![]() And in my judgment, that’s the worst of all, because to him that knoweth to do good and doeth it not, to him it is sin. You can be very allegorical, because your experiences and your feelings and your emotions and your intuitions and your visions and your revelations are substantively the equivalent of Scripture.Īnd then you have, of course, the evangelical and the fundamental people who would die for the absolute authority of Scripture, but they get up week after week in their pulpits and never delineate its principles. You can make verses say whatever you want them to say. You can use it to paint anything you want. And also what invariably happens is in that particular movement you wind up with a tremendous freedom to use the Bible almost as a creative instrument. And so, the purity of expository preaching is watered down. And it becomes just as important to for them to teach their experiences as it does to teach the Bible. Recently I – and I’ve done this a couple of times, but when I was giving some messages along this line to a group of pastors, I said, “The liberals attack the Bible by denying its truth.” You know, and you can hear the ‘Amens’ ripple across the room.Īnd I said, “And then the people who have sort of flipped out on the experiential end and on the Charismatic end and have taken those things to excess, they come along and say, “Well, Jesus said to me,” or, “I had a vision,” or, “God spoke to me” or, “The Lord showed me what this meant.” And what they’re doing really is adding their own experience, their own revelations, their own visions to the Bible and in so doing that they undermine the authority of Scripture, too. They talk in broad generalities.īut it’s amazing to me also that even evangelicals do the same thing. The result of all of that is that there are no real significances attached to the terms themselves, so they don’t bother to deal in an expository manner. They want to deal with a different level of inspiration, whether it’s the inspiration of someone’s thought or whether it’s the existential approach that if it zaps you somewhere then that’s inspired for you or whatever approach they take that’s less than verbal plenary inspiration. We would say that liberals attack the authority of Scripture in a head-on attack. I think that even evangelicals and fundamentalists have the same problem. But it isn’t only the liberals that concern me in that dimension. In fact, they don’t make them at all, simply because they do not believe there’s anything significant about the terms, so why bother to deal with the terms. You know, one of the things that’s become apparent to me, as you just kind of keep your ear to the ground and watch what’s going on in terms of theology today, is that expositors never come out of institutions with a low view of Scripture – never. It is to be dealt with with tremendous commitment. The Bible is not to be dealt with flippantly, it is not to be dealt with lack of diligence, it is not to be dealt with in a cursory manner. And as such, it must be treated with a tremendous amount of respect. It reflects the mind and the heart and the will of God. But it is something we need to be reminded about that the Bible is the Word of God. Of course, I think we’re all aware of this. Treat it with awe and respect, protect its purity, and never knowingly violate its sanctity. All right, principle number one, the Word of God is a holy and sacred thing.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |