Max Anders - 30 Days

The size of our solar system is beyond comprehension. To get some perspective, imagine you are in the middle of the Bonneville Salt Flats with nothing but tabletop flat ground around you for miles and miles. There you put down a beachball two feet in diameter, which you use to represent the sun. To get a feel for the immensity of the solar system, walk about a city block and put down a mustard seed for the first planet, Mercury. Go another block for Venus and put own and ordinary BB. Mark off yet another block and put down a green pea to represent Earth. A final block from there, put down a mustard seed to represent Mars. Then sprinkle some grass seed for an asteroid belt.

We have now walked about four blocks, and we have a beachball (sun), mustard seed (Mercury), BB (Venus), pea (Earth), mustard seed (Mars), and grass seed (asteroid belt). Now things begin to stretch out,

Continue for another quarter of a mile. Place an orange on the ground for Jupiter. Walk another third of a mile and put down a gold ball for Saturn.

Now lace up your tennis shoes and check their tread. Then step off another mile and, for Uranus, drop a marble. Go another mile and place a cherry there for Neptune. Finally, walk for another two miles and put down another marble for Pluto.

At last, go up in an airplane and look down. On a smooth surface almost 10 miles in diameter we have a beachball, a mustard seed, a BB, a pea, another mustard seed, some grass seed, an orage, a golf ball, a marble, a cherry and another marble.

To understand our replica of the solar system even better, use another beachball to represent Alpha Centauri, the next-nearest star to our sun. You would have to go another 6,720 miles and put is down in Japan!

Understanding the size and location of things and the relationships an distances between them gives us perspective. Just as this example gives us perspective about the solar system, a knowledge about geography can give perspective about the events of the bible. It is helpful to know the names, locations, and relative positions of important places. Otherwise we skim over important information without comprehension or visualization, and this makes the bible less interesting and less easily understood.

The one who is ignorant in geography cannot know history. The bible is largely history.So to begin out mastery of the history of the bible, we must start with the geography of the bible.


I read this book over and over. I love it. As much as I like to buy so many books. I almost like I am cheating on this one when I do. It gives so much information that when I read it again, I find more things that I don't remember reading before. Kind of like the way we read our bibles. We just discover new things each and every time. Even with the same passage. It just reads totally different during different parts of our lives.