archimedes and the golden crown short story

#Archimedes and the golden crown short story full

This is an important topic for us to consider. Even the Apostle Paul tells us to, “Test yourselves to see if you are in the faith examine yourselves!” (2 Corinthians 13:5).

In another instance David again asks the LORD, “Search me, O God, and know my heart Try me and know my anxious thoughts And see if there be any hurtful way in me, And lead me in the everlasting way” (Psalm 139:23-24). The Psalmist, David, certainly knew the importance of knowing the depths of his sin, Job implored God to show him his sin when he asked, “How many are my iniquities and sins? Make known to me my rebellion and my sin” (Job 13:23). We see it many times throughout scripture.

#Archimedes and the golden crown short story full

This is a biblical concept the idea of coming to a full understanding of the sin that corrupts us. Then, we’re going to look at how God responds to that sin. We’re going to take an in depth, though not exhaustive, look at how sin has affected you, an image-bearer of God. It’s one thing to say that sin affects all men it’s quite another to say that sin has affected every part of you. We have to submerge it in the water so that we can tell what’s on the inside. We can’t just look at it from the outside. It’s easy to talk about sin in broad strokes, as we’ve been doing, but if we want to see the full scope of sin then we also have to get specific. And last week, Pastor Paul took us through all the ways that sin has seeped its way into the lives of men.Īnd now, in our study today, I want us to start looking at sin on a more personal level. At its inception, and introduction at the fall, as well as its implications for mankind as those who were created to bear the image of God. Then we look at man we see how he was created, and we see the results of sin change that creation into something corrupted. We needed to establish what the standard is. We needed to define God first so that we can define holiness and perfection. This is merely the culmination, the conclusion to our study in The Doctrine of Man & Sin, and even the study itself is actually an extension of our study in The Attributes of God. That’s why we’ve already been talking about sin for the past two weeks, and here we are, still trying to better understand it. Even this lesson on its own will not accomplish the task.

In an attempt to determine the magnitude, the weight, the scope of sin there’s no one formula that we can use. Archimedes was rewarded, and we can only assume what may have happened to the goldsmith. So he immersed the weight of gold in water, and then the crown, and crown had caused the water to rise higher because it did indeed have silver mixed inside. He realized that even though the crown might weigh the same as the gold that gold, in any shape, will always displace the same amount of water. He jumped out of the tub, and ran all the way home shouting, “Eureka!” the entire way there. Yet one night, as the story goes, Archimedes went to take a bath, and he noticed that as he got into the tub, the water rose up and spilled over the sides. There was no way to tell how much gold was in the crown without determining its volume, but the shape of the crown made that nearly impossible. But even Archimedes was at a loss when asked to solve the king’s problem. Archimedes was a young scholar at the time, having been known for his work in math and science. His cousin, in fact, a young man named Archimedes. Luckily, the king knew a man that he was sure could help him. But how do you determine that? How do you find out if this crown was indeed pure gold, and not mixed with silver? It weighed as much as it should, as much as the gold the king had given, but there was no way to determine what was on the inside without melting it down, and the king refused to do that. Naturally, the king was furious, but he didn’t just assume he had been cheated. And Hiero had given this goldsmith a certain amount of gold to create the crown, but when the job was completed, and he received the crown, he heard rumors that the goldsmith had actually cheated him, and kept some of the gold for himself, and instead replaced it with silver. It’s a story about a Greek king, Hiero, who had commissioned a goldsmith to create a golden crown in the shape of what’s called a laurel wreath (which is two branches crossed over one another, and leaves on each side going all the way up to the end). There’s a bit of a folk tale told in the realm of science one that goes back almost three centuries before Christ.