HOW SAINTS READ THE BIBLE. (2)
Dangers to Bible Reading Believers.
1. Beware of using your own ideology learned from your culture, life’s experiences, and your ingrained bias adopted from eminent speakers from your own church.
2. Remember the Bible never contradicts itself
(a) Scripture in a number of places uses antinomy of two opposing truths next to each other which seem to contradict each other, and human logic will never fully understand them. If it did then salvation would be logical. It is spiritual and only the spiritual can understand. Understanding does not come from the human mind but from the Holy Spirit. Only those possessing Him within will gain spiritual discernment. (1 Cor. 2)
(b) It is not accessible from mere human analysis, human effort.
“But we speak the wisdom of God in a mystery, even the hidden wisdom…but God has revealed them unto us by his Spirit…now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given to us of God.” (1st Corinthians 2:7-14.)
(c). Two opposite Bible doctrines must not make you reject one for the other.
3. Once you do this your mind is closed and then you use your own ideology as the interpreting filter and arbiter of truth. Search the scriptures, but never graduate as a student of the Word.
4. The Age of Enlightenment raised the human mind to be god in theology. This caused 2,000+ Christian sects and denominations to spawn in the 19th Century.
5. The disastrous effects led to the humanizing of Bible believing churches with the demise of intercessory prayer gatherings, and radical conversions now classed as old fashioned and belonging to another era.
6. The roots of today’s apostasy:
(a). 18th C Higher Bible criticism
(b) textual criticism
(c). new inferior Bible versions based on Westcott and Hort’s 19th C revised Greek Text rejected that of Erasmus (1519) and the Received Text of Stephanus
(d). The anti-Reformation tendency of Protestants rejected the 16th & 17th C English Bibles under the pretext of modernizing English.
(e). Rationalism began to doubt the content and accuracy of Scripture.
(f). As Eve in Eden listened to Satan’s same ploy to doubt what God had said so the church was tempted to do likewise.
(g). The 19th C pulpit plague of private interpretation produced weird sensationalist evangelism by stage performers with the gift of the gab speaking extemporarily and pandering to emotionalism
(h). Its easy-religion made salvation a common consumer package for the masses.
(i). Among the moral majority the preacher became a law unto himself using his liberty for license in the evangelical and fundamental wings.
(j). Early 20th C bibliolatry idolized certain words, phrases and verses of holy writ to promote and justify any new fangled doctrine in the personality cults of the mega church movement that spread from the USA
(k). The guru in the pulpit became more important than the whole counsel of the Scripture.
7. Amid an era of doubting Scripture’s meaning believers become confused.
8. Hundreds of new, but erroneous modern translations amplify the confusion and believers increasingly trust the preacher, instead of the Holy Spirit to interpret the Scriptures.
1 John 2:27 KJV
“But the anointing which you have received of him abides in you, and you need not that any man teach you: but as the same anointing teaches you of all things, and is truth, and is no lie, and even as it has taught you, you shall abide in him.”