Types of Statements

Genesis 13-15 and Matthew 5:1-26 were the BibleGateway passages of scripture for Sunday, and while reading the Beatitudes my math topic was confirmed.  I noticed a verse while reading earlier that got me thinking about using if-then statements in logic.  Let me explain using an example.

     If you climb onto the kitchen counter then it is possible to fall off the counter.

The "if" part (you climb onto the kitchen counter) is called the hypotheses, and the "then" part (it is possible to fall off the counter) is called the conclusion. Written this way, it is called a conditional statement. If we rearrange or change the wording, the statement is called a related conditional.  For example, if we switch the hypotheses and conclusion it is called a converse statement.

     If it is possible to fall off the counter then you climbed onto the kitchen counter.

If you negate each part of the original conditional it is called an inverse statement.

     If you do not climb onto the kitchen counter then it is not possible to fall off the counter.

And finally, if you negate both parts of the converse statement, it will be called a contrapositive statement.

     If it is not possible to fall off the counter then you did not climb onto the kitchen counter.

I may only be five days into God's Word this year, but I am amazed at how many conditional statements I've already read.  The first was in Genesis 2:17.  In essence God says, "If you eat of the tree of knowledge of good and evil then you will die." I continued to find conditional statements in the reading, but when I read the fifth chapter of Matthew, I knew this was my topic - even before I fell off the kitchen counter!

While speaking to his disciples, Jesus gave them conditional statements. Read each verse as an if-then statement. If you are poor in spirit then yours is the kingdom of heaven.  If you mourn then you will be comforted.  If you are meek then you will inherit the earth. If you hunger and thirst after righteousness then you will be satisfied.  If you are merciful then you will obtain mercy.  If you are pure in heart then you will see God.  If you seek peace, you will be called a child of God.  If you are persecuted for righteousness' sake then yours is the kingdom of heaven.  If men revile you and persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account then rejoice and be glad for your reward is great in heaven.

Remember, Jesus is speaking to his disciples. Now, read the next two verses.  They are NOT conditional statements.  These are simply facts.  You are the salt of the earth . . . You are the light of the world . . . Why?

"Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works and give glory to your Father who is in heaven."  Matthew 5:16

The Tower of Babel

While reading Genesis 10-12 and Matthew 4, we find the statement, "Come, let us build ourselves a city and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves, lest we be dispersed over the face of the whole earth." Immediately, I began to think about how man seems to thrive on being disobedient to God. Like people today, they had plans to make a name for themselves, and apparently these folks didn't want to follow God's directive to spread out and fill the earth.

These are the people who began what is labeled as the sexagesimal, positional numeration system or a base-60 numeration.  They only had two mathematical symbols, one a narrow wedge (resembling Y) and a wider wedge (resembling <) and could represent any numbers they needed and calculate very accurately.  They were able to calculate the square root of two correct to seven decimal places. These are the people who gave the world sixty seconds in a minute and sixty minutes in an hour.  Why base-60 instead of base-10 (fingers) or base-20 (fingers and toes)?

The people of this city needed a tower to study the stars.  They gained much worldly wisdom, studying the earth, the moon, and the stars (and, of course, developing gods associated with many aspects of creation to worship instead of the Creator).  They were accustomed to a 360 day year. (You can do some research here, but I personally believe that there was originally a 360 day, twelve month, thirty days a month year that was disrupted when the flood occurred.)  These city-dwellers assigned 360 degrees to a full circle (one revolution of the earth - yes, they knew it was round), and so angular measurement developed into what we still use today. 360 conveniently divides by ten, twelve, fifteen, twenty, thirty and sixty. Sixty conveniently divides by one, two, three, four, five and six.

As I conclude today's thoughts, I realize I've been meditating on Biblegateway's verse of the day from Micah 6:8 which is in direct conflict (disobedience) to the beginning verse from Genesis 11:4.  "He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?" 

Statistics

Genesis 7-9 and Matthew 3 are today's passages from Biblegateway.com, and the math I notice is a very basic, foundational, introduction to statistics.  Statistics is the science of learning from data, and of measuring, controlling, and communicating uncertainty; and it thereby provides the navigation essential for controlling the course of scientific and societal advances (Davidian, M. and Louis, T. A., 10.1126/science.1218685). Statistical thinking and methods are applied daily to a wide variety of scientific, social, and business endeavors in areas like astronomy, biology, education, economics, genetics, and so on.

There are four terms used to describe types of data: nominal (name only), ordinal (a natural ordering), interval (like ordinal, except with measurable values) and ratio (interval with an actual zero). In the scripture text we can find all these types of data.  For instance animals taken on the ark were classified as clean or not clean.  This is a nominal classification. When God gave Noah the 'go ahead' to leave the ark, and He promised Noah that as long as the earth remained there would be "seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night." This information is ordinal.  The events of the flood (building the ark, the loading, the waiting, the deluge, the waiting, etc.) are actually interval.  If you give dates to Noah's call and all the individual events after his entering into the ark and until leaving the ark, this information becomes ratio.

As I read through these scriptures to the departure from the ark, Genesis 8:19 tells me that everything "went forth by families out of the ark."  As I continued reading into the next day's passages, I found that in chapter 10, the descriptions of Noah's sons were given by "their families, their languages, their lands, and their nations."  This made me consider sampling techniques in statistics.  There are five main ways to sample a population.  They are random, cluster, convenience, stratified and systematic.  I might simply observe here that nothing God plans or executes is random or done for convenience.  God is methodical and orderly, so His labels are stratified, and His methods are systematic.

Paul said in Ephesians 3, "To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to bring to light for everyone what is the plan of the mystery hidden for ages in God who created all things, so that through the church the manifold wisdom of God might now be made known to the rulers and authorities in the heavenly places."  Although I feel it is the responsibility of all believers to 'preach' the unsearchable riches of Christ, I must admit that my chosen method is through proclaiming the beauty of mathematics that God mysteriously hid in His Word.

Generations

The scriptures for today were Genesis 4-6 and Matthew 2.  Genesis 2:4 states "These are the generations of the heavens and the earth when they were created. Genesis 5 begins, "This is the book of the generations of Adam."  Matthew 1 (reading for 1/1/14) discusses the generations from Abraham to Christ. Mathematically speaking, sequences are much like generations. A sequence is an ordered list (order matters) and are useful in a number of mathematical disciplines.  Sequences are also of interest in their own right and can be studied as patterns or puzzles, such as the prime numbers or the Fibonacci numbers.  It contains members and can be finite (countable) or infinite. 

Did my brief definition of sequences resemble your understanding of generations?  Then quite possibly a math lesson over even numbers, odd numbers, primes, or multiples (Use Genesis 4:15 as a reason to learn the multiples of 7.), could be taught beginning with a discussion of the generations that exist within your own family.  This discussion would transition very easily into several different educational activities.

I think my favorite activities would be to use the data from Genesis 5 to teach

• how to create a bar chart/graph depicting either the age at which each person died or became the father of the indicated son (or both).
• how to create a stacked bar chart/graph using the combined data. (You could use this for an Excel lesson.)
• a family lesson by either drawing on butcher paper (Can you still get that?) or using Excel to highlight/shade columns creating a vertical 'timeline' depicting Creation to the flood - or even to Joseph if you want to extend this lesson.

I will tag some 'extra' math lessons from these scriptures after this post, but now, I want to get into the 'family lesson' I mentioned above.

At one time, there were nine living generations.  Adam was still alive when Enoch was born and died only a 'short' fifty-seven years before 'Enoch was not.'  Wonder how many times Adam took Enoch for a walk by the Garden of Eden and possibly said, " Enoch, my dear great, great, great, great, great, great grandson, I really messed up.  You see those cherubim with the flaming sword?  I can't take you in there to show you what you're missing, but you really NEED to walk with God.  A relationship with Him is what you need to seek. Don't ever forget that!"

What do our children hear from us each day?  What should we be telling them?  Are we?  Do our children or the generations following us learn from us, from our experiences?  As far as math (or everything else) goes, what kind of impression to we give those watching us?  Do we indicate that math is too difficult to understand?  Are we like the people in Matthew 13 whose "heart has grown dull, and their ears are heavy of hearing, and their eyes they have closed, lest they should perceive with their eyes, and hear with their ears, and understand with their heart," both mathematically and spiritually?

Just some questions for you to ponder today, as I've been pondering the Verse of the Day from biblegateway.com found in Psalm 90:12. "So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom."

What does math have to do with scripture?

On this first day of the new year, I went to www.biblegateway.com, chose the Old/New Testament reading plan (as I have for the last few years) and read through Genesis 1-3 and Matthew 1.  I have been asking the Lord recently to let my daily Bible readings this year be the inspiration for my new blog, Math in Scripture.  You see, I love teaching math, and I find myself this spring not returning to the classroom.  Since I feel the "need" to impart mathematical knowledge and/or insight to others, I have come upon this idea of a blog allowing me to do just that.

There actually were three other events contributing to the development of this idea.  Within two days of my resignation, a colleague suggested I consider writing Christian math curriculum materials integrating scripturally based math problems into examples and assignments and the following weekend, a relative on Facebook told me she didn't know what I did for a living, but I should be a writer. (Please take that with a grain of salt.) The third factor actually happened several years ago when another colleague attended a chapel service at our school the day I made a presentation.  He asked if I had the presentation videotaped so that he, and other homeschooling parents, could use it.

So, what is the purpose of this blog?  What is my mission?  I desire to read the Bible through this year letting God speak to me through His Word, but to see more mathematically than I have seen before.  I want to see if what God gives me can be used by other believers, and if so, hear their questions, comments, insight, and suggestions.

So, I will finally get to my mathematical thoughts for today. 

Genesis 1-3 is the account of creation.  We are told in Colossians 1:16-17, "for in him all things were created, in heaven and on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or authorities - all things were created through him and for him.  He is before all things, and in him all things hold together."  This means that when God created "all things," that included the mathematical laws that exist.

At Christmas each year, we watch "The Star of Bethlehem" by Frederick A. Larson. (www.bethlehemstar.net)  We are amazed, over and over again.  An excerpt from Isaiah 46:9-10 says, "for I am God, and there is no other; I am God, and there is none like me, declaring the end from the beginning and from ancient times things not yet done."  There is a simple phrase in Genesis 1:16 saying that while God was performing His creative acts on the fourth day, "he made the stars also."  Just think, while God was making "the stars also," He already knew exactly when His Son, the Lamb, slain before the foundation of the world, would be born in Bethlehem.  And He knew, He PLANNED, exactly how to mathematically arrange the heavens, so that the magi would see His star in the east and come to see the King.  We find in Galatians 4:5, "But when the time had fully come, God sent forth his Son, born of woman, born under the law."  Marking the stars was NOT just an afterthought.

This adds a whole new meaning to one very familiar passage in Jeremiah 29:11.  "For I know the plans I have for you, says the Lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope."  Just ponder a few moments about His plan to give us a future and a hope; now consider what Jeremiah 18:12 says about our plans.  " We will follow our own plans, and will every one act according to the stubbornness of his evil heart."  Quite a difference, huh?  

When a student of mathematics, whether through love of the subject or the necessity of schooling, approaches the subject, it would profit that student to also realize that EVERYTHING God created is designed to declare the glory of God - even mathematics!!!  (The next time you read through Psalm 19, you might consider reading and contemplating the psalm in light of this post.)

Galileo Galilei is credited with saying, "Mathematics is the language with which God has written the universe."  So, as I take this journey this year, and I examine the world we live in, the one God planned and created, "Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart be acceptable in thy sight, O Lord, my rock and my redeemer." Psalm 19:14