Maybe I’m showing my age but I think Monty Python is one of the funniest comedy groups ever. If you can look past their bad language, innuendo, and irreverent humor, their comedic genius sets them apart from most comedians. Their gags are sort of off-the-wall but it’s not slap stick. It’s certainly not low brow. Some of their scenes are high IQ and work on many levels to poke fun at social norms.
Arguably, their 2 best movies are Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Both have an overtly religious (albeit irreverent) theme with lots of political humor thrown in for good measure. In The Holy Grail, the guard scene is one of my favorites. It’s only a couple of minutes long but take a moment to watch it. I promise you’ll be amused.
Isn’t that hilarious? Anyway, I’m going somewhere with this. You noticed that I asked in the title of this post if there was something we could learn about the Bible from Monty Python? Normally, I wouldn’t recommend getting theological pointers from comedians but, in this case, we can use it as a sort of “what not to do” when reading the Bible.
Do these guards remind you of anyone? Think hard. Don’t feel bad if you can’t think of anyone because I didn’t notice it for a long time. Eventually, though, it sort of clicked. These guards remind me of Christians who claim to believe the Bible but still believe in evolution!
Let me explain. The guards in this skit were given very clear instructions: stay here and make sure the prince doesn’t leave the room. Yet as simple as that sounds, the guards just didn’t seem to get it. The king kept repeating the commands very slowly and even asked them to repeat them back to him - correcting them every time they strayed from the directive. And just when he thought they understood everything, the guards started to follow the king out of the room proving they didn’t understand anything at all! //RKBentley chuckles//
Genesis is a very straightforward and plainly written account of the creation. Even a simpleton could read it and plainly see that it says God created the world in six days and then rested on the seventh. The creation event was a week long. It wasn't millions or billions of years. It wasn't a long progression of creation events over countless generations. There isn't a catastrophe and reconstruction wedged in between verses one and two. It's a simple account of a miraculous event. It's hard to misunderstand.
Yet despite the fact that it is so clearly written, there are millions of people out there that don't seem to be able to understand the clear meaning of the words. “How long is a day?,” I've heard them ask. Next they will say, “The Bible only tells us that God did it and science tells us how.” Excuse me? Are they reading the same text as me? The Bible says that God spoke and it happened. He created light on the first day, the sky on the second day, the dry land on the third day, etc. Each day is punctuated with the phrase “evening and morning” and marked with an ordinal number (“first day”, “second day”, etc). Could it really be more clear?
2 Peter 1:20 says, Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. In other words, the Bible generally means what it says and there’s no need to look for some hidden meaning or tortured interpretation. To say that “six days” could somehow mean “billions of years” is the epitome of a private interpretation!
If you believe that the Genesis account of creation really means God created via something like evolution, then let me ask you a question: if God had meant to write that He created everything in six days, how might He have said it any more plainly? Why is it that the word “day” is easily understood the other few hundred times it is used but suddenly is “vague” when we read it in Genesis? Why should we even look for a different meaning other than the plain one? To me, people who read the Bible and then claim Genesis means something other than what it clearly means sound about as silly as the guards in the video.
The sad part is that the guards in the movie are trying to be funny.