Disclaimer: Be warned, this is a very long post (as a lot of mine tend to be when I get all riled up) but I do hope it will prove to be a blessing to all who read what I have got to say (rather, what I have felt compelled to say by what I hope to be the inner workings of the Holy Spirit). I will be addressing issues that may cause people to get either very angry with me for saying such arrogant sounding things or cause people to be edified by God’s gracious work through my feeble words. I don’t claim to be an ordained minister of God’s word but I do claim to have tried to maintain faithfulness to the Bible and to have interpreted the meanings of things as best as I have been enabled to. If I ever stray from the Word of God as found in Scripture, do not hesitate to correct me, since my goal (i.e. our common goal) is the glory of God and not just expressing opinions. Please don’t be intimidated by the length of this post and grant me this opportunity to try and edify you by reading on.
I am discouraged and disheartened to see so many of my fellow brothers (and some silently assenting sisters too) discrediting the Bible as their final (and sometimes only) source for pure, glorious, and truthful inspiration, ideas, and information. This feeling of sadness and unrest has come up many times in the last several months through participating in discussions with other brothers and sisters about the hot topics of today, concerning our Christian faith (eg: evolution vs. creationism, the problem of pain, etc…). I mean no condemnation or accusation with this post, but I do mean make some people very uncomfortable with their own behaviour and words by exposing their lines of thinking as wrong, and even heretical. I won’t pretend to speak on behalf of God, but I will try to quote the Bible on as many accounts as possible as to stay faithful to the Scriptures, something that, sadly, many of the people–especially us youths–at Jaffray have failed miserably to do.
I am astounded with the sheer weakness of faith in the Bible as a reliable source of information demonstrated by some self-professing Christians. In my Sunday School class, Faith Under Fire (a class based on Lee Strobel’s Faith Under Fire video series and originally intended for university-aged students with debating on their minds), we discuss, like I said, hot issues which could cause a Christian to doubt their own faith. Without naming names, I would just like to say that there is a whole lot of human-centered, modernist, and/or agnostic thinking going on in that class without most people attending even noticing or realizing. Have we as a church become so calloused to God’s Word, are we so out of practice with our devotional life, and are we so lacking in our Biblical foundations as to completely miss the glaring signs of doubt, skepticism, and downright heresy when we see it? It doesn’t take much for someone lacking a critical, Scripture-sharpened mind to be swayed into believing a complete untruth when put in the right words. What’s more alarming is that it’s self-professing Christians saying things such as “One must make a choice between the Bible’s theory of Creation, and Darwin’s theory of Evolution.” or “One can never use facts to [justify] faith since that’s not faith. It takes faith to believe in God because one can never know for sure.”
I do not claim to be in complete understanding of the Bible (indeed, there are many Scriptures which I wrestle with on a daily basis because I find them so difficult to understand, and then apply in my life) but I do claim to trust that my Bible is the Word of God, in all its complete and infallible glory. To say that I am unsure whether the Bible’s account of creation is really true is to place the truth of Christ’s atoning death and resurrection in the same doubtful light. We cannot pick and choose which parts of the Bible we will choose to believe in. As 2 Timothy says, “All Scripture is God breathed…” and so there can be no distinction between different parts of the Bible in terms of truthfulness. If you wish to place your faith in Christ based on the (completely valid and trustworthy) Gospels’ accounts of the life, death, and resurrection of one Jesus of Nazareth to save you from eternal separation from God, you must equally put your faith in the Bible’s recount of the historical realities of the Six-Day Creation of the World (see Genesis ch. 1-2), the Great Flood of Noah (ch. 6-7), and the Ten Plagues of Egypt (Exodus ch. 7-11). Yes, these examples and claims of the Bible are very bold and seem utterly impossible to the unbelieving heart, but to those who have been reborn by the grace of God should have be able to understand the impossibility-conquering nature of our God. To discount miracles recorded by the Bible as only mythological is to suggest that Christ was not really of virgin birth, that He did not really live pure and sinless, and that He did not really die or that He did not really come back from the grave to save us from our sins.
There are ample claims of the Bible’s validity as truly the very Words of God from within itself (see 2 Tim. 3:16, Matt. 22:31) but of course, we cannot use its own claims alone to determine the Bible’s authority as God’s Word. Even the other scriptures of other false religions regularly claim to be from God. There must be, therefore, some sort of difference between the Christian Bible as we know it and the other scriptures. All things are not equally valid, let us be clear on that. Regardless of what happy or dreamy mediums we may wish to entertain about peace on Earth and the coexistence of all faiths in harmony, the Gospel of Jesus Christ (i.e. Biblical Christianity) is anything but complacent (i.e. it is missional, see the Great Commission in Matt. 28:16-20) or ready to compromise (i.e. it is not on friendly/negotiating terms with false religions, see Exo. 20:4-6, Jer. 7:9-11). Biblical Christianity, as I have come to understand it, is wholly God-centered and never man-centered, and as such, can never be wishy-washy, relativistic, or even considerate towards other religious views. By the very nature of the Bible, all other religious thinking is false if the Bible is to be taken seriously as the Word of God.
And yet the Bible has things other than its own claims about itself to boost its credibility as the Word of God. In a recent article (the first segment in a series of articles demonstrating the evidences for the Bible’s validity) by Rev. John Samson, co-contributor to the Reformation Theology weblog, the Bible’s historical scientific accuracy is cited as strong evidence that the human authors were writing things not of their own minds, but from a Higher Intelligence. Here’s a quote (bold mine):
Every other religious book contains [scientific] statements which, when they were written, were accepted as correct, but have since been proved to be incorrect… every religious book, except the Bible. And here’s where it gets exciting; the Bible contains no such nonsense Scriptures. Even though when the Bible was written most people believed these wild theories, there is no mention of them in the Bible whatsoever… no elephant theory.. no turtle theory… no moon shining with its own light theory… no earth is flat and triangular theory..
What does the Bible say… “He hangs the earth on nothing…” Job 26:7
It was Sir Isaac Newton who discovered the law of gravity and that in fact, the world could hold itself up. Science would therefore confirm this statement from the Bible book of Job around 4,000 years after it was written!
I’ve already posted before about the facts we know and that they do indeed point to a God, so I won’t go there again. In essence, there will be no excuse for anyone at the End of Days to claim that they had no idea that there was a God just because of the overwhelming evidence found all over the universe that points towards Him. You either have not bothered looking, or have looked, found, and refused to come to the right and justified conclusion that there is indeed a god. Of all the things that God is not, He is surely not only probably there.
It is a serious threat to Biblical Christianity when anyone, Christian or otherwise, sheds a doubtful light on the Bible’s truthfulness and credibility, whether in part or as a whole. Why do you believe in Jesus? What do you know about God? Where do you get your morality from? How do you know if what you know is true? Why do you believe what you do? All these questions, if asked of Christian, should not (and really cannot) be answered without the Bible. If the Bible is, in itself, flawed at any point, there can be no faith in it as the flawless, infallible words of God. God doesn’t make any mistakes. The first step down the slippery slope of sin and destruction was doubt and disbelief in God’s Word. That was how all of Man fell once, and Christians are just as susceptible to falling again if we begin to doubt the Bible’s truthfulness.
It is usually around here where I begin to lose steam and meander a bit as I am doing now, but what I really want to make clear is the absolute nature of truth in the Bible. It is all quite simple in my mind. Either you believe in the Bible as a whole, complete, and correct collection of things God has to say to man, or we do not and are deceiving ourselves if we call ourselves followers of Christ. If you are not sure of the Bible as a reliable set of documents that are truthful in nature, you are qualified to be a high school English teacher that claims the Bible to be a set of nice, idealistic, and even romantic mythologies, but you should not be calling yourself a child of God (John 1:12). It may sound judgmental and arrogant of me to say these things, but it is not I, but rather, the Bible (the one all true Christians ought to place their whole faith in) that is saying all these things. To do so (i.e. call yourself a Christian but have a disbelieving heart towards the whole Bible) would be to pledge allegiance to something you do not really believe in and such deceiving, of yourself and your brothers and sisters, is sinful at its core. Moreover, we have already been warned against those who teach others what is ultimately incorrect and lead others astray (1 Tim. 1:3-7).
The Bible is so clear as to the fate of such sinful and heretical behaviour that I’d rather just quote it for you rather than paraphrase (even though I will do some of that after). The following is taken from 2 Peter 2 (italics and bold mine):
False Prophets and Teachers
1 But false prophets also arose among the people, just as there will be false teachers among you, who will secretly bring in destructive heresies, even denying the Master who bought them, bringing upon themselves swift destruction. 2 And many will follow their sensuality, and because of them the way of truth will be blasphemed. 3 And in their greed they will exploit you with false words. Their condemnation from long ago is not idle, and their destruction is not asleep.4 For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into hell and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; 5 if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; 6 if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; 7 and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked 8 (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); 9 then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, 10 and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority [of God, of the Word].
Bold and willful, they do not tremble as they blaspheme the glorious ones, 11 whereas angels, though greater in might and power, do not pronounce a blasphemous judgment against them before the Lord. 12 But these, like irrational animals, creatures of instinct, born to be caught and destroyed, blaspheming about matters of which they are ignorant, will also be destroyed in their destruction, 13 suffering wrong as the wage for their wrongdoing. They count it pleasure to revel in the daytime. They are blots and blemishes, reveling in their deceptions, while they feast with you. 14 They have eyes full of adultery, insatiable for sin. They entice unsteady souls. They have hearts trained in greed. Accursed children! 15 Forsaking the right way, they have gone astray. They have followed the way of Balaam, the son of Beor, who loved gain from wrongdoing, 16 but was rebuked for his own transgression; a speechless donkey spoke with human voice and restrained the prophet’s madness.
It is clear from the passage the nature of these false teachers. They are secreive and deceptive (v. 1, 13) in how they persuade weaker Christians into trusting their false and empty words (v. 14). They have a tendency to reject authority (v. 10, 15) and choose to speak openly and loudly without fear of the Lord (v. 10) about things they really know nothing about (v. 10, 12). In doing so, they pervert what is true, slandering against God by casting into doubt the truthfulness of His Word (v. 1, 10, 12, 15). The worst part is, they are among us and are often hard to spot (v. 13), often being counted as our fellow brothers and sisters with whom we dine.** Thankfully, God has promised in (v. 1, 3, 9, 12, 13) swift and decisive destruction for those who pervert His Word for whatever agenda (eg: sounding enlightened, causing a controversy, creating dissent among children of God). We must still be wholly aware that there are indeed people like this, perhaps even sitting in the pews right beside us. I am not trying to get us all flustered and paranoid about our fellow brothers and sisters, but to simply be aware and alert. We need to equip ourselves to spot heresy when we come across it instead of mindlessly accepting everything that sounds about right.
To all of those who have both claimed to be Christian but have spoken apart from faith in the Scriptures, both in the past and present, I have no need to hold my tongue as my God is not silent. It is evident and clear what will happen to you if you persist in your perversions. Please do yourself a favor and either reconcile yourself and your beliefs with the Word of God before teaching anyone, or do not speak at all. This advice ought to be as applicable to the heretic as it is to myself, as it ought to be for any minister of the Word. In fact, this should apply to all Christians alike since we are all called to give testimony and serve witness to God’s glory in all things. There are, after all, few things worse than an ignorant teacher.
** It really pained me as I sat in that Sunday School class today (and on previous Sundays) listening to the words of people I have counted (and will still try to) as fellow followers of Christ as they indirectly (yet consistently) underminded the Scriptures which I hold so dear. It is thoroughly disturbing to come to the realization that many people are not who they claim to be. However, I am not aiming to decide/discern who is or isn’t a true follower of Christ (since that is not my calling nor do I count myself fit for such an office in God’s grand scheme of things).
It’s now apparent to me that we as a church have failed to properly educate one another in the most fundamental, critical, and crucial cores of our Christian faith. I believe it is a serious problem that Jaffray has ignored for too long and the fruits of such lazy sinfulness are beginning to blossom into something disgusting through and through. Again, I am as much a culprit in this failure to uphold the value of the Bible as any other member of our church. We’ve failed to instill a strong commitment to Biblical authority. All is not lost, but we must–must–seek God’s mercy and repent of such evil. With urgency we must return promptly to our Bibles lest we go down in a huge ball of exploding something-or-other (I’m using a mask of humour here to try to show just how uncomfortable it makes me to consider what may become of our church if we do not quickly conform ourselves back to Words of God).