April 2018

How should we handle the Bible? Is it the inspired Word of God? Should we give each word the same respect we give the next one? Is all of it for me?

In my early years of preaching, I parroted a lot of things. Who doesn’t repeat what they hear in their early years? It’s difficult to think for yourself when you’ve always been told how to think. One of the things I said loud and proud was that the Bible was a remarkable book because it was free from contradictions. I remember once being oh so bold and declaring that if someone could produce for me a real contradiction, I would quit preaching, because the book wouldn’t be worth defending if it had such blatant an error as contradictory thought.

I’m so glad that no one came forward to challenge me. It would have been embarrassing to be so publicly proven wrong on such an easy challenge. I’m not sure what I would have done. I’m glad I didn’t have to find out. Surely there were those in attendance at such poorly thought-out sermons, who saw my challenge for what it was: the emotional rantings of someone based in ignorance. Or in short, the statement of a cocky, young man who had more brass than brains. As George Bernard Shaw, “Youth is wasted on the young.”

It doesn’t take a lot of digging to find some problems in the text of the Bible, if problems with continuity, scientific understanding, or perfect harmony of theology between writers is what you are looking for. You could start with the simple question of what constitutes the Bible? If you asked that question in 1611 at the royal court of King James of England, you would get 75 books of the Bible instead of the 66 we know today. The king’s translation included the 9 books of the Apocrypha, what modern Christians refer to as the Catholic books. These give the story of Hannukah and the doctrine of purgatory. In 1885, these were dropped from the KJV. So the Bible meant something for 274 years that it doesn’t necessarily mean today.

We could also bring up the books of pseudepigrapha (“false attributed writings”). These books existed as long as many books of the Hebrew Bible, our Old Testament, yet we consider them uninspired, and thus, unnecessary. However, some New Testament writers were influenced by them, as Jude quotes from the pseudepigraphal book of Enoch in his letter.

Now there are many reasons why we have landed on the 66 books that we have today, and the road to that conclusion is worth going down, but not here. We will save that for someone else. But it is worth mentioning that the process of addition and subtraction was not an overnight one. Each generation added its own argument. For instance, Martin Luther noticed internal contradiction so bold that he argued against the Book of James as being included in any future editions of the Bible. With James and Paul so diametrically opposed on the issue of righteousness by faith without works, Luther considered James’ position the heretical one. He also argued against the Book of Revelation, stating that it was simply impossible to believe. I would imagine he was disillusioned by seeing Revelation as a book of literal images rather than symbolic ones. But I digress.

Or perhaps that is not a digression after all, as many of the troublesome passages of the Bible are most likely problems with interpretation and understanding as much as anything else. Let’s not shy away from the fact that the Bible speaks of creative days, but doesn’t give us the sun by which to mark our days until Day 4. Let’s not forget Joshua’s famous prayer that God stop the sun in the sky so that Israel could fight longer, and the day paused, though we now know the sun isn’t moving at all. Let’s not be blind to theological cloudiness, like David believing that he could go see his dead son someday, but David’s other son Solomon (the wisest man on earth) declaring that the dead know nothing, and that it is all over for them.

So what are we to do, and how are we to handle the Book? I for one, find the Bible to be a fascinating piece of literature, written by 40+ different writers in 3 different languages over a period of 1500 years. It tells stories, conveys principles and digs deeper into the psychology of man than any other ancient writing. It shows how man has interacted with God, and vice versa. It gives us incomplete pictures of God, but honest pictures as men saw them at the time, and it culminates with the Word of God becoming flesh and showing us an image of the Father through Jesus that we would have never had otherwise. And that, for me, is the Bible’s ultimate contribution: it introduces us to the highest form of a human being, a man named Jesus. It displays love and self-sacrifice. It shows us, through Him, how to deal with a chaotic world; how to love the unlovable; and how to endure trials and tribulations too numerous to count, and too difficult to understand. The Word did not become a book; the Word became a man named Jesus, and He should be our focus and our rallying cry.

If you build your rallying cry around a verse of Scripture, you will always find a voice of dissent that is doing the same thing, opposite of you, with a different verse of Scripture. Instead, let’s put Jesus back into the center of what we see in the text, and find out how He affects the passage, and how the passage leads to Him. Where we can’t find Him, or where the passage seems to lead elsewhere, maybe that is our indication that we are dealing with problem areas of the text, perhaps uninspired. Paul seemed to see the same thing when in 2 Timothy 3:16 he declared that some Scripture is inspired, but not all. A mistranslation has led us to read, “All Scripture is given by inspiration of God,” but look closely. There are italicized words added there which give it a different thought. Read closer to the Greek, Paul declares that “Every writing which is divinely inspired is profitable for doctrine.” Is every writing divinely inspired? In 1611 it was thought that at least 75 books were, but in 1885, that number had dropped by 9. What changed? Perhaps our understanding? Perhaps our revelation? Maybe it was never meant to be that our understanding or revelation lay solely in what we read. Could it be that the writings were meant to make us think, and to stir conversation? Maybe they were meant to take us to the man Christ Jesus where we could have a real relationship; internal and built upon faith. Maybe the internal Holy Spirit was meant to show us that moments like the book of Job can teach us deep insights about man’s suffering and His encounters with God, but we weren’t supposed to apply equal respect to the foolish advice and counsel of Job’s friends as we are to the voice of the Holy Spirit within us, though the advice and counsel of Job’s friends can be quoted chapter and verse.

It needs to be pointed out that there is most certainly a theme that runs throughout the writings of the New Testament that points to faith in Christ and His finished work; that upholds the hope of the resurrection; that points toward pending judgment; that demands fruitful action of the people who call themselves believers. How we interpret these truths vary, as perhaps they should, but they do not exist in a vacuum, where our interpretation stands alone and above all others, but within the greater community of believers, and their longevity and their application speak to their importance. That is why whatever we are hearing in our spirit – that which we are attributing to the Holy Spirit – must align with the truths of the New Testament. This prevents someone from rising up who has “New revelation” that is opposed to these basic themes. It protects against cults and theological foolishness. The Bible may have question marks, but the followers of Christ work through those question marks and the consensus that comes out the other side shows the position of the body of Christ, and that position should be respected.

So go to the Bible with an open mind and an excitement to learn. Great truths have been recorded and conveyed there. Don’t approach it as if it were written by ignorant and unlearned men – show some respect. It has lasted a long time; maybe the people that assembled it had something worthwhile to say. God knows, we all need to learn something worthwhile. Grace to you.