The Neglected Riches of God's Written Word

I want to begin this entry reminding readers of my original purpose for this blog and maybe expound on that a bit.  I’ve said before, I want to outline, for those who have known me for years, where my thought has come from and where it has landed and will stay, I believe, for the long run.    

And let me reveal some of my motivation.  I feel responsible to refute what I formerly claimed to believe.  For the last quarter of a century, I had been “eager to teach” and should have listened to the warnings of James to not be so eager to step into this office.  I taught many women’s bible studies and also let my voice be heard often and, by testimony of some, persuasively in the midst of Sunday morning bible studies and even a few times got up before the entire congregations to spout “what God had recently told me”. 

This blog is my penance.  I do enjoy writing, but there are days when putting these posts together feels very wearisome.  This subject matter requires much more patience than I was born with.  My way of blogging in the past was more “stream of consciousness” and then just hit post, trusting my thoughts to be profound and worth sharing.  Now I feel the need to be more careful.  I try to check each thing against the Word of God and provide references so that it is not me speaking, but rather proclaiming what God speaks in his Word.  Perhaps this practice will prevent me wanting to remove my posts from the Internet five or ten years from now.  So think of this blog as printed “retractions” of many old posts, conversations, teachings and general spouting off.  I am not rebuking others as much as I am rebuking myself.  I hope these posts will be taken in that light.

I realize lately that many things I learned over the past few decades were from teachers and authors who slipped often into use of eisegesis rather than exegesis.  This is when you pull verses out of context and read into the text, inserting your own ideas, inserting what is not given in the text nor from any context: textual, cultural, historical or otherwise.      I am absolutely sure that I have been guilty of this practice myself. 

To give an example I want to look at an area of belief where I had used a few verses that I had read certain meaning into and used to support certain positions.  I will also show how the meaning I inserted does not hold up when you bring the verse back into context of the surrounding passage.

I’d become, in recent years, very comfortable with the phrase “God showed me” and “God told me”.  I was comfortable with the idea that God could communicate to me outside of His Word.  I would also see pictures in my imagination and imagine some spiritual interpretation to them.  I would have thoughts that, if they were accompanied by certain strong feelings, I would assume came from God and were words from him. 

I’m surprised, now that I look back, that I didn’t fear God.  It amazes me that I had the nerve to speak things in the God’s name when my basis for believing the words came from him was so flimsy.  My belief in the authority of my words came from my imagination and feelings.  But I had become inured to any sense of danger since so many around me did the same thing and had not been struck by lightning.  But what did I think?  Did I think the judgment James warned would fall on careless teachers would be immediate?  And even if we ought not to fear judgment, because Jesus paid it all, are we not fearful of running up the debt so that “grace may increase”?

Okay, that’s a whole other blog in the making.  I’ll try not to bunny-trail.  So hearing God’s voice, hearing from God outside of his Word, is it biblical?  Is it something we can expect as a normal everyday experience for every Christian?  Look first at this verse:

“…and how from childhood you have been acquainted with the sacred writings, which are able to make you wise for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus.  All Scripture is breathed out by God and profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness, that the man of God may be competent, equipped for every good work.”  2 Timothy 3:15-17

So this passage cites the sufficiency of scripture.  Sufficient simply means “enough”.  It really couldn’t be clearer.    So given the riches we’ve been given and how long it would take just to plumb the mighty depths of God’s word, why go outside of that?  And on top of that, there is the fear-of-God factor to it all.  It’s true that no one stones false prophets anymore, but if they still did, there would be a lot of stoning going on.  I know there are things that I felt sure God was telling me at one time, and now it seems I was mistaken.  This should give me pause… and it has!

I know the idea of what “scripture” entails differs among some believers.  But for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume that most would agree with me that scripture includes not just the Old Testament, but also the writings of the apostles that compose the New Testament canon. (Protestant, not Catholic.)  The Old Testament is honored because it was quoted by Jesus and the Apostles.  And the writings of the Apostles are honored because they were commissioned by Jesus and those who were there for the resurrection and were present for the ascension.  And of course there is Paul, to whom Jesus appeared separately and whose teachings the other apostles approved. 

These apostles have authority where we do not.  The commission given to them by Jesus cannot be transferred to us.  (Though there are those who would argue that point.  I’ve come to settle on the idea that God’s hand was on them in a special way to deliver the faith once for all to the saints.  All things being equal, they are simply “more equal”.  That could be a whole separate blog, but I’m going to go forward with these ideas held as a given.  But let’s look at least at this section of 2 Peter that not only affirms Paul’s teaching as scripture, but also affirms the believer’s need to receive a founding in proper doctrine to guard their mind against false teachers.

“…as he does in all his (Paul’s) letters when he speaks in them of these matters.  There are some o things in them that are hard to understand, which the ignorant and unstable twist to their won destruction, as they do the other Scriptures.  You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability. 2 Peter 3:16-17

I don’t want to be a lawless person.  I want to have standards and hold others to standards if they teach me, that standard being God’s word.  I want to be like the Bereans who were praised as being noble since they checked the teaching of the Apostles against scripture to see if what they were saying was true.  I have been unstable in the past, lost my stability like this passage had warned against.  How do I avoid this?  I stick close to God’s word and stick close to teachers who stick close to God’s word.

I did not used to stick so close.  Here is a verse I used to justify this:

“I still have many things to say to you, but you cannot bear them now.  When the Spirit of truth comes, he will guide you into all the truth…” John 16:12-13a

I though this meant that not all was revealed to the apostles.  I imagined volumes of Jesus' truth that he simply didn't have time to teach on his short time on earth.  Silly me.  As if the Father would have left Jesus with too little time.  God's wisdom was surely deep, I thought, and the Spirit would "fill the gaps" for where modern life had rendered scripture somehow insufficient.

But I had taken this verse out of context.  First of all, Jesus is speaking to the Apostles, the ones who will complete the canon and write the New Testament.  He was indeed, at that point, not yet finished teaching them.  He continued to teach them until he was taken into heaven after the resurrection.  Also, the Holy Spirit, as it says in the same chapter, will “take what is mine and declare it to you.”  They needed the Holy Spirit to understand the work of Jesus and to fully understand the scripture.  He would show that the whole scripture was about him, was testifying about his work to be completed on the cross.  The Holy Spirit would illuminate not only the Old Testament, but also would make sense of all the Jesus had already said to them.  Their understanding of scripture was dim before the Holy Spirit came.  

This passage in John 16 also says that the Holy Spirit will specifically convict the world of sin and righteousness and judgment.  It’s weird, but those “words from God” that I had received from others and often gave to others myself usually had nothing to do with any of these three things.  Often, the things “prophesied” flattered the hearer, which is the opposite of Jesus' description of the Spirit's work. 

Romans 3:20 says that through the Law (which is scripture) comes the knowledge of Sin.  And the scripture is full of testimony to God’s righteousness and about judgment.  Scripture also contains God’s comforting words.  And, what do you know?  The Holy Spirit is called the Comforter (John 14:26).  Doesn’t it make sense that the Holy Spirit, who seems to have all these same qualities as the Word of God, would be working hand in hand with scripture for these purposes?  In fact, I don’t need reason to come to this conclusion, because scripture itself says that God’s Word is the “Sword of the Spirit” (Ephesians 6:17, Hebrews 4:12)

Jesus also said to abide in him or we could do nothing. (John 15)  He goes on in this passage to give requirements for bearing fruit, such as “if you abide in me and my word abides in you”.  In the same passage, he says to bear fruit you must “keep” (treasure) his commandments.  So he equates staying connected to him with staying connected to his Word, not basking in some ethereal feeling of God’s presence, which is what I hear some people call “abiding in the Lord”.  

Many use Mary, Martha and Lazarus’ sister, as an example of someone who was praised for just sitting at Jesus’ feet and enjoying his presence.  But it was clear from the story about her that what she was doing was not "basking in his presence" but rather hanging on his every word, mind fully engaged.  (Luke 10:38-42)

Here is another passage I had used to use to justify learning things “from the Spirit” and apart from God’s word.

“But the anointing that you received from him abides in you, and you have no need that anyone should teach you.  But as his anointing teaches you about everything, and is true, and is no lie—just as it has taught you, abide in him.” 1 John  2:27

Now first of all, this is not even a complete thought.  There is a “but” at the beginning of it.  And look at the context of this verse… it’s in the midst of a letter sent for the purpose of teaching the church.  Obviously John did not mean to say that believers didn't need teachers.  He wasn't implying, "You just need the Holy Spirit and off you go!  You’ll become a mature Christian all on your own!"  Of course not.  The apostles all spent their energy to their dying breath teaching and re-teaching trying to keep believers from error and false doctrine.  That, in fact, is the purpose of the letter of 1 John.  There were false teachers that were leading believers astray, claiming possession of special knowledge (gnosis) that believers needed in addition to John's teaching in order to really get it right.  They were trying to teach that believers needed something more.

John was not telling them the didn't need teachers, but that they didn't need additional teachers, ones outside the fellowship of the church.  They indeed had already been taught the truth of the Gospel from John and had possession of the scriptures and of the Apostles’ letters and they didn’t need anything else.  Additional teaching from those who had been “of us but went out from us to show that they were not of us” would muddy the waters of their thinking and destroy the purity of their faith.  Ironically, this verse supports the opposite of the idea I was reading into it.  It teaches against adding to scripture, not arguing for it.

Most misunderstandings in interpretation of scripture can be cleared up by putting the verse or verses back into their original context.  What is just a balm to my soul is hearing teachers who proclaim entire passages, multiple passages, perhaps chapters, as they preach, bringing forth law and gospel in beautiful clarity.

But instead of exegesis of passages of scripture, many “exegete” (or rather eisegete) one verse, or perhaps a single word out of the verse, taking the definition of that word and preaching a whole sermon using every idea that could flow out of the definition of that one word, as if definitions were approved by God to be profitable for correction and instruction.

Some teachers “exegete” almost anything before practicing exegesis on a passage of scripture.  Popular targets include movies, fairy tales, stories from their own lives or the lives of others, urban legends, dreams that they had, or pictures that rose up in their imagination.  They take these thing and mine for “deeper meaning” and the “spiritual nuggets of truth” out of these things  as though everything under the sun were  declared to be profitable for training, correction, teaching and instruction… at least if the teacher is clever enough to squash it into a Bible-ish teaching.

Why abandon the Word of God when there is so much of it that most of us probably haven’t scratched the surface?  Why do we turn to so many other things, including our own imaginations and hearts?

Here is, by the way, a more detailed refutation of extra-biblical revelation by people with more education and knowledge of the Bible than I have.  This article specifically refutes Blackaby’s view of hearing from God.  This is very much worth reading and if fairly short and to the point.

How firm a foundation, ye saints of the Lord,
Is laid for your faith in His excellent Word!
What more can He say than to you He hath said
Who unto the Savior for refuge have fled?