For those of us that do accept the Bible as knowledge revealed from God it seems to me it would serve us well to remember a few things. The Book of Genesis, the book of origins or beginnings, sets the tone in its first few pages. Whether you believe the stories to be literal or metaphorical doesn’t matter, the lessons are the same.
The first truth revealed in the scriptures is that God is our Creator. We all came from Him and that linage can be traced back through the generations. We are directly connected to God. After our creation, the first lesson He instructs us in is that we have been given freedom of choice. We can choose to obey our creator, to accept what He declares is good and evil, and we’ll live. Or we can take it upon ourselves to decide what is good and what is evil and be subject to death. Being the independently minded creatures we are, we chose the latter…and have suffered with that decision ever since. You see, only God, our Creator can determine what is good and what is evil. Who could be better than The Manufacturer to know how His creation works best?
God’s next lesson, revealed through the story of Cain and Able, is that God determines what is and what is not acceptable worship to Him. We have largely ignored that lesson through the millennia and have opted to do what feels more appropriate to us. We have wanted to feel, more religious, so we’ve created our own rituals and temples and rules among other things to satisfy us…and tell ourselves that we are satisfying God.
In a like manner, only God can determine what is and isn’t holy. Only God can lift up something from the mundane and set it apart for a special purpose…one dedicated to Him. What makes both time and space holy is the presence of God. God created holy time in His creation of the Sabbath. He set that time apart from the mundane as specially consecrated to Him. He declared a physical space in the tabernacle, and later in Solomon’s temple, to be holy space. Here again, we humans aren’t content with what God declares holy so we step in and correct His mistakes for Him. What do you suppose would have happened, when Moses approached the burning bush and God told him to remove his shoes because the ground he walked on was holy, if Moses had said: “ I’ll take my shoes off over there…that patch of ground looks more holy than this one”? (We probably wouldn’t even know the name Moses today is my guess. )
So, God reveals Himself to us in scriptures, He reveals what is good and what is evil, He reveals what forms of worship He finds acceptable and He reveals what is holy. God reveals the laws that should govern our behavior individually and socially. These are themes that run throughout the Bible in story after story. The scriptures reveal for us the Creators instruction manual for the care and maintenance of the human race. These should be the very things that guide everyone calling himself a believer. God reveals much more if you reflect on it. For the believer, history has a beginning, a purpose and a destiny. For the believer a missing dimension in human affairs is revealed, a spiritual dimension that interacts with this physical dimension in human psychology and in human affairs. That revelation alone gives us new insight into so many things.
Two questions should be on the minds of every believer. The first question is whether or not we are really making an effort to know what God reveals? The second is: are we willing to accept that revelation and make and effort to live by it? No one understands all the truth the scriptures reveal. The Bible is a book of layers, each time one reads it one can glean new levels of understanding. God reveals to us that we are responsible for what we come to understand. If we are faithful and obedient in a little…more is revealed.
Some, calling themselves believers, have attempted to distort every aspect of the revealed knowledge in scriptures. They ignore the danger in doing so at the risk of their own lives.
There are churches these days that claim to be Christian and worship ‘the goddess’. No doubt God has feminine aspects in His nature since He created men and women in His image…but He reveals Himself to us as a father throughout scripture. To ignore that is to disobey the God revealed in the scriptures. That is addressed in the very first commandment. Some attempt to remake God in an image more comfortable to themselves, one that fits, not what the scriptures reveal, but what their own hearts and minds limit Him to. That's a form of idolatry and it’s addressed in the second commandment. Many call themselves by the name of God and make little or no effort to follow His way of life. That is addressed in the third commandment. The forth commandment reveals what time God has declared holy. Most believers don’t bother with that one either. They choose instead to pick their own day and declare it holy while trampling on the one God has designated.
The last six commandments don’t so much reveal things that man can’t find out another way. In fact many human cultures and traditions have come to understand what they contain as the best way to live. Those obedient to them are rare and are among the wisest of human beings. Life itself has instructed them in the wisdom of obeying the way of life laid out in the last six commandments. To the believer, obedience to all the commandments against our own desires is an act of worship. It is an act of worship that God readily accepts. In fact He says if we love Him we will keep His commandments. To one who understands the truth of the commandments and still disobeys them their own understanding condemns them.
One of the biggest misunderstandings among believers is taking knowledge that has been revealed to them and, instead of using it to become a better person the way it was intended, they use it to hit each other over the heads with. There are many traditional churches full of people who will readily tell you who is and who isn’t saved. But God reveals to us that He is the judge…we are told not to judge. God reveals that He is a just and merciful father, but many twist some verse or two to claim that infants dieing before reaching maturity or people who have never heard the message of the Christ will be condemned to an ever-burning hell. These people miss the big picture by misconstruing the details. These are the folks that will no doubt lecture Christ that He should never have allowed the thief on the cross to enter paradise! Where would God be without our advice!?
Then there are those that go to the other extreme and distort the meaning of love to excuse whatever they want. “I only beat my wife because I love her too much!” “I slept with my best friends wife because I fell in love with her!” There are those that call Sodomy, ‘homosexual love’ and pederasts ‘lovers of children’. God calls love obedience to Him. Love reaches out to give to others…it doesn’t desire for self.
The road to being a believer is full of pitfalls and everyone of us will fall into more than one. We can always find our way out if we remember that only God determines what is good and what is evil, what is holy and how He will be worshipped. To believe Him is to trust Him. The measure of a believer is in openly and honestly seeking to understand what God reveals to them…and in making an effort to live it. The true believer repents when they fall and they get back up and continue on the path that God has revealed to them. The true believer lives justly, loves mercy and walks humbly with their God.
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