I know. Generally an article with that kind of a title will be about the salvation that God supplies. This is not one of those pieces. I'm referring to the wondrous efforts that we humans go through to save God. You see, God doesn't have a very good PR department. Like so many modern celebrities, He has a history of having some really bad things purportedly written by Him and it is only through the careful protection of His human followers that we're able to keep Him from being ... canceled.
I'm talking, of course, about the Bible. The Scriptures claim to have been breathed out by God (2 Tim 3:16-17). If it wasn't for that kind of disastrous position, a lot of this stuff could be easily avoided, as many like to do. "The Bible is God's Word? Oh, don't be ridiculous. Maybe it contains some of God's words or, more likely, not, but it is not written by God, so we can ignore the wrong stuff attributed to Him." And, bingo, we've saved God from His own bad press.
Take, for instance, that whole disastrous first 11 chapters of Genesis. Such claims! God created the heavens and the earth. God made Man. Man sinned. The whole talking snake thing. People living for hundreds of years. A nonsensical worldwide flood. The confusing of languages. So much blather. God's reputation is intact because that's all a bunch of myth and legend, some ancient writings without any reality. We now have Science to inform us so the false narratives are no longer necessary.
How about that whole, "Go kill every man, woman, child, and goat" thing (1 Sam 15:1-3)? Quite the bloodthirsty God, eh? And when the king refused to carry it out, it cost him his job (1 Sam 15:11)?! Well, that will never do. Never happened. Neither did God strike down Uzzah for touching the ark (2 Sam 6:6-8). Ancient mysticism where the poor guy had a heart attack and the writers mistakenly attributed it to God. Don't worry, God, we've got your back.
The New Testament doesn't fare any better. There's the whole "sacrifice of Jesus" thing where an apparently barbaric God demands a blood sacrifice to appease His wrath. I mean, it says that we are saved by the blood of Christ (Eph 2:13; Heb 9:14; 1 Peter 1:18-19; Rev 1:5) and it says that His blood appeased God's righteous wrath (Rom 3:24-26; Heb 2:17; 1 John 2:2; 1 John 4:10), but that's not going to fly in today's inclusive, peaceful world. (Note: It didn't at the time, either (1 Cor 1:18-24).) So we'll just explain that stuff away as misguided 2nd century pagan beliefs and, once again, we'll pull God from the fire of His own book.
Even good, Bible-believing Christians have to step in sometimes and save God. When it says that we are dead in sins (Eph 2:1-3), we have to add "mostly dead" and explain how "dead" isn't quite right. When we read that the natural man cannot understand the things of God (1 Cor 2:14) or even believe (John 6:64-65) without God changing them, we have to mitigate it. "That's not what it means." When it says that He chooses whom He will save apart from our choices, we've got to moderate it, mitigate it, ease it a bit. Too tough to swallow. So we're "predestined" (Rom 8:29-30) after we come to faith and He doesn't actually choose individuals (Rom 9:10-19), but groups. (Not making this up; I've heard this multiple times.) You see, God ordained that there would be Israel and there would be "the Church" and we decide if we're in it. And God, once again, avoids a disastrous use of words.
I'm telling you, it can be hard work sometimes. Passages seem so clear, so explicit, so straightforward. They seem to say things about God that just don't fit with our expectations. That's even without misogynists like Paul making lunatic statements like, "Women should keep silent in the churches" (1 Cor 14:34). Nonsense! But if we're careful and we pick and choose what agrees with Science and modern culture versus some of the "obscure" clear texts we see in the Bible, I think we might just be able to make a go of saving God from His own bad press.
2 comments:
Yet they'll tell us they aren't dismissing or rejecting what Scripture says, but only that they're dismissing or rejecting our "interpretation" of what Scripture says. That would be fine if they actually had some evidence or "hard data" to confirm an alternative "interpretation" we've yet to hear from them for that which we get so wrong. But alas and alack...
Yes, Art, that's often their claim. They dismiss "your" interpretation ... which is often the historical, grammatical, contextual, linguistic, rational interpretation. "No, no," they say, "it doesn't mean that at all." However, they almost never tell you what it does mean and almost always deny it "because that's what I think" rather than "because that's what it says and here's why."
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