You know what a con man is, right? The word is a shortened form of "confidence." The way it works is someone gains your confidence and then takes you in and steals from you. A con man.
Confidence. It's fleeting at times. I, for instance, am confident in what appears in the pages of the Bible. When it appears straightforward and clear, I think it's straightforward and clear. I think it's God-breathed (2 Tim 3:16-17) and, therefore, completely reliable. So Jesus says, "No man comes to the Father but by Me" (John 14:6) and I think, using hunches, opinion, devious meanderings, and other methods, that it means "No man comes to the Father but by Me." So I confidently proclaim it and there is no end of folks willing to correct my grievous error.
Obviously I need to stop having confidence in God's Word, or, rather, in my ability to understand it. It's not clear. It's elusive, tied up in changing worlds and lost languages and nuances that, frankly, no longer even apply. Sure, those people thought they knew what it meant when it said it is an abomination for man to lie with a man as with a woman, but they were wrong and so are the rest of us. We need to have confidence, but not in the readability of the Bible. We need to place it elsewhere. In men.
It is folly, it seems, to read the Bible for what it says. The only way to evaluate the Bible is to figure out what to think before you read it and then figure out how to read it so it matches what you already think. If you think it means something that the Church has historically understood it to mean or, worse, what the Reformers thought it meant, clearly you need to rethink it. "There is none good; no, not one" cannot mean there is none good. It actually means "There are lots of good people; look around you!" If you understand texts like Romans 1:26-27 to say that homosexual behavior is not okay with God, you're not grasping the language. If you think that 1 Corinthians 6:9-10 says that those who make a practice of homosexual behavior will not inherit the kingdom of God, you simply don't understand the culture of the time. If you think that when Genesis says that God created humans as male and female (Gen 1:27), it means that humans are male or female, you're simply fabricating ideas out of thin air. If you see "a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh" (Gen 2:24; Matt 19:5; Eph 5:31) as a definition of marriage, you're just stuck in the historical, traditional view of marriage and your overlaying your own beliefs on the Bible. If you have the audacity to think that God actually made the heavens and the earth and all that in them is in six days, you just don't know Science. Science says it is not so, so the Bible can't mean that. Oh, and if you see, heaven forbid, in every reference Jesus makes to "eternal fire" (Matt 25:41), a "fiery furnace" (Matt 13:41-42), "unquenchable fire" where "the worm does not die" (Mark 9:43, 48-49) and the like a reference to some sort of eternal hell, you just don't know much, do you?
No, no, do not put your confidence in the plain, straightforward words or the simple meanings of Scripture. Look away from the obvious. You need to put your confidence in people who can explain all that away for you and give you a worldview that matches the rest of the world around you. You might be tempted to think, "Hey, doesn't the Bible warn us not to love the world or the things in the world? Doesn't it say that the world's thinking is not from the Father?" (1 John 2:15-16). Well, yes, it does, but surely you can see the error in your thinking. Didn't we just say you need to stop taking the Bible at its word? So, stop. Put your confidence in Man, not in what men have written (Eph 5:6). Trust me. They'll be glad to have you beside them if you'll only toe their line. It's a matter of confidence, man.
6 comments:
Stan i was wondering; do we get a new spirit when we are born again? i know that we have the holy spirit living within us. but am not sure if the spirit that died, is rejuvenated.
you would think that i would know the answer to this by now, but no... still a little confused.
Not at all sure what you're asking. We were born spiritually dead, so "rejuvenated" doesn't seem like the right term. When we are "born again" we are "made alive in Him", so we have that new, living spirit (lowercase) as well as the Spirit (uppercase). Did I say something in this post that made you think of it?
As usual, good stuff.
While I understand saying that we have confidence that the plain meaning of a text means what it says, I don’t understand how anyone can say with confidence “It absolutely doesn’t mean that.”. It seems like you’d always start from the clear and work toward the murky. It also seems like if you’re going to definitively say what something doesn’t mean, that you should be able to be just as definitive about what it does mean.
I'm amazed at how many times we're told, "Oh, no, it doesn't mean that," but we don't learn what it does mean or why. I've always tried to go from the explicit to the implicit as a rule of thumb. The clear to the unclear. I rarely post and rarely stand on the unclear. But, hey, I guess that's my problem, right? I have too much confidence in God and His Word.
Because it’s easy to make definitive pronouncements about what something is not. It’s much harder to come up with a logical reason to explain why “no one” really means “some people”. Or, if you just repeat your pronouncement often enough, it miraculously becomes fact.
It’s almost like some folx want scripture to be unclear on the things they don’t agree with, while finding clarity in vagueness when it’s beneficial.
There is also the ongoing problem of "Yours are just hunches, but we're pretty clear our understanding is correct."
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