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Elephants

by Adam Bennett  
7/25/2008 / Christian Apologetics

There's a Hindu (or Buddhist or Sufi) story about a bunch of blind men who, each feeling a different part of an elephant arrive at different conclusions about what an elephant is like.

For instance, one feeling a leg determines that an elephant must be like a tree and another feeling the trunk decides it is like a snake (or something along those lines).

The apparent wisdom of the story (which might be partly as a result of it belonging to an eastern religion and involving an elephant) is that, though many of us have different perspectives about God, in the end we are all feeling different parts of the same object making all our various perspectives valid.

However, there are fundamental problems with the analogy. Most importantly, regardless of how convinced the blind men were, an elephant is not a tree.

The blind men were not equally correct but equally wrong. The elephant was very different to what any of them were able to discover. In fact, to learn that the object they were exploring was an elephant required the story-teller's third-party perspective.

What the story really tells us is that blind people can't see. Left to ourselves, we are blind and cannot see what God is like. Any view we form about him on our own will inevitably be incorrect.

The only way to form a true view of God, which is necessary to relate to him, is for someone who can see clearly to show us.

This is what God has done for us in Jesus. The Bible says, "Going through a long line of prophets, God has been addressing our ancestors in different ways for centuries. Recently he spoke to us directly through his Son. By his Son, God created the world in the beginning, and it will all belong to the Son at the end. This Son perfectly mirrors God, and is stamped with God's nature. He holds everything together by what he sayspowerful words!" (Hebrews 1:1-3 The Message)

Copyright Adam Bennett 2009. More articles are available at http://godward-thoughts.blogspot.com/

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