is the gospel - the very heart of what the Bible is all about.
    And that message is also at the center of our human experience.
    History, Science and even Mathematics all bear witness to the centrality of the gospel in the human story.
    But just because God is at the center of ourstory doesn’t mean that we (or our world) is at the center of the universe.

    The Bible is God’s Word for you, but it came through other people.

    Psalm 96:10 ESV
    10 Say among the nations, “The Lord reigns! Yes, the world is established; it shall never be moved; he will judge the peoples with equity.”
    One of the big mistakes that we can make in reading and interpreting scripture is to make it too much about us and our own point of view.
    You may have heard that you can read the Bible like each verse is written just for you!
    That may be a great inspirational message - and it’s not entirely wrong - but it also not entirely right.
    God’s Word is for you - but it also has a context - it was first written to other people and through other people.
    The whole flat earth debate also has a context, much of which has not been told.
    When most of us (at least the older of us) were in school, we learned that Christopher Columbus set out to prove that the earth was round.
    Actually, he set out to find a shorter route to China.
    The flat-earth vs. round earth component was added by author Washington Irving in 1828 when he published a biography of Columbus.
    Irving, being a master storyteller added a few flourishes to the story, including the part about claiming the earth was not flat - a detail which was never found in the historical archives.
    But it became part of American folklore.
    We also heard the story that Copernicus, using the newly invented telescope, discovered that the earth was round and that he had a hard time convincing the Catholic church of his new scientific theory.
    That story is also an embellishment of what actually happened.
    The truth is that Greek scholars had for many years, since at least the time of Pythagoras, believed that the earth was a sphere.
    And since church scholars also read many Greek works, that was also the prevailing opinion.
    Copernican theory - which actually had to do with the rotation of the earth and its revolving around the sun, not the shape of the earth, was well received by the church until the Inquisition of 1611.
    They had a problem with Copernicus after it was already embraced as fact, because his theory implied that we are not the center of the universe.
    Interesting ...because many flat-earthers today have the same problem.
    These stories and their misconceptions have been used to stoke the fires of debate between science and the Bible.
    Science was presented as the new all-knowing authority,
    And God and the church are portrayed as the comical idiots in these accounts,
    But that is not how it happened.
    The Bible may be a mystery to many people but it’s still true.

    How can I understand the Bible?

    So if the Bible is not written just for me or about me, how am I supposed to understand it?
    Isaiah 55:8–9 ESV
    8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways, declares the Lord. 9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.
    By the way, this passage in Isaiah goes on to describe the water cycle, another scientific concept which is also believed to have been discovered much later.
    When we read the Bible - we want to think that we can understand everything.
    Surely God wouldn’t give us a book that we can’t understand?
    I do believe that most of what we need to know about God is lain enough to be understood if we just read the scripture.
    But that way of understanding the Bible often leads to oversimplifying things.

    Read different genres differently.

    Years ago, at a previous church, I had a guy that I was walking with through a hard time in his life. One day he gave me a book all about flat-earth theory and asked me to read it. “It has lots of scriptures in it” he said.
    Well, I’ll be honest. I skimmed it. Most of it was filled with pseudo scientific experiments that likewise focus on narrow concepts and miss the overall context. And this happens because they mistrust the larger body of established scientific evidence.
    You see, flat earthers do to science what most people do to the Bible.
    They view it through a very narrow window, seeing only the part that they want to see, and ignoring the rest.
    And yes, many people do that with scripture as well.
    One website summarized the who flat-earth debate this way:
    The cornerstone of many current flat-earthers is a literal interpretation of the Bible, paying no heed to translation issues, the use of metaphor, idioms, or even simple poetic license. For them, the Bible is word-for-word literal, and any suggestion that it may not be so is simply dismissed as incorrect at best, or deliberately misleading at worst. www.thecollector.com/does-bible-teach-earth-flat/
    Different parts of the Bible are written differently and for different purposes - that’s what genres are.
    Not all of the Bible is narrative - narrative is the part that you normally take literally - because its purpose is to tell you what happened.
    There is also poetry - which is primarily meant to convey a feeling or to communicate to the heart.
    Some of it is in the form of letters which each had a specific an audience and purpose - which can also make a big difference how you read it if you recognize it a someone else’s mail!
    There is also various laws, songs, dreams and wise sayings - each of these has their own style of expression which are important to understanding what is expressed.
    For example if I were to read to you a Haiku:
    And you did not know
    That Hai-ku is Jap-an-ese.
    Three lines - five, se-ven, five.
    You wouldn’t recognize that what I just said was haiku.
    Hebrew poetry is like that too.
    Al of this to say that even though the story of God's redemption is plain from a simple reading of scripture, there are many layers of nuance to be gleaned from a careful study.
    You can take the Bible literally - but if that’s the only way you read it - you’re going to miss a lot!

    Always consider the context.

    Everything in the Bible has a context - what it meant to the people to whom it was originally written.
    When we interpret the scripture for ourselves - it means taking it out of it’s original context and applying it to ours.
    That is certainly necessary and ok to do - but it helps to understand the original context so we don’t get too far away from what was being communicated.
    That’s what I spent years in Bible School and Seminary learning how to do.
    And you don’t need a degree to do it - you just need patience and humility.
    You’re not always going to get it right.
    But let me give you a few tips on hermeneutics - that’s Biblical interpretation - that will help guide the conversation.
    Whenever you look at a verse, look at it in its context.
    Don't’ just “cherry pick” the verses you like.
    Look at what’s around it.
    Consider who is speaking and what is happening.
    Think about how it fits into the bigger picture of what God is doing in the earth.
    Consider a verse like Phil 4:13
    Philippians 4:13 ESV
    13 I can do all things through him who strengthens me.
    We like that one!
    It makes it sound like Jesus makes us invincible.
    Except the context is Paul talking about how he is surviving persecution.
    ....just barely...with God’s help.
    Philippians 4:12–15 ESV
    12 I know how to be brought low, and I know how to abound. In any and every circumstance, I have learned the secret of facing plenty and hunger, abundance and need. 13 I can do all things through him who strengthens me. 14 Yet it was kind of you to share my trouble. 15 And you Philippians yourselves know that in the beginning of the gospel, when I left Macedonia, no church entered into partnership with me in giving and receiving, except you only.
    Does it look different when you see it in context?
    Sometimes it help to read a little more widely...

    What is the real issue here?

    So I’m happy to talk about flat-earth theory if it helps us to read the scripture more carefully, but I think there is more that we can glean from this topic.
    I was recently reading Psalm 17 in the Message Bible.
    Psalm 17:14 MSG
    14 Barehanded, God, break these mortals, these flat-earth people who can’t think beyond today. I’d like to see their bellies swollen with famine food, The weeds they’ve sown harvested and baked into famine bread, With second helpings for their children and crusts for their babies to chew on.
    Eugene Peterson the author of the Message Bible is a brilliant scholar who has attempted to translate Hebrew idioms into modern expressions.
    In this case he is talking about the wicked who do not acknowledge God.
    Psalm 17:14 ESV
    14 from men by your hand, O Lord, from men of the world whose portion is in this life. You fill their womb with treasure; they are satisfied with children, and they leave their abundance to their infants.
    Essentially, he is talking about people who refuse to recognize anything which is beyond their own senses.
    And Peterson calls them flat-earthers - because that is essentially what they are doing.
    They refuse to recognize anything beyond what they can see for themselves.
    On one hand, I get it....

    We want to understand the world that we live in.

    How do we know what we know?
    We learn by what we observe and experience for ourselves.
    But we also learn from generations of experience and what others have taught us.
    Flat-earthers only trust what they can observe for themselves and they are reluctant to trust the vast body of information that has been passed on through the generations.
    A little research tells in interesting story...
    Modern flat-theory traces its origins to Samuel Rowbotham in England in the 1800’s
    As the modern scientific revolution was ramping up and the industrial revolution was in full swing, Rowbotham decided to trust only his own experiments.
    Using a boat and a telescope, he supposedly proved that the earth was flat because the the boat did not disappear over the horizon after several miles.
    Several decades later, another man, Wallace, would repeat his experiment, except this time the boat did disappear.
    The difference was that Rowbotham kept his telescope just inches above the surface of the water where evaporating water vapor refracts the light.
    Wallace raised his telescope by several meters avoiding this factor.
    Rowbotham’s experiment is still cited as evidence for flat-earth theory.
    The refractive properties of water vapor are harder to see and even more difficult to understand.
    Sometime the truth is not as simple as we would like it to be.

    We need to know that truth exists.

    Proverbs 25:2 ESV
    2 It is the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.
    The Bible and science are not opposed to each other, in so much as both are interested in conveying the truth.
    You see, the problem with both science and our interpretation of scripture is that at whatever point we insist we are right and stop learning - that is where we go wrong.
    The Bible gave birth to the sciences.
    The originators of modern science were all Christians seeking to discover more about the world that God created and thereby also to know God better.
    There are still many today in the scientific community who love God and are motivated by a holy curiosity.
    I have had the privilege of knowing some of them over the years.
    The sciences both clarify and confirm the Bible.
    Science can also become dogma when people insist that their theories are right and stop entertaining questions.
    We have seen examples of this in recent years where people have been on TV shouting “trust the science” only to find out years later that the science they were citing was seriously flawed.
    Sometimes it takes more faith to believe science than it does to believe the scripture.
    The reason flat-earth theories are so popular these days is because we are so used to being lied to.
    We already know that much of what we have grown up believing and seeing in the media either isn’t true or isn’t entirely true.
    If you go down that road, it can lead to the conclusion that virtually everything we have been taught is really a lie.
    The fact that so many people find this to be plausible - says something about how far our society has drifted from the pure pursuit of truth.
    However, the thing that I find most difficult to accept about flat earth theory, is that not only would I have to believe that we are being lied to on a daily basis, but that virtually everyone in the government and the scientific community are in on it.
    That is the part that I cannot accept.
    I know of too many clear-thinking, sincere followers of Jesus Christ is virtually every spere and discipline of science to believe that they would all willingly be complicit is such a deception.
    I believe that as long as we continue asking questions of scripture, of history and of our own observations of the world around us, we will continue to grow and discover even more truth.

    Questions for reflection:

    What kind of arguments have you found yourself getting into? What would happen if you asked questions rather than making counter arguments? What might you learn if you really tried to understand?
    When you read the Bible do you read it as God’s word to you? Do you ever stop to look at the context? Do you ask questions? Have you found that God’s word become even richer and more meaningful as you explore it in depth?
    How do you know what is true? Do you only trust your own observations and instincts? Or do you read widely and compare perspectives? Does trusting the insights and experiences of others ever become an exercise in trusting God?

      • Revelation 7:1ESV

      • Revelation 20:8ESV

      • Isaiah 40:22ESV

      • Job 26:7ESV

      • Psalm 24:1–2ESV

      • Psalm 96:10ESV

      • Isaiah 55:8–9ESV

      • Philippians 4:13ESV

      • Philippians 4:12–15ESV

      • Psalm 17:14ESV

      • Psalm 17:14ESV

      • Proverbs 25:2ESV

  • God Of Wonders
Spring City Fellowship
office@springcityfellowship.com
(610) 948-5250
https://springcityfellowship.com
31 members • 6 followers