Heiser - Brief insights on mastering Bible doctrine 80 expert insights, explained in a single minute

I remember the events of 9/11 distinctly. I watched as much of the television coverage as I could. I read through dozens of accounts of the awful tragedy. Each one was filled with eyewitness testimony that recalled how planes rammed the towers of the World Trade Center and the pandemonium that ensued when the skyscrapers collapsed. Hundreds of newspapers would recount the tragic stories of lost loved ones and life-or-death heroism.

And yet, despite the fact that the worlds attention was riveted on the attack, no two accounts of the events of those stories are the same. They all differ on the details. The reason is obvious. Each eyewitness recollects specific things. The fact that none of the stories agree doesnt mean in principle that any of them are wrong. Theyre just different.

How strange it is that people so often say that disagreements between biblical stories told more than once shows the Bible is unreliable. For example, there are instances in the Gospels where one gospel writer has two people in a scene with Jesus but another has one more or one less. Contradiction! Not exactly. In most cases, harmonizing disagreements between stories isnt difficult or unreasonable. And because of the familiarity we have with being exposed to multiple reports of the same event, the impulse to put them together in harmony is quite normal.

The issue of harmonizing passages that disagree is actually of profound theological importance. There are many descriptions of the second coming of Jesus in the New Testament, as well as Old Testament passages about the arrival of the Messiah at the end of the age. They dont all agree on all the details. For example, 1 Thessalonians 4:1518 has the Lord meeting believers in the air when he comes back. Zechariah 14:45, however, has the Messiah returning to earth and setting foot on the Mount of Olives. The same passage in 1 Thessalonians has believers being caught up to be with the Lord in the air. Revelation 19:1116 has Jesus returning on a white horse with an army.

Christians over the centuries have disagreed on how to approach these disagreements. Many opt to harmonize the accounts, to join them together into a grand portrayal of a single event: the second coming. Others, however, prefer to keep them separate, splitting up the descriptions of the Lords return into two eventsthe removal of believers (living and dead) from the earth (the rapture) and the second coming. Whether youre a splitter or a joiner depends on an interpretive decision you make. Neither is self-evident in the biblical text.