Literate or Illiterate?

            It’s almost football season which means you can go to any grocery store or book store and find a ton of magazines describing who the best fantasy football players are, how each team will do in the upcoming season and which team is predicted to win the Super Bowl. I have already looked at a few and put each down in disappointment. None of these are my favorites. I am still waiting for my favorite magazine to come out. Which one is that you may ask? It will be the one who picks the Broncos to win the Super Bowl. For me, all the other opinions are wrong.

            What I find funny is that we do the same thing with the Bible. If we like what the Bible says than we keep it. If we don’t like what it says then we ignore it. Many are also good at reading the Bible and using it for their own personal agendas and beliefs. The Bible and the writings of Martin Luther (yes the founder of the Protestant Reformation) were used by Hitler and the Nazi’s to persecute Jews. Christians used the Bible in the middle ages to launch the Crusades against the Muslims and to persecute Jews as well. The Bible was also used to defend slavery. Today, we use the Bible to fight against what we consider to be “moral and cultural battles” and the “defending of our faith to reclaim America for God.” But what good has come out of it?

            Christians refer to the Bible as the sword of the spirit. Have you ever been to a place like Medieval Times or a Renaissance festival? If you put a sword into a skilled person’s hand and ask them to demonstrate its use in front of a crowd you can have good entertainment with cheers and applause. But give the same sword to an unskilled person and ask them to do the same things with it and you better have a medical team standing by. Unfortunately, the latter is a picture of the church today. People are wielding scriptures around in defense and the result is the injuring of people with their words while others run away in fear.

            The problem is that the church is not as Biblical literate as we really believe ourselves to be (we are actually quite illiterate). An example of this is how people quote Leviticus to speak against homosexuality but probably has no idea why it was written, who it was written to or what else the book teaches. (Leviticus also says that a person cannot plant a field with two kinds of seed, you cannot wear clothes made with 2 different types of material and you cannot put tattoo’s on yourself [Lev. 19:19, 28] but we seem to look over these laws even though they are surrounded by commandments against sexual sins and punishment for sins.) Please understand, this does not mean you need to have a formal education to understand or teach other’s God’s word. However, it should be important to understand what the Bible means and understand its original context before we start using it to justify our agendas.

            So where does the problem come from? Part of it comes from the church. Today many preachers give short, seeker sensitive sermons to encourage others. Many speakers do not even use the Bible in their sermons. Also there is no encouragement for people to bring their Bibles to church since the scriptures are either given by power points or by handouts. There is nothing necessarily wrong about that. However, it leaves the listeners not understanding much of the Bible and its context.

Part of it also comes from the people who go to church. The attitude is that if the pastor said it then it must be right because he has the education and this is what he gets paid to do. Yet it was the church in Berea that was considered to have “noble character” because they did not just except Paul’s words but looked it up to see for themselves if he was really telling the truth (Acts 17). Those listening have a responsibility to study the Bible for themselves.

            So what should we do? First realize that we don’t really understand the Bible as much as we think we do. It means that we need to learn why a particular book was written and what it meant in the context of those people. Second, it means that pastors need to go deeper in their preaching and the listener needs to study the Bible for themselves. Third, when we quote the Bible let’s do so with love and grace rather than judgment and anger realizing that words can have the power to help and heal or hurt and cause others to turn away.