Thoughts for the Day

I the Lord do not change.                               Malachi 3:6

One last day reflecting on Biblical authority!

With God all seems so black and white.  The Israelites were offered a simple choice: blessings or curses, life or death.  Proverbs contrasts the wise and the foolish.  Elsewhere the contrast is between the righteous and the wicked.  We are offered a simple choice: accept or reject Jesus.  And yet, to us God is also a God of paradoxes:  justice and mercy, eternal love and consuming fire.  Somehow, in ways we struggle to fathom, God holds it all together not in tension, not even in balance but in harmony.  What has this to do with Biblical authority?  I suggest one of the problems with us humans is that unquestioning faith can respond to those straight lines, the black and white, with judgement and legalism, and likewise to the paradoxes with preference or compromise.  I think God wants us to wrestle to know Him better and this includes wrestling with the scriptures.  We should both accept in faith all that they reveal of Him and apply our lesser minds to make as much sense of it as we can … guided by the Holy Spirit.

Fortunately, the Bible declares that God does not change.  If He did change, we could not rely on any of the Bible at all.  But because He doesn’t change, we can rely on all of it.  Indeed, we must rely on all of it and set each passage in the context of the whole revelation of God, humbly wrestling to understand as much as we can as best we can.  Sticking to the bits we like, the passages that support our current preferences (or even prejudices) and trying to minimise or discount the bits we would rather weren’t there simply will not do.

If that doesn’t seem much of a challenge, it probably should do!