Put your Bible in a box, and take God out.

My wife commented the other day how she missed reading my blogs. I know I haven't written one in over a year, I have read quite a few though. I do not know why I have not written a blog but I promise I am going to try to do better and be more consistent. As I have been reading I have found a growing trend which quite alarms me. Many of the blogs I have read, boil down to people do not like the implications that some of the Bible messages give about God so they try to come up with creative reasons why the Bible is not an accurate account. I know this is nothing new, people have been trying to do this sort of thing for quite a while, the part that scares me is how many young people I see today buying into this lie.

The Bible is God's revelation of Himself. He used faithful men to write down the words he breathed into their lives. All of scripture accurately points to Him. The problem comes when we start looking at scripture and saying that does not fit my view of God therefore it must be wrong, we start saying we know God better than He does. What really ends up happening is instead of seeking out God we start making up a different god that fits into our box that we have made for him. The Bible is relatively easy to understand and pretty straight forward. God however is quite complex and scripture reveal that about Him.

Not only do we start to lose sight of who God is when we try to undermine scripture, but we start losing the common ground that enables us to have dialogue. We lose the objective revelation of God, and everything becomes subjective. With only a subjective revelation everything becomes relative, and with everything being relative even the language used in our discussions about God become relatively meaningless and shuts down lines of communication and intellectual discussions.

Half of the time those who are writing these blogs, trying to explain why the Bible is not an accurate account, often will cite things from their childhood growing up, either feelings, or ways that someone who holds to the Bible as being absolute truth misused Scriptures. The first problem comes that feelings can be, and often are, misleading. A man I love dearly had lost his Grandson in a tragic incident, and when asked if he could feel the Love God lifting him up, the man replied "no," but though he did not feel God's love lifting him up, he knew it was there, and that God indeed was carrying him through this tough time. Our heart according to the Bible is deceitful. The second problem comes out of the idea that the Bible can not be right because people who believe it to be misuse it, or misinterpret it. People look to for excuses to disbelieve the Bible because what they were taught as a child was wrong, instead of really trying to understand it as if it were the truth as Jesus claimed it to be.

There seems to be a lot of work put into trying explain away difficult passages that do not fit this nice picture people have of God. In the end I think people put more work into that then it would take for them to have a more open mind of who God really is. Yet who am I kidding those of us who hold to the idea that Scripture is in fact an accurate revelation of God, and believe it to be the truth, we are the close minded ones, who put everything into a box. Many authors have even indicated that we make the Bible a part of the Trinity. The truth is that I would rather have my understanding of the Bible in a box, than my have my God in a box.