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The Word of God

 

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness, (II Timothy 3:16)

“If you love me, keep my commands.”  (John 14:15)

 

          A third of the fundamental ideas of Christianity is that the Bible is the Word of God. Some who criticize this assertion quickly point out that claiming that the Bible is the Word of God because the Bible says that it’s the Word of God is circular reasoning. By itself, it is not evidence that the Bible is the Word of God, and more than a bit of drivel that I write becomes a Shakespearian sonnet just because I put his name on the page, or any more than my putting Stephen King’s or Brandon Sanderson’s name on my novel would make it a best seller.

          There are books on this subject, and I can’t possibly do justice to it all here. But there is one point that seems obvious but is somehow missed by most of us. If we believe the Bible is the Word of God, we should pay close attention to it, study it, build our lives around the principles it teaches. That is what is meant by being a Christian. We may not be able to be perfect about it, but it should be our goal in all that we do, and our failure to do so should disappoint us deeply.

          Consider what would happen if, in the middle of a game of Uno, someone announced, “I don’t like the rules to this game. I want the winner to be the person who has collected all the cards in the deck.” I don’t know how such a game would be played, but I know this: the game would no longer be Uno. In the same way, those who want to change the rules of Christianity, to reject Scripture as the Word of God aren’t Christian. I’d say they aren’t necessarily bad people, but if they claim they are Christian, they are either mistaken or lying. And if they are trying to convince others to reject the Bible as the Word of God (and therefore authoritative in the life of a Christian) they are doing evil even if they have good intentions. Whatever they are being, it is not Christian. To claim it is, is evil, whether they intend it to be or not.

          And what of the Christian’s response to the Bible as the Word of God. Should we not turn to it with enthusiasm, to find out how to better live in accordance with its teachings? How often do we, instead, approach it with fear, trembling, and perhaps resentment, expecting to find yet another impossible standard that we’ll spend the rest of our lives failing to meet? Yet another reason for us to be praying for our attitudes, and the attitudes of those around us. 

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