Is the way the Bible is used beneficial to the community of humanity?
For many believers, using the Bible as the guide to living a spiritual life, the definitive, and final answer for everything is believed that is how God intended Bible to be used. But is that the case.
I know the Bible is all divided up into nice chapters and verses that are conveniently weaponized and used as proof text ammunition to validate man-made doctrine?
The fact is, the chopping up of scripture didn’t start until long after the post cross books were written.
Is the way the bible is used God's design? What if God didn’t intend for it to be the unquestionable 'Word of God'? What if God isn’t behind the way verses of the Bible are ripped up to prooftext everything? What if God doesn’t approve of our blind devotion to, and the idolization of a book?
I know that sounds repulsive to the traditional way of thinking, but biblically could that be the case?
What about in the gospels where we hear Jesus declaring, “You have heard it said… but I say…” Sometimes he’s just talking about tradition or the teachings of other religious leaders. But a lot of times, he’s talking about the scripture we call the Old Testament.
Is he breaking the bonds of scripture to bring new truth and spiritual life into his people?
The freedom he is declaring doesn’t even stop there.
According to the book of Acts, Peter was at a house in the town of Joppa when he decided to go up to the roof and pray while lunch was being prepared. Not long after he had began praying, he fell into a trance and had one of those famous biblical visions from God. In the vision, he saw a sheet fall from heaven full of all sorts of creatures..."four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air”...and he heard a voice saying, “Take and eat.” Peter said “no” because scripture forbade him from doing so. The voice told him again to take and eat and once more Peter refused. This happened three times and three times Peter said no, citing scripture.
To the scripture believers of his day it was an odd vision that only becomes odder when you step back and realize what’s really going on.
God was speaking and God was telling Peter to violate scripture. Wow...we know now Regular, you are a heretical!
What we see here in Peter’s vision, and throughout the New Testament is a fundamental and radical shift from the old way of doing things (no more sacrifices, from how God related to God’s people (no more need for a high priest), from scripture itself (no longer bound by the Law).
It is a seismic shift to something radically different than the way it was done before.
So why was God doing something so radical and so obviously contradictory to scripture and tradition?
Because in Jesus God was doing a brand new thing through his community of the redeemed, a Spirit thing that couldn’t be bound by scripture that would break people free from the being shackled to the past.
Today most people still use the Bible the same way Peter did...as a book to be blindly followed, and an idol that even God is answerable to. Then the religionist would post Facebook postings about heretics in the church trying to deceive the faithful, then load their mouth firing tongues
Full of Bible verses to “prove” they are right, follow that with a thorough trashing of their opponent’s knowledge of the Bible, and finally wrap things up by denouncing them as a heretic.
Not realizing that when all self-righteous work was done, just like Peter, we would have successfully quashed the move of the Spirit.
The Bible is meant to give us direction to Christ and love people has he loved them, but instead we’ve turned it into a jailer that shackles us to ideology, dogma, doctrine, denominationalism and legalism.
Instead of letting the Bible lead us to Jesus the Truth, we use it as a weapon to attack people who believe differently than we do and defend our ideological idols.
If Peter had continued to use scripture the way we do today, instead of getting out of the way for God to move, the power of the Spirit would have been stifled and the redeemed community would not have gotten off the ground. If Paul had used scripture the way we do today, he could have never taken the gospel to the ends of the earth and ministered to the Gentiles because they were outside of Israel’s covenant as described in scripture. I wonder...is that the reason that in over 2000 years of gospel preaching the majority of people still do not know the gospel?
Believing God's Grace message doesn’t negate the importance of scripture. It simply puts it in proper perspective and allows gives it its proper function...a pointer to Christ, not an idol to be worshipped or a weapon to be wielded to prove stupid man-made beliefs.
If we fail to understand how the Bible is used...or misused and abused...is not ordained of God, we will get left behind because we’re so busy quoting Bible verses and holding God hostage to scripture we won't be able to understand the work of his Grace unfolding in the community of the redeemed to benefit the community of humanity.
I know the Bible is all divided up into nice chapters and verses that are conveniently weaponized and used as proof text ammunition to validate man-made doctrine?
The fact is, the chopping up of scripture didn’t start until long after the post cross books were written.
Is the way the bible is used God's design? What if God didn’t intend for it to be the unquestionable 'Word of God'? What if God isn’t behind the way verses of the Bible are ripped up to prooftext everything? What if God doesn’t approve of our blind devotion to, and the idolization of a book?
I know that sounds repulsive to the traditional way of thinking, but biblically could that be the case?
What about in the gospels where we hear Jesus declaring, “You have heard it said… but I say…” Sometimes he’s just talking about tradition or the teachings of other religious leaders. But a lot of times, he’s talking about the scripture we call the Old Testament.
Is he breaking the bonds of scripture to bring new truth and spiritual life into his people?
The freedom he is declaring doesn’t even stop there.
According to the book of Acts, Peter was at a house in the town of Joppa when he decided to go up to the roof and pray while lunch was being prepared. Not long after he had began praying, he fell into a trance and had one of those famous biblical visions from God. In the vision, he saw a sheet fall from heaven full of all sorts of creatures..."four-footed creatures and reptiles and birds of the air”...and he heard a voice saying, “Take and eat.” Peter said “no” because scripture forbade him from doing so. The voice told him again to take and eat and once more Peter refused. This happened three times and three times Peter said no, citing scripture.
To the scripture believers of his day it was an odd vision that only becomes odder when you step back and realize what’s really going on.
God was speaking and God was telling Peter to violate scripture. Wow...we know now Regular, you are a heretical!
What we see here in Peter’s vision, and throughout the New Testament is a fundamental and radical shift from the old way of doing things (no more sacrifices, from how God related to God’s people (no more need for a high priest), from scripture itself (no longer bound by the Law).
It is a seismic shift to something radically different than the way it was done before.
So why was God doing something so radical and so obviously contradictory to scripture and tradition?
Because in Jesus God was doing a brand new thing through his community of the redeemed, a Spirit thing that couldn’t be bound by scripture that would break people free from the being shackled to the past.
Today most people still use the Bible the same way Peter did...as a book to be blindly followed, and an idol that even God is answerable to. Then the religionist would post Facebook postings about heretics in the church trying to deceive the faithful, then load their mouth firing tongues
Full of Bible verses to “prove” they are right, follow that with a thorough trashing of their opponent’s knowledge of the Bible, and finally wrap things up by denouncing them as a heretic.
Not realizing that when all self-righteous work was done, just like Peter, we would have successfully quashed the move of the Spirit.
The Bible is meant to give us direction to Christ and love people has he loved them, but instead we’ve turned it into a jailer that shackles us to ideology, dogma, doctrine, denominationalism and legalism.
Instead of letting the Bible lead us to Jesus the Truth, we use it as a weapon to attack people who believe differently than we do and defend our ideological idols.
If Peter had continued to use scripture the way we do today, instead of getting out of the way for God to move, the power of the Spirit would have been stifled and the redeemed community would not have gotten off the ground. If Paul had used scripture the way we do today, he could have never taken the gospel to the ends of the earth and ministered to the Gentiles because they were outside of Israel’s covenant as described in scripture. I wonder...is that the reason that in over 2000 years of gospel preaching the majority of people still do not know the gospel?
Believing God's Grace message doesn’t negate the importance of scripture. It simply puts it in proper perspective and allows gives it its proper function...a pointer to Christ, not an idol to be worshipped or a weapon to be wielded to prove stupid man-made beliefs.
If we fail to understand how the Bible is used...or misused and abused...is not ordained of God, we will get left behind because we’re so busy quoting Bible verses and holding God hostage to scripture we won't be able to understand the work of his Grace unfolding in the community of the redeemed to benefit the community of humanity.
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