People today are very concerned about making sure they get the rights they are due. That stems partly from how we got started:
"We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."
Those words set the United States apart in 1776. People are born with rights. They are not privileges granted by government; they are granted by the Almighty, and a good government is the one that recognizes and protects those rights.
But there's a problem with the way many Americans — including many American Christians — think of their rights. It is an error to think that God only granted us rights. He also gave us duties:
"As God’s slaves, live as free people, but don’t use your freedom as a way to conceal evil. Honor everyone. Love the brotherhood. Fear God. Honor the Emperor" (1Pet 2:16-17 HCSB).
"Give to everyone what you owe them: If you owe taxes, pay taxes; if revenue, then revenue; if respect, then respect; if honor, then honor" (Rom 13:7).
"So in everything, do to others what you would have them do to you" (Matt 7:12).
Is that enough to make the point? God expects us to fear him, love our neighbor as ourselves, and respect our government leaders among other things. Even though we have rights, we are expected to behave as if other people have a claim on us.
Our society generally recognizes this. We have freedom of speech but a duty to tell the truth, and there are penalties for libel and slander. We have a freedom to assemble but most see a duty to do it in a way that is not a nuisance — and most see closing down highways during rush hour as a violation of that duty.
But when things don't go our way, we tend to focus on our rights to the exclusion of all else. We want our rights to be honored and, all too often, don't care about the affect on anyone else. Americans don't like this, but "my rights" are not the most important thing in the world. My duty to my neighbor may occasionally requires that I set aside some of my rights and privileges. My duty to the duly elected government may require that I do things I don't want to do.
This is something we have to keep in mind all of the time. We need to be mindful of our duties in traffic ("do to others what you would have them do to you"), during the several times a year we pay various taxes, and when we have unwanted trash in our hands and no convenient garbage can. We also need to keep this in mind when we're at the grocery stores and restaurants — the other customers and the staff matter to God. And occasionally the government has to remind us of this. Sometimes the government has to ask us, even tell us, to do things for the greater good.
That's not to say the government never goes too far, but if we are considering pressing for our rights, there are some questions that we should ask ourselves:
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How will my actions affect my neighbor?
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Is the government just flexing its muscles, or is it asking me to do something for the sake of my neighbor?
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If everyone acted like this, what would the result be?
Don't be too quick to demand your rights. We are occasionally obliged to set aside our rights for the sake of our neighbors. If Paul was willing to give up meat (!) for the sake of another's conscience (1Cor 8:13), what might God ask you to tolerate?
To make sure I'm clear, I'm not saying everyone should be a doormat for the state. I'm saying "my rights" cannot be our first priority. Love of neighbor and obedience to God's word must take that place.
“Taste and see that the LORD is good;
blessed is the one who takes refuge in him” (Psalm 34:8).
Now I get to write about God. I’ve been chomping at the bit, because this is a topic that makes my heart sing.
Does that seem odd? As J. Gresham Machen wrote, "Many Christians today have a horror of theology; they suppose it must necessarily be a cold and lifeless thing.” Enjoying studying God would be odd if studying God were like memorizing logarithm tables. But what if it were like getting to know the most beautiful, clever, and fascinating person you’ve ever met? Would it be odd then? I don’t think most people would regard it so.
Theology can be made dry if it is treated like facts and figures, but when it is treated like the privilege of getting to know the maker of the universe it cannot be. God is an eternal, infinite being with the wisdom and power to make a universe, yet he condescends to disclose himself to us. There is an unimaginable beauty and glory that can only be experienced at his invitation, and he invites us to come. Though he is perpetually surrounded by adoring angels, he wants us to know him and has made a way for us to do so. How can we respond to this with anything less than enthusiasm?
Theology is not only exciting and beautiful, it is also life-giving. JI Packer wrote, “There is no peace like the peace of those whose minds are possessed with full assurance that they have known God, and God has known them, and that this relationship guarantees God’s favor to them in life, through death and on forever.” CH Spurgeon, the famous 19th Century preacher said, “[N]othing will so enlarge the intellect, nothing so magnify the whole soul of man, as a devout, earnest, continued, investigation of the great subject of the Deity.” The joy and peace that come from God cannot be found anywhere else. As St. Augustine put it, we are made for God, and our hearts will be restless until they find rest in him.
Theology is also intensely practical. Blogger Wendy Alsup wrote, “The reverential fear that comes from truly understanding God’s character sets us on a path of wisdom and understanding. Theology, simply put, IS practical. If our study of God hasn’t broken into the ins and outs of our busy daily lives, we may have not accessed real theology at all.” AW Tozer said, “A right conception of God is basic not only to systematic theology but to practical Christian living as well.”
Packer again (I’ll be quoting him a lot in this section): “Disregard the study of God, and you sentence yourself to stumble and blunder through life blindfolded, as it were, with no sense of direction and no understanding of what surrounds you.”
Come to the study of God like a child led to the dessert buffet. It is truly all you can eat, and I promise this will make you neither fat nor sick. God’s glory is on display in the world around us and in the pages of scripture, and we get to feast. Taste and see that the Lord is good!
One of the best ways to get an appreciation for God’s character is to examine how he acts toward us. I recommend Paradoxology: Why Christianity was Never Meant to be Simple by Krish Kandiah.
Photo credit: Welleschik, used under Creative Commons
Part of Christianity 101
“Jesus replied, “You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God” (Matt 22:29).
Why does it matter what we believe about the Bible? It matters because the scriptures are how God communicates his nature and his will to us, so wrong attitudes toward the Bible affect how we live. Here are some of the common errors and the results they tend to have.
Idolatry
Some people almost make the Bible a deity. Besides the offense to God this represents, these people also tend to read the Bible hyper-literally, not believing that there is symbolism in the Bible that is not supposed to be taken at face-value. They tend to accomplish this feat via amazing leaps of illogic that cannot be sustained by any but the most committed. This creates a “faith” that cannot survive the real world, creating a lot of “ex-Christians”.
Naturalism/Just the words of men
These people don’t believe in the inspiration of scripture. There are people who would call themselves Christians who do not believe divine inspiration is possible. Still more would say, even if it’s possible, it didn’t happen. To them the Bible is just a book written by men, some wiser than others. When inerrancy and inspiration are lost, people pick and choose what parts of the scriptures they will believe. This part seems mean, so we’re not going to believe that. This part is hard, so it’s out. You very quickly get a religion that is Christianity in name only. The deity and physical resurrection of Christ have historically been early casualties of these processes. Sin gets watered down until basically anything goes so long as you’re “nice”, so you don’t need an atoning death of Christ, which is good because that was mean anyway. No sin means no hell so no evangelism, so the lost do not hear the gospel.
Gnosticism (New Age)
These people don’t believe in the sufficiency of scripture. Ancient Gnostics were looking for secret knowledge from or about God. Modern Gnostics, though they don’t go by the same name, are basically doing the same thing. Christianity’s nice, but the Bible doesn’t have everything we need to know about God; we have to search out the secrets the other religions have discovered. Besides the fact that the other religions (especially the Far Eastern ones) have vastly different conceptions of God than we do, opening yourself to other religions leads to an “all roads lead to Rome” approach. Moral relativism soon follows. Things are added to their faith that run completely contrary to the revealed truth of God.
Code book
These people don’t believe in the clarity of scripture. Bible code hunters, like Gnostics, are looking for secret knowledge, but they’re looking for it in the Bible. They think there are secret messages that can be found by reading every eighth character of the text or some such. The truth is that you can find these “codes” in just about any text of sufficient length. It’s just random chance. But their error leads them to believe that they have truths that Christians in the past were not privy to. And they tend to believe some pretty weird things, almost invariably about the end times.
“Red-letter Christians”
These people also effectively deny the inspiration of scripture, but in a different way than those above. They want to create a “canon within the canon” where the words of Jesus carry more weight than the words of the apostles. “Wait, what’s wrong with that?” It’s two-fold. First, the same Spirit by which Jesus spoke inspired the prophets and the apostles. If there appears to be conflict between them, the fault lies in our flawed interpretation.
Second, we do not have anything written by Jesus. We have the things the apostles transmitted to us as they tried to teach the lessons their intended audiences needed to learn. We must not think that we have some kind of direct link to him. One of the fundamental concepts of Bible interpretation is that the more didactic portions should interpret the narratives. In this case, the epistles explain the gospels. We cannot understand what the gospels writers meant to say independent of the epistles.
These folks often mean well. They generally are trying to push the Church to be more outward focused, more charitable. But experience has taught us that this is usually accompanied by being less gospel focused. We quickly lose sight of the mission of the Church. Sometimes, though, these people are trying to excuse moral issues that are not directly addressed in the gospels but that are addressed in the epistles.
If we’re going to live in a way that pleases God, we have to keep the word of God in its proper place, neither elevating it to godhood nor picking and choosing the parts we want to follow. We have what the Lord wants us to have in order to know him and to please him.
Image credit: "Bible code" by Cmglee, used under Creative Commons
Part of Christianity 101
“He made the Sea of cast metal, circular in shape, measuring ten cubits from rim to rim and five cubits high. It took a line of thirty cubits to measure around it” (1 Kings 7:23).
“How can you trust the Bible? It’s full of errors and contradictions!” The critics are sure the Bible is full of errors. Some of them can even give a couple of examples if pressed. But it’s easy to find lists if you search. One of Bart Ehrman’s many books is a compendium of “contradictions” he assures the reader are completely irreconcilable. (They’re not.)
Before we talk about the alleged errors, it’s important to lay down some ground rules. Rule #1: Give a text the benefit of the doubt. Any text, even those not in the Bible. If a text can be understood in two ways, and one of them makes sense, assume that is what the author meant. It’s just good manners. To put it another way, the burden of proof is on the skeptic.
Rule #2: Pursuant to Rule #1, a plausible solution is a solution. All we need to do is show that there is a reasonable way to allow the text to make sense.
Rule #3, which I borrow from Rick Cornish’s 5 Minute Apologist: “A hard passage does not imply a mistaken passage.” Some things are hard to understand. Your inability to understand it does not make it a mistake.
Rule #4: Context, context, context. The vast majority of alleged “errors and contradictions” you’ll find on the web are simply taken out of context.
Norm Geisler, in When Skeptics Ask: A Handbook on Christian Evidences, gives some guidelines for handling difficult passages.
- Be sure you know what the text says. Often a misquoted text will mislead someone.
- Be sure you know what the text means. The Bible uses some words and phrases that may not mean exactly what you expect them to mean.
- Don’t confuse imprecision with error.
- Don’t confuse perspective with falsity.
- Language about the world is everyday language. We all use phenomenological language.
- Remember that the Bible records things it does not approve.
I would add that we must remember that culture influences writing. Modern readers see quotation marks and assume, well, that it’s a direct quote. Ancients not only didn’t have quotation marks, they didn’t even have the concept. They would move from direct quote to paraphrase and back without blinking. A story didn’t have to be retold with the same amount of detail every time nor all the details in the same order.
Also, ancients gave authors a fair amount of license. Minor details weren’t important to them. They were free to round numbers. Times were not precise. People didn’t have watches, so they estimated the time in very broad terms. 10 AM would be called “about 9” by one and “about noon” by another.
Adding to the above about imprecision, realize that ancient people frequently didn’t share our interest in precision. Unless is was absolutely required, it was more trouble than it was worth. Many cultures didn’t have fractions or decimals. In the passage quoted above, the Bible’s not suggesting that pi is 3; the "Sea" was roughly 10 cubits across, roughly 30 cubits around, and was mostly circular. We joke about “one, two, many,” but some cultures literally used large numbers to mean “many.” Some have suggested that “120 years” in the Bible is a metaphor for “a ripe, old age.”
The Bible quotes people who lie. And people who make mistakes in what they say. And people who tell the same story in different ways. These are not mistakes in the Bible; they’re simply what happened.
That said, there are some places in the Bible, even in the gospels, that can’t be just brushed away. Why are two different genealogies given for Jesus? How could the sun stand still for Joshua? What day was Jesus crucified? How did Judas die? There are answers to these questions, but they’re not the kind of thing that can be dismissed as the critics being picky.
Just as there are entire books that list these issues, there are entire books that exist to answer these issues. No one has found a new “contradiction” in the Bible. We’ve been studying the same book for 2000 years; there are no surprises. So when you have a question, or when someone brings up a supposed error you can’t answer, don’t panic. Look it up. Give the word of God the benefit of the doubt, and do the hard work of finding answers to your questions.
For detailed examples, see the Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties by Gleason L. Archer.
Part of Christianity 101
“... [F]rom infancy you have known the Holy Scriptures, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus. All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, so that the servant of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim 3:15-17).
This passage is a wonderful summary of what the word of God does for us.
It teaches us things we need to know. First and foremost, the Bible is how we know God. It makes us “wise for salvation.” It is the method God has chosen to reveal himself. The word of God tells us how to gain eternal life, and, according to Jesus, “... this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God ...” (John 17:3). We get to know God the way we get to know anyone else: By talking to him and listening to him. Communication is necessary, and this is his part of the conversation.
It is also food for the soul. Jesus said, “It is written: ‘Man shall not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God’” (Matt 4:4). The spiritual health of a believer will be affected by how much time he or she spends in the word.
It also teaches us about people. Do you want to know about the wickedness in other people’s hearts? Do you want to know how to distinguish the lazy, the proud, or the immoral from the righteous? It’s in there. Do you want to see the dangers that lurk in the hearts of even good people? It’s in there. Do you want to know, when temptation strikes, whether you should fight or run? It’s in there.
The Bible also teaches us what God expects from us. It does this so that we can “be thoroughly equipped for every good work.” If you want to be useful to God’s Kingdom work, thorough immersion in the scriptures is required. You will be of no use if you do not know God plans, his standards, and his methods. You cannot represent him if you do not share his heart. This all comes through the scriptures.
The word of God “is a lamp for my feet, a light on my path” (Psalm 119:105). We saw before that the Bible “makes wise the simple.” The scriptures were given to us so that we would know the way God wants us to go. It is not a map showing us everything we’d want to know, but it is a flashlight, allowing us to pick our steps carefully in a fallen world.
The scriptures also rebuke and correct us. “The decrees of the LORD are firm, and all of them are righteous. ... By them your servant is warned ... But who can discern their own errors?” (Psalm 19:9,11,12). God gave us all a conscience, but it is a fallen conscience. You can convince yourself anything you want to do is right. If you’re spiritually healthy the truth will nibble at you, but you can ignore it if you want to. The scriptures are our Jiminy Cricket, telling us where we’ve gone wrong and pointing out the right way.
The word of God is also our weapon. Paul calls it “the sword of the Spirit” (Eph 6:17). With it, Jesus fought the temptations of Satan. We can do the same (Eph 6:11).
Ultimately, the Bible transforms us. Paul wrote, “Do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind” (Rom 12:2). Either we will conform to the world, or we will be transformed by the word. No other options are given.
God did not just abandon us here to try and figure out what he wants and how to live. “His divine power has given us everything we need for a godly life through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness. Through these he has given us his very great and precious promises, so that through them you may participate in the divine nature, having escaped the corruption in the world caused by evil desires” (2 Pet 1:3-4).
He gave us this great gift to equip us for the works he wants us to accomplish through his Spirit. What do you think the appropriate response would be?
Image credit: Thy Word is a Lamp unto My Feet and a Light unto My Path by Bertram Poole
Part of Christianity 101
