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Scripture's Complexity and Simplicity: A Journey Through Biblical Paradoxes
71 Plays1 year ago
In this episode, Pastor Ridley Barron, alongside host Dan Sanchez, delved into the profound complexities and simplicities of interpreting God's Word. Their enriching dialogue navigated the uncertainties and misconceptions that can arise when reconciling scripture with human understanding. They broached topics such as misinterpretations of Biblical texts, the process of canonical selection, and the essential role of historical context, using compelling analogies to illustrate the gap between divine wisdom and human comprehension. Throughout the sermon, Pastor Barron highlighted the importance of embracing a reliable and orthodox framework, combined with a supportive community, to prevent scriptural manipulation and maintain fidelity to Christian teachings.
Timestamps:
00:00 Discussion on Scripture's authority and related questions.
04:33 Christians defend belief despite skeptic’s accusations. God's mystery.
06:38 Use Bible and reliable sources for interpretation.
10:02 Misinterpreting scripture to claim personal promises.
14:37 Explaining God's knowledge like 2D vs 3D.
16:41 Immerse yourself in learning to understand everything.
21:25 Doubts about certain punctuation and historical accuracy.
24:58 Misapplying scripture can lead to misinterpretation.
28:18 Community support is crucial when interpreting scripture.
29:45 Speaker disagrees with interpretation of scripture reference.
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Transcript
Introduction to the Series
00:00:01
Speaker
Welcome back to the Scripture Unfiltered series as part of the Grove Hill Church podcast. I'm here with Ridley Barron and today we're going to be diving into more of God's Word.
Authority and Complexity of Scripture
00:00:12
Speaker
But Pastor Ridley hit it hard this last Sunday on everything related to God's Word and why it's authoritative and why we should believe in it and why we can
00:00:19
Speaker
put our hope in this holy book. Today I wanted to tackle some peripherals around it because it seems like most of the conclusions we have to this podcast is go back to the word, go back to the word, go back to the word. So we know that, we got that, and we'll continue to do that. But today I want to tackle some other things related to the word to, I don't know, hit at some things that I know have our questions in people's minds, or at least have been in my search and
00:00:47
Speaker
Search for understanding the truth so to kind of kick it off Ridley I'd like to talk about The fact that the Bible the Bible can be simple enough to understand I mean you can read the gospel the gospel a mark to a child and they can understand it. Yeah It's hard Reading the Bible this morning. I was like, I do not understand what this means right? It's a hard thing Can you talk about the fact that this is this is kind of a simple yet complex book at the same time? I
00:01:15
Speaker
Yeah, I think the simplicity of the book was underlined best by Jesus when he said, you know, anybody who has a childlike faith and comes to me. He in that moment was basically saying, you know what, John 3 16 is enough for you. If you can comprehend the need for mankind and what God's desire is for mankind, those things are things you can pull out. They're like the big rocks that you can pull out of scripture.
00:01:42
Speaker
The closer you appear—that's not the word I'm looking for—the closer you look into the Scriptures, the more complex they get. It's kind of like putting something under a microscope. You begin to notice things that you've not noticed before. And sadly, I'm afraid that for many people, that's where the stumbling blocks really come in.
00:02:03
Speaker
Uh, if it was all about, you know, God loves the world, everybody loves that idea. And in that concept, nobody box at that. But when you start to dig into some of the other things, the context and when it's written and those kinds of things, you begin to get bogged down and sometimes stumble over some of those things.
Simplicity and Power of the Gospel
00:02:21
Speaker
I remember watching this fantastic video. I need to really go search for it on YouTube, but it was like missionary. I mean, this was an older video probably from three decades ago. They recorded sharing the gospel with this tribe out in Indonesia, some random island, middle of nowhere. And this tribe had formed its own beliefs of spiritual things, very animist.
00:02:43
Speaker
Islam had not reached this island, luckily. And they walked the whole tribe through the process. And this tribe was one that's like, they had to go in together or they weren't going to win people one by one. It was very much a community-oriented thing. And they explained to them like, hey,
00:02:58
Speaker
Like, here's where your tribe is. Here's the group of islands you're part of that kept zooming out and then finally got to the world to educate them like, hey, you're in a big world. It's more than this island or the group of islands near. There's this place all the way on the other side called Israel. And 2000 years ago, and then they essentially just walk through the Gospel of Mark.
00:03:17
Speaker
Remember watching you watch the video and they're like responding to the stories they play section by section. They're all just listening to it a little hand crank thing Yeah, and but it's simple. They understand it They had it took a while because they had to translate it in their language and play it back to them but they all respond to it men women children and the whole community like
00:03:37
Speaker
like they they get mad at Judas. They're all mad. They're just outraged that Judas does the thing and then it's very in a very exaggerated way. It's really fun to watch the whole community and then they they cry when Jesus gets crucified and then they when they finally roll back the stones and the invitation to gospel comes like
00:03:54
Speaker
They listen, and then one man stands up, and I think he says, etow. I think the message of the video is that. Like, etow. I found it. I have the truth. That's it. And then the whole tribe gets saved in a few moments. And it was just an incredible thing to show the power and the simplicity of the gospel and the story to change a life. Yeah.
00:04:17
Speaker
And I always remember that thinking when explaining it to my own children, like it doesn't, you don't have to really understand the full nuance of how God draws you or all the little things in order to really understand the message. It's a wonderfully, it's a beautiful thing how simple it can be.
00:04:33
Speaker
Right. And, you know, interestingly enough, over the years, I've had friends who are skeptics who do not believe, who accuse Christians of using what you just said as an excuse when you say, well, there's certain things we just won't understand because God is God and we are not. That's an excuse, but it's not. It's a reality. I mean, God is deeper than us, broader than us. He comprehends things that we've never even begun to understand. And so,
00:05:03
Speaker
The ability of God to take men who were inspired to write this book and to put their personalities into these books in the way they wrote them and still communicate a very pure, very unified message from Genesis through Revelation over thousands of years. That's a miracle in itself. If you stop and ponder it, it's just absolutely astounding that Moses writing the first five books of the Bible when he wrote them
00:05:33
Speaker
you know, a couple thousand years before, you know, Jesus arrives that he has lined up perfectly synchronized with Paul, Peter, those guys who wrote, you know, after Jesus disappears from the earth. It's crazy. Yeah. Despite the simplicity of the message that across 2000 years and a totally different culture in a different place, like some random tribe or your four year old can understand the general message.
00:06:00
Speaker
Yeah. Yeah.
Interpreting Scripture in Context
00:06:02
Speaker
Because it's 2000 years old and in a totally different part of the world from many of us, it comes with some, some issues too. Sometimes some things are hard to understand or we do what you, you've called ice of Jesus, right? Or we try to contextualize it and rewrite what it means for us today, because that's our culture. And that's how we see it through that lens of myself, our culture and our worldview.
00:06:31
Speaker
What's the approach that any Christian can take in order to better understand the Bible? I was told by a seminary professor early on that if you're going to study the Bible, you should have the Bible in one hand and a Bible dictionary in the other. That was years ago before we had the internet. The internet becomes a valuable tool. I would say
00:06:54
Speaker
that when you can find good, reliable, conservative sources that understand the importance of sticking to the scripture and doing what we call exegesis rather than isegesis, that they keep you within the channel of interpretation. What I mean by that is
00:07:14
Speaker
You read a passage and something hops out at you. You go, I don't understand that phrase. I don't understand that culture, cultural tradition. How does that fit all this? Then go to the dictionary or to the internet to your source and look it up and you'll be amazed that
00:07:31
Speaker
one of our challenges is reading this old book through Western eyes. We don't understand the concept of slavery, the way slavery is talked about in the Bible. We're familiar with the horrible tragedies of what happened here in the United States, places like even Cuba, places all over the West as slavery spread, but that's not what they're talking about in the Bible when they talk about slavery. So
00:07:56
Speaker
Yeah, that's an interesting topic. I've listened to some other podcasts on slavery and the shades of gray of slavery, which you're like, how can there be shades of gray? It's all evil. You're like, well, yes and no, there's shades of evil. Yeah. Well, and what happened was it was a custom that started off early on and even God gave directions on how it would be done fairly, but it really
00:08:21
Speaker
Not to get so sidetracked on the subject of slavery, but it's a good example. Slavery at the time of Exodus, slavery was more about becoming part of a family. In fact, the directions from God were after six years, the guy can leave if he wants to. He doesn't have to choose to stay. But if he wants to stay, then he becomes a part of the family. He even gets part of the inheritance. It wasn't the brutal thing that we think of this day and age.
00:08:47
Speaker
I think it was obviously human error that led it down the path that turned it into what it was. Yeah, so slavery is a fun one where you really have to understand the context in order for it to happen. And I find that that's kind of the thing that we're missing a lot when we read the Bible, is first you have to read it and try to understand. It's like if you get these questions out of order, you can get your interpretation mixed up. But the first question you should ask when you read any scripture is,
00:09:16
Speaker
What does this mean to the people it was intended to be read by or spoken to? Based on what it means to them, is there anything that can then apply to me? Right. Because a lot of things don't cross over. What it means for them, it meant for them. Back then, oftentimes you read like prophets like Isaiah. I think this is pretty common where you read something like Isaiah or Jeremiah and you hear like,
00:09:44
Speaker
somebody talking about correlating Israel to America. Yes. Is a common misstep because you have to ask the question, well, this is meant for Israel, but how much of this can apply to America? Well, some of it, and that's why it's hard because it's not a no, but it's not a straight yes either on some of those prophecies. Yeah. One of the things that we love to do here in America is we love to take promises out of the scriptures, especially in the prophets there.
00:10:13
Speaker
even story of Moses. We love to take those promises and apply them to us where they were never meant to be applied to
Understanding God's Revelation
00:10:21
Speaker
us. They were meant for the people who were reading it at that point in that time or the people that the prophet was prophesying to. What they teach us is not, here's a promise for us to claim, but instead a promise that reveals the character of God and how he responds in these kinds of things.
00:10:37
Speaker
Jeremiah 2911 is one of those real famous ones we like to talk about. I know the plans that I have for you, plans to prosper you and not to harm you to give you a hope and a future. That promise is not meant for us specifically. It was meant for the people in captivity and exile during Jeremiah's time. But what it does teach us is that God does have a plan for people and He does want what's best for us.
00:11:00
Speaker
So yeah, it's really easy. Again, I said, Jesus is this, this proclivity we have to, to interpret a text, bringing our own presuppositions, our own agendas and biases and doing applying them to the text. And that's not appropriate way to read the scripture at all. Have you ever mentioned on the podcast cat and dog theology? No, I don't think so.
00:11:24
Speaker
Somebody explained it to me. And I'm like, I think somebody tried to explain to teenagers that kind of the difference between exegesis and isegesis. Oh, yeah. But he explained it in kind of a fun way. It's kind of like, well, when we approach the word, there's there's cats and there's dogs. You know what dogs do when they come to their master. They're all about their master. They're excited. Their enthusiasm. They, they, they don't care so much about themselves. They're just focused on the, the, the one who, who owns them, who their, their owner.
00:11:49
Speaker
versus a cat, well, they're just kind of self-centered. But a lot of us propose the word in the same way. Is it all about me, me, I? Or is it you coming to God being like, oh, what's God doing here? What's he want? How can I better serve him? What's his attention on, right? Dog versus how can I get out of it? If you listen to the sermon Sunday, if you listen to our live stream, or if you've been in our church recently at the time, the thing we try to emphasize over and over again is the Bible's not about us. It's about God.
00:12:17
Speaker
And that's one of the areas where you start to remove a lot of stumbling blocks. If you quit reading the scripture to find out what God's saying about you, He's not really saying much about us. He's saying a whole lot about Him and His glory, His holiness, His power, and what He's willing to do for us because He's that kind of God.
00:12:38
Speaker
One of the things I love about scripture is that we will probably be studying this book for eternity. I have a feeling like we will keep finding new mysteries out of this one book, even though we'll have, you know, we'll be able to see clearly not like looking into mere dimly. We'll be actually be able to see the Lord, not like we won't be able to understand him fully because he's infinite.
00:12:59
Speaker
but we'll be able to see him much more clearly and therefore understand the word better. But I think we'll still be studying it and getting new unlocks and insights into it for forever. I agree with you completely, but I also imagine that minute you walk into heaven, whatever that looks like, that there probably is going to be a period of about
00:13:18
Speaker
I, can you call it a week? Cause there's no time there, but you know, there's a short period of time right at the very beginning where you're going. So that's what he was talking about. You know, suddenly some of those things will come clear. And I think that's going to be a really cool moment for us. Even just being able to see Jesus face to face and go, okay, now starting to put the, put together the pieces of the puzzle.
00:13:41
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, it starts to paint a clear picture. When I think of that happened, then the revelation picture starts to make more sense with the elders being like, Oh my gosh. And they fall down. Oh, right. They fall down over and over. They keep understanding more. They're like, is that what happened? Oh my gosh. Yes, exactly. And that's kind of what I'm talking about. And you know, I mentioned that Sunday that we're going to spend all of eternity learning from God, but we'll never know what God knows. Not all of it anyway. Um, because he's infinitely God.
00:14:10
Speaker
And what's so crazy about his wisdom is that the book that we call the Bible has filled with all kinds of incredible
00:14:19
Speaker
knowledge, truths, whatever word you want to use there, facts, but they're not even 1, 100th of a percent of what God knows. I mean, he's just shared a little bit with us and was kind enough to reveal it and we're going to go, whoa, you've got more?
Insights and Variations in Scripture
00:14:36
Speaker
I was trying to explain to Selah two nights ago when I was putting in her bed, she's like, how
00:14:41
Speaker
How come we can't know what God knows? And I'm like, babe, it'd be like a 2D stick figure trying to understand us. You know, it literally like he's out, he's in the page and he can only see in two dimensions. What if you even try to touch him? You get to see four circles pushing through the page or five circles. If your fingers are going through the page and they're going to be like,
00:15:02
Speaker
Huh? I see five discs. Is that God or who is that? Is that sailor, right? It's, it's just impossible to comprehend when you live in a 2d world, what 3d could be. Yeah. Right. That's what I was trying to explain to her. I was like, there's, you, you're talking about some, a being that was never created is always been always will be. It's a very, very simple example, illustration from, from nature. But I used to tell my kids, it's like an ant trying to explain the human world.
00:15:31
Speaker
I mean, if you think about it, how small they are, how, I mean, their existence is pretty mundane, you know, they do what they do. They keep their head down. They keep working. And all of a sudden this human shows up and everybody's going, what is this? Where's this coming from? Well, even seeing the bottom of our feet, as we step on them, those ants don't even begin to understand and comprehend everything that's above them.
00:15:55
Speaker
So eventually as we explore this good book, we'll run into things that we have questions about. And I've found that just about every question I've ever had has some kind of satisfying answer, at least questions of the word. Why are there differences between some of the gospels? Sometimes you have a demon-possessed man, there's just one and the other one, there's two and it's the same instance.
00:16:23
Speaker
And then theologians always have a pretty dang good answer as far as the why the differences, why this, why this wordage here, there's always an answer somewhere. Sometimes you just have to go digging or ask quite a few people before you actually find a satisfactory answer. It's out there somewhere. Well, I mean, it would be very much like if you at age 16 had walked up to a car, opened the door, looked inside, said, this is too complex for me. I don't understand it and just turned and walked away.
00:16:52
Speaker
Whereas by getting into the car, by immersing yourself in the vehicle, you begin to learn everything and how it works. What does this light mean? How do I turn on the radio? How to make the engine work? There are answers. You just got to be patient with the process and continuing to uncover it. And to your point, I think.
00:17:10
Speaker
Digging in with the help of very intelligent guys, scholars who've studied the language, studied the culture, studied the history, you begin to find out that if you don't have the answer to a question, it's not because it's not out there, it's just because you haven't found it yet. There are explanations for all of it.
00:17:28
Speaker
one of the topics that I like looking at because it was one of those things that I had questions about in high school. And then I started looking for answers. So I started, and it's, it's taken me a long time and I finally have like, I mean, I'll probably even go deeper because to me, it's just kind of an interesting subject around the books that didn't make it into the Bible, the Apocrypha, which sounds like some secret books. You can actually order them on Amazon. Yeah.
00:17:53
Speaker
I don't necessarily recommend it for everybody because these books, there's a reason why they're not in the Bible. Some of them historical and useful from an outside historical perspective. Some of them are just straight up lies. Not useful at all. They have interesting stories in them. Yeah. I've never done an in-depth study of the Apocrypha. Obviously, I've been a
00:18:22
Speaker
been in class has been in training regarding the canonization of scripture and why books were left out. There's good logical reasons. Yes, there's never there was never a point where God, and let's be clear about this, there was never a point where God said, this book, this book, this book, this book needs to be included, and we're going to call it the Bible. He never did that.
00:18:39
Speaker
But he led men, wise men who were in that, you know, early centuries of the church who had very good knowledge of what was going on to sit down and come up with some really good guidelines. Why do books belong in here and others not?
00:18:55
Speaker
Uh, and, and the cool thing is if you go back and trace the story of it, they started with facts. Here's what we know to be true. We know it because we have eyewitnesses who were there or the firsthand testimony of those eyewitnesses. So let's start from that and build off of that. And by doing that, what they did is they created a nice little filter that said, if the book doesn't make it all the way through every one of these tests, then they just don't belong. Some of those tests were.
00:19:22
Speaker
If it pointed to Christ, that was a big, big test. There has to be evidence of it pointing to Christ somewhere. They, I knew for the New Testament, they had to have an apostolic origin, as in they need to be written by an apostle who had firsthand knowledge or somebody who like spent a lot of time with one of the apostles, like, like the gospel, gospel mark, right? Spent a lot of time with Peter, like you mentioned on Sunday, like there's certain criteria they, they followed. I mean, through the Holy Spirit's guidance in order to select the right.
00:19:52
Speaker
And even specific stories or recounts of stories where if book A said this and book B said that, if one of them contradicted what they knew again to be fact because of testimony, like if this book's told a story of Jesus that they knew contradicted his character, then they would remove it going, okay, we know from hard evidence that this is who Jesus was or what he did. We're going to pull that one out.
00:20:20
Speaker
One of the last things about the Apocrypha that I always found confusing, and this bothered me for a long time until more recently, is if you read through the book, the whole Bible carefully, you'll notice in many different places in the Bible, it references books that aren't in the Bible, especially in Chronicles and Kings, it'll be like, go and read this attempt. In this book, you'll find more about that. You're just kind of like, where is this? Yeah, exactly.
00:20:45
Speaker
And a lot of instances, this doesn't cover all of them, but a lot of instances like Enoch, for example, gets mentioned a couple times. Those books, we just don't have them anymore. Like Enoch, we're pretty confident like what if you go into Amazon and go buy the book Enoch, it's available.
00:21:03
Speaker
we think it's mostly fabricated. We don't know how accurate it actually is. Unlike the process you talked about on Sunday, we have historical evidence just through the ceiling that the Bible is what it was and that it's accurate to what it was actually pretty being close to what was the original text.
Accuracy and Historical Evidence
00:21:20
Speaker
The people debate about only the smallest nuances of grammatical things now. Those are the only things in question are like literally periods and quotation marks, stuff like that. Everything else is pretty well known.
00:21:34
Speaker
But Enoch, we're not sure. We can't prove that we don't have a lot of historical evidence that it's accurate. And it seems to be, it doesn't quite pass the filters, you know, of like, does this align up with what seems to make up God's character? It kind of goes a strays from that. It misses some of the filters, so we don't include it.
00:21:55
Speaker
Still there's other books like that the Catholics take that we don't take that are kind of interesting historical books to look at are probably like closer, but not still don't pass the filter test. Yeah. And you're right. There are multiple references, uh, old and new Testament to, um, extra biblical sources, if you would like to call it that. And I think what they acknowledge is that even in books that were not, uh, verifiable to the point where they felt comfortable putting in there, there were verifiable truths in them.
00:22:26
Speaker
So they didn't throw out the entire book. They said, we know this part of the book is true because it's been verified by other sources. And so because of that, we'll put it in there. I think Jude references some extra biblical sources. And like you said, you know, the book of Kings, they refer to these records of the Kings that are not, we don't have any record of them anywhere that we have found so far.
00:22:49
Speaker
But yeah, I think it's cool that the Bible is so competent in itself that it's willing still to talk about other sources. You know, even Paul, I think Peter did too, but Paul definitely, he quoted different poets from that day and age and used phrases in there. So it's a pretty relevant book even for its time.
00:23:11
Speaker
Good. He said a lot of precedents what missionaries could or couldn't do in order to relate to a culture, right? Yeah. When I was working at a missions college, that was a constant thing of a constant part of the conversation is how do you contextualize the gospel to this culture? How do you make it relevant to them? Not that you're changing the essence of it, but how do you make it so they can understand it? Right. Right. For them. Um, and Paul was the master of that. He'd come in and be like, well, I was walking by and there was this, there was this,
00:23:40
Speaker
an altar to an unknown God.
00:23:44
Speaker
I've come to talk to you about that. God, he sent me as a representative, you know, it's like, it's an interesting way to kind of like break into the conversation. Yeah. I mean, obviously if I had a choice about who to pick and spend time with, Jesus will be first, but Paul and Peter would be a close second. I mean, they're just such interesting characters and you know, just their willingness to change their every thinking, their dreams, their visions in order to align their lives with Christ. I mean, you think about what Paul did.
00:24:14
Speaker
in those missionary journeys. And he didn't just hop in a car and drive a couple of hours to go do what he did. He literally spent the rest of his life walking the middle part of Asia and Europe and places like that to share this message. So something, we believe it's the gospel, but something grabbed his heart and changed who he was in a radical way. Absolutely.
00:24:36
Speaker
The last thing I want to talk about is how the enemy uses scripture.
Challenges and Misinterpretations
00:24:40
Speaker
He's actually very, very familiar with scripture, right? He quotes it and he'll use it. It's a tool. It's like he takes the truth and uses it as a tool to get people to do the things they ought not to do. What are some of the common ways, most common ways you find the enemy using scripture to manipulate the truth?
00:24:58
Speaker
I think, you know, going back to the story of Jesus being tested in the wilderness was a perfect example of how Satan would take Scripture and try to misapply it. I think we have a tendency to do that today, again, trying to take promises that were made for people in that day and age and apply them to our lives, trying to take practices that were a part of the current time in Scripture then and apply them to our day and time.
00:25:27
Speaker
I also think that the number one thing that he does is he will take in my mind, number one thing he does, he will take like a scripture that's really powerful, has really strong meaning. He'll pull it out of context. He'll put it on a poster at a bookstore and then we'll go read it. And then we don't understand the context in which it's written. And so again, we start misapplying it.
00:25:50
Speaker
changing it around to fit our needs, to meet our biases, those kinds of things. So again, we keep coming back to this whole idea of context of proper exegesis of the scripture. If you've ever taken a basic journalism class, it would help you
00:26:07
Speaker
to fight many of the things that Satan does with Scripture because they teach you those five questions you're supposed to ask. Who is it written to? Why is it written? What's the time period it's written? Where was this guy writing it from? All those things begin to help us understand the purpose behind the story that's being shared or behind the letter that's being written in cases like Paul's and Peter's.
00:26:28
Speaker
And we begin to eliminate some of the tools that Satan uses by helping us misunderstand and apply scripture in the wrong way.
00:26:38
Speaker
It was a really good example of talking about Satan with Jesus in the wilderness of Satan using I said Jesus. Yes. Satan invented that way back. Satan's been using that for a long time. I mean, even in the garden, uh, no, the garden, the garden of Eden is probably a different tactic, but it's like Satan doesn't really have new tricks. He just reuses and the old ones over and over. His old ones work so well. He doesn't really need very many. You know, um,
00:27:07
Speaker
I think a modern example that many of us are familiar with, where people misapply scriptures, where Jesus and some of his last directives to his disciples said, you know what, you'll be able to pick up snakes and they'll bite you and they won't harm you. And so now we have an entire segment of Christianity here in the United States that makes it a part of their worship experience to play with snakes in order to prove their faith. And I'm like, that's such a weird application of that scripture.
00:27:33
Speaker
Yeah. And eventually they die. Like some of the leaders are like, I've been bitten 50 times a 51 dead. Yeah. I have a, I wouldn't even call him a friend. He's just a guy I ran into one time, I think at a conference or something, who was a former EMT up in the Appalachian mountains. And he said, you would be amazed the number of times we get called out on Sunday mornings. It's such and such holiness church or such and such assembly of God where so-and-so has been bitten by a snake. He said, it just, it almost became sadly comical.
00:28:02
Speaker
You know, when the call came in, we knew what was coming up. Ma'am, gotta be careful when you're applying the word of God. Like you said, you can't just pull it open and hope for like, you can't treat the word of God like a fortune cookie. Exactly. That can be fun.
00:28:18
Speaker
It's not your horoscope. It's not your fortune cookie. It's not going to tell you how to play the stock market or anything like that. We, of course, emphasize this a lot in our church, but you cannot underestimate the importance of solid community around you when you read the scripture because then you've got people who can look at you and say, you may be allowing your prejudices to interpret that verse in the wrong way.
Community and Accountability
00:28:45
Speaker
It saved me in the past, helped me open my eyes to things that I probably could have stumbled over. Imagine you probably could share some of your own stories where somebody spoke truth to you and kept you from misdirecting scripture in the wrong way. I wish more people would. Yeah. I feel like most of the things I've had to correct myself, I'm like, I wish more people would have called me out on certain things because I was into the health and wellness thing for a hot second. Oh yeah. When I was first, when I was like 18, 19, someone handed me Miles Monroe and I'm like, this
00:29:14
Speaker
best thing ever. I was like naming it and claiming it. Not quite that, but getting close. I believe some heresy, but it's what you kind of do when you're young. You get exposed to some things and then you keep reading them. As long as you come back to the word while you're reading the books, over time you're like, I remember holding to this, I had an email with you on some scripture and I'm like, this is something I've held true for a really long time, but now I'm starting to reread it and think about it differently now.
00:29:44
Speaker
Because here's conversation about it. Here's a really good example how we have to be very careful to in that regard because there is and I'm not going to call her name because I don't want to get sidetracked by. She's actually somebody who I really respect and think she does a great ministry with what she does interpreting scripture for for her listeners. But she today mentioned the fact that she believes that God in scripture. Makes a reference to the fact that there are other gods out there.
00:30:12
Speaker
that he is obviously the Supreme God, but there are other gods. And she called it mono... Anyway, it's a combination between monotheism and idolatry. So she said that's in the Bible. And she based it off the fact that the Ten Commandments, God says you should have no other gods before me, which she thinks is a reference to the fact that there are other gods. To me, I don't interpret it that way. I think what it clearly says is there are no other gods, so don't try to create any to compete with me.
00:30:43
Speaker
That's an example of reading one passage of Scripture and trying to make an interpretation because if you go elsewhere in the Bible, for instance, in Deuteronomy 6 and the Shema, God tells Moses to teach the people to say, hero Israel, the Lord our God is one.
00:30:58
Speaker
There's only one God. You go to Isaiah. The prophet is encouraged by God to understand I am the Lord, dear God. There is no one else like me. So that that seems like such an innocent, sweet little statement from a very well recognized person. But you have to be a student of the entire book of the Bible, books of the Bible so that you know how to read those things. Yeah. And that one you could probably figure out just from reading the book the entirety and looking at it. Of course, Christian
00:31:29
Speaker
what Christians have believed for a long time also would fly against that too, which is why it's another pillar of how I try to find the truth. I'm like, have Christians believed for a long time? That one? No.
Controversial Interpretations and Orthodoxy
00:31:40
Speaker
In fact, I've never heard a Christian say that, actually. That's the first time I've heard that one. Well, and again, the real popular hot topic that everybody wants to reinterpret scripture is based around the idea of homosexuality and whether or not it's actually a sin, you know?
00:31:54
Speaker
2000 years, the church has stood solidly on the camp that that's the sin. So all of a sudden, the geniuses of 2024 have figured out a different way to interpret that scripture and say, this is what Paul meant. What Paul meant is very clear. It's been clear for 2000 years. We're the one that's muddy in the water when we try to reinterpret it. It's orthodoxy. It matters. It really does. If it's no, you need to be pretty like, you should go searching and be really critical of it. It's not that it can't, but
00:32:24
Speaker
That's a great line to encapsulate this whole podcast. Orthodoxy matters. Yeah. And there you go. And we'll wrap up with that. Thank you so much for listening to the Grove Hill church podcast, where we try to impact the life of every person with the whole gospel by any means possible. And of course that includes this episode. So share it with somebody who is searching out the word, wants to know more and is hungry for truth.