It is becoming increasingly evident to me that many believers are simply cherry-picking the Scriptures, taking what they like and ignoring those verses they don’t, or either ignoring the Bible altogether. You see it in their talk and walk! John MacArthur once said, “You cannot live the Christian life if you don’t understand the Bible.” By that metric and given the times we are living in, there are a large number of Christians not living the Life! Willful spiritual ignorance of the Scripture abounds among so many believers today.
Every true believer has the capacity to receive the things of God because he/she has the Holy Spirit living within them. When it comes to the natural or sensual man (1 Cor 2:14; Jude 1:19), he/she cannot understand the Scriptures because it requires a spiritual discernment that comes only from having the Holy Spirit. The natural or sensual man is spiritually blind (2 Cor 4:4); the supernatural or spiritual man is not. It kind of strikes you as odd that any saint would want to be shortsighted spiritually for whatever reason coming out of a spiritual world of darkness at regeneration?
Christians today seem to be content with only a “fundamental” (I'm being gracious) knowledge of God and undisturbed by a “dust on my Bible” attitude. It conflicts with 2 Pet 3:18. It reveals a supposed “love” for God but no love for the truth of God’s Word. We cannot separate the two; our love for God is manifested by our obedience to His will! The world is replete with “I don’t need the Bible to get by in life.” I get that, but not from believers taking such a position right out of the playbook of paganism 101!
How
do we know that? Again, just pay attention to the talk and the walk of believers today! How do we obey
what we choose not to know, commanded to know? Jesus told His disciples, if you love Me, keep my commandment (Jn 14:15). There is a major love problem in the world, but we see it in Christianity today, too! The love for God and neighbor are intertwined (Mk 12:30-31). Many just listen to preaching because they don’t
like to read. You get the impression they are grooving with the music but not the Word. They want the preacher to tell them what to believe, and if they don’t
like what he’s got to say, they ignore him, too! The Word of God has been
highly mistreated as optional!
People who are grossly spiritually ignorant of the Word, to hear them tell it, come across as experts on how things should be
done in the church or living the Life as a believer! If they don’t understand the Bible,
how can they know how to think, feel, and live a life pleasing to God as one who has the Holy Spirit within them? Maybe they don’t? How can
they see and interpret the world according to God’s viewpoint and ignore His Word? Believers can’t, and they are left with only the viewfinder of the old man or flesh when turning a deaf ear rather than turning the pages of the Bible!
My grandmother would save leftover vegetables from the table in
the freezer and then make vegetable soup from the stockpile of vegetables
collected over a period of time. Many believers do the same thing,
metaphorically speaking, in making a hodgepodge of theology soup to live by,
but it is not spiritually tasty. In fact, the worse ingredient in that
spiritual soup on the table is the theology learned from the natural man (1 Cor
2:14, things like salvation, worshipping, judging, love, forgiveness, etc), and
he/she is spiritually blind as a bat!
Unwisely, they throw a range of things into this spiritual
concoction. Some ingredients may include things learned growing up, truths heard from the
pulpit, principles obtained by formal and informal education, stuffed learned
from a spiritual interpretation of theology by the music of others not grounded
in the Word, listening to the world’s view of theology, things learned pragmatically through
experience from the school of hard-knocks and et cetera. It is based on
personal preference with a whole host of ingredients seasoned by the positive and
the negative take on life itself.
This pot of homespun wisdom becomes the spiritual “nutrients” to live by; it’s delicious to the appetite of the flesh but not to the spiritual man. Oh, it doesn’t stop there; they pass that recipe of spiritual and physical success on to their children – a worldview that is anything but biblical. There is just enough “taste good” in it to keep it around, like a broken clock that is right only twice a day, but it is corrupt spiritually to the hilt! It is spiritually bad for anyone who dines at that table and partakes in that meal that causes you to drift away from the Lord.
Then they finally retire and sit down in their rocker on the porch and say, “I have done pretty well in my life. God blessed me; so, I must have done something right! Isn’t life good, mama?” And they continue what they always have done until the day they die and are given a Christian funeral. The problem is; the Bible was never their handbook on life nor their compass.
They never truly loved God, and He was never the Lord of their lives, and the “Christian” life they supposedly lived was disingenuous. The only road map of life they were very familiar with was DIY, that spiritual homespun slop they call their authority, not the Bible. Every Christian wants to go to heaven and be forever with Jesus, or they give that impression, but down here on earth, they don’t have time for God much less His Word! How depressing is that, yes?
Usually,
you find out with a closer examination via spiritual discernment (not judging)
that their gods were meism and materialism, but hey, they believed in God,
believed the Bible was God's Word, attended church more than most, and were even faithful givers to boot! They were great people in the community as well; let’s not leave that
one out!
That
person’s Christianity had an appearance of godliness, but it turned out to be actually
nothing more than a secular homegrown, self-interpretive religion that lived independently
of God and ran strictly on human power (“Look at what I accomplished,
neighbor!”). Yahweh never had preeminence in his/her life. A love for God
and being led by God were conspicuously absent. This is so common today in the
lives of so many people claiming to be true believers that it is alarming. It is as if we are living in a modern-day post-period of the Judges, a spiritually ripe environment for apostasy (a rejection of the truth) to flourish, and it is. And hey,
The Israelites during the time of the Judges were running on their own authority. Did they not have the Law of Moses during the pre-monarchial days of Israel? Yes, but during that dark period of Israel’s history, the people treated the Law as optional that rapidly deteriorated spiritually to an ungodly lifestyle, to say the least. I refer to this as the good old boys’ or good old girls’ “old-time religion.”
They can be at times the nicest people you will ever meet, but with spiritual discernment, you can see that God is never at the core of their lives only on the periphery. If you don’t agree with their narrative on living as being in accord with the Scriptures, you quickly lose popularity with them. They are not interested in your spiritual concern or care for them no matter how you say it or your choice of words. You are considered self-righteous and, of course, judging! “Who do you think you are pushing your values on others?”
Agape overtures toward them are interpreted as meddling. They wander as sheep having no Shepherd though they may attend a local church where they play up the tunes and the preaching ain’t meddlesome. If the preacher makes them mad or they don’t like the music, they just go somewhere else; it is the layman’s leverage over the preacher, “I’ll take my money elsewhere!” They are their own authority or autonomous: independent, self-directed, self-governing, self-reliant, the sovereign over the “me” and the “mine.”
Perhaps
you think I am being a little too rough and lacking compassion on these kinds of
people since there are so many serving the gods of meism and materialism, yes? Keep in mind that idolatry is anything that competes for the will of God in your life! Read the book of Judges on what happened
to those people during the time of the Judges “doing their own thing” with only
regard for themselves. I am a “putty cat” in comparison.
The
book of Judges records Israel’s drifting away from Yahweh prior to the death of
Joshua (cf. Josh 24:15) and taking a deep dive spiritually into apostasy after
his death, and picked up speed, per se, with the generation that died off
knowing Joshua personally. This falling away from Yahweh to idols was seven distinct
cycles that showed up throughout different
geographical sectors of Israel over a span of several centuries. So, this cyclical
adoration of Yahweh to rejection of Him can be accurately summed up by Judges in 17:6; 21:25,
In
those day there was no king in Israel; every one did what was right
in his own eyes (RIHOEs, bold added, right equals a
self-defining of truth).
This sounds just like today, yes? Read
the warning (cf. Prov 14:12; Eccl 11:9) to us not to be a RIHOE,
Gal 6:7 Do
not be deceived, God is not mocked; for whatever a man sows, that he will also
reap.
Gal 6:8 For
he who sows to his flesh will of the flesh reap corruption, but he who sows to
the Spirit will of the Spirit reap everlasting [enduring forever and the highest quality of life] life.
Gal
6:9 And
let us not grow weary while doing good, for in due season we shall reap if we
do not lose heart.
Wouldn’t
it be cool if it could be said of our time on earth,
“In
those days…every one (true believers) did what was right in God’s eyes!”
It begins with the “me,” yes? That isn’t going to happen if the Word of God is not the supreme and final authority in our lives academically and applied where the rubber hits the road because we love (agape) Yahweh. That requires knowing the Word and working the Word in our lives, not ignoring it or cherry-picking it!
What
is your rule of life? You, someone else, or Yahweh? RIHOEs are arrogant,
everywhere (lost and “saved(?)”), and worldly. Missing are the men and women rooted
in the wisdom of the truths of Scripture. Are you in the silent missing or in the
resounding mix for such a time as this?
