Acts 1:12-26; 1 John 5:9-15; John 17:11-19
In the
book "Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics" author Ross
Douthat traces the changes in American Christianity from orthodoxy (i.e., sound
in doctrine) to the mess we currently have on our hands in which the teachings
of Jesus have been obscured, twisted, and dismissed. Not surprisingly, the
turning point that put us on this slide into heresy was our change in attitude
toward the Bible. Once the Bible was open to personal interpretation, subject
to "scientific" scrutiny, and filled with problems that we need to
root out, our culture entered into a spiritual death spiral. Sadly, treating
God's Word in this way is not new.
For
example, Thomas Jefferson physically cut and pasted the Bible to suit himself.
We have to go back much further than that to find the earliest instance of
people despising God's Word. When we do, we discover that treating God's Word
with contempt is not unique to Americans, but is a problem that we share with
every human being. Misusing and abusing God's Word is part of our human
heritage following the first time a person thought that it could be untrue:
Adam breaking God's command in the Garden of Eden. This means that all of us
have a natural tendency to reject God's Word as truth. When we do, we call God
a liar.
1 John
5:10 spells it out rather clearly, "Anyone who does not believe God has
made Him out to be a liar." Rejecting this simple proposition, people
protest that the Bible can't be used to validate itself, seek to discredit the
authenticity of 1 John, and even try to interpret away the meaning of this
verse. However people try to get around it, in the end it boils down to either
a person believes that the Bible is truth or he dares to call God a liar. It's
important to realize that this is not an intellectual exercise, but that
believing the Bible is the truth of God is something a person is only able to
do by faith. Without faith, a person can only call God a liar and will perish
because of it. By faith, we receive His truth and with it forgiveness,
salvation, and life in His Son. It's also by faith that we understand that the
reason that God wrote the Bible in the first place is that people would know
the truth and not perish, but have eternal life. Like His Word, He was willing
to be despised, abused, and rejected to keep us from perishing. And that's the
truth.
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