One of the things that happens when people believe something very strongly – whether that’s something religious, political, scientific, pseudo-scientific, or even just a belief about life in general – is that they hold it closely and defend it against all comers^[1]. And that’s perfectly natural; humans construct belief systems and knowledge systems in order to feel more secure in what is really a very uncertain world. If something (or someone) comes along and threatens that perceived security which is engendered by those belief systems, then they themselves feel threatened.

Where the problem lies with this, at least in terms of the many denominations of the Christian faith – groups of people who all profess to believe in Jesus of Nazareth, but all believing slightly different things from other such groups – is when those people holding those beliefs insist that everyone else’s beliefs are somehow ‘wrong’, and that they themselves – and only them – have it all right and correct. And that means that their own belief system indirectly depends on someone else’s belief system being wrong. So the trouble begins when they go on to tell others just how wrong those others are. And this is part of the Religious Spirit, as I describe in this article.

Sometimes, though, the very worst of these people appear on forums and blast those with whom they don’t agree. Not only does this constitute the dreaded ‘Bad Witness‘!, in that it tarnishes God’s ‘reputation’ amongst unbelievers^[2] but also it damages their chances of coming to a close Relationship with God. He has His ways around this, of course, but it’s not good when people carry baggage into that Relationship that they picked up even before they were believers due to the efforts of those of the Religious spirit. And yes, you’ve guessed it: most of these people identify as Evangelicals!

Anyway, one of the worst things these people do is to try and appear to be able to decide who is ‘in’ and who is ‘out’. Who is ‘saved’ and who is not ‘saved’. Which is quite a stretch for anyone, if you ask me!

And so I go into this behaviour in full detail in the following article, which I first published in December, 2016 – but which is still relevant today, hence the reblog. I hope it blesses you!

I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved. They will come in and go out, and find pasture. (John 10:9)

As my regular readers will know, I very often contribute on forums where some of the worst excesses of Christian judgementalism can be seen. On those forums, there are some pretty nasty examples of hard-line, dogmatic religious types who are so harsh and unbending that they portray a horrible image of my Father God. And so, I go on the forums in order to show the hurting, the true seekers, the rejected of society, that not all those who profess to follow Jesus Christ are harsh and ungracious. I go on there to demonstrate the gentleness^[3] of Jesus to those who are sinking in the mire of everyday drudgery and hopelessness. I go on there to show people that God loves them, exactly as they are, and that He loves them in spite of everything that they think stands in between them and Him; everything that would cause their sensitive consciences to believe that they are not welcome in His Presence – when in actuality, they are fully welcome there. In short, I go on there to counter the nastiness exhibited by those who claim to be working ‘from the Scriptures’, and yet don’t even come close to exhibiting the character of the Christ revealed in those Scriptures. And I have to say that sometimes it’s hard to be gracious and gentle with these people, whom God also loves, but I do the best I can.

So of course I come under heavy fire from the harsh and judgemental. Because I do not agree with what they preach, and indeed I actively stand against it, I too become ‘unacceptable’ in the eyes of people I don’t even know; unacceptable both to them, and, they hasten to tell me, to god as well. No doubt the words ‘heresy’ and ‘blasphemy’ have featured in replies to my comments more than happens to most people! It seems that some would rather espouse a gospel of harshness and nastiness than one of love, joy, peace and all the other fruits of the Spirit. And, to be honest, sometimes this type of action is damaging; occasionally I need to take a break from the battle and recharge.

Well, this article is about why, despite their vitriol, I am not afraid of these people, and also about why you in your turn need not be afraid of them either.

Gentle soul, honest seeker after Truth, be encouraged!

Let me tell you that nothing that these people can say can change the reality of God’s love for you, nor can they change the passion with which He seeks you – although by the way they talk (well, ok, write!), anyone would think that they are the people who decide who ‘gets into heaven’ or whatever. (Actually writing that down in black on white re-emphasises for me how ludicrous that statement actually is!).

I do believe that they like to think of themselves as ‘God’s Gate-Keepers’! – but we do not need to be afraid of them! They hold no power to do the things that their writing suggests they imagine they can do!

Remember that these people have neither the right nor the mandate to be God’s ‘Receptionists’ – people who would like nothing better than to screen others in order to determine their acceptability as people who are/are not allowed into God’s Presence. What I am saying is that, well-meaning and sincere though some of these people may be, they are not the Gate-Keepers.

Probably the principal harm that they can do is that they ‘shut the doors of heaven in men’s faces’; they make it appear as if it is impossible to please God – except, of course, by following their particular set of Rules and Requirements – and thus put people off following their hearts’ desires and seeking God. Their efforts at ‘evangelism’ by pointing out ordinary folks’ ‘sin’ actually puts their victims off following a path of faith, when actually they were quite amenable to the idea before they met these people! The other main harm they do is to give others a really bad idea of what god is like; to outsiders, their god looks vicious, mean and nasty! And who would want to follow a god like that?

This is all, to my mind, completely reprehensible, because the Christian Life is so full of blessing, and the Gate-Keepers are denying that blessing to those whom they damage with their harsh attitudes.

These are indeed the people of whom Jesus said, “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the door of the kingdom of heaven in people’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to”. (Mt23:13)

So, let me tell you again that these people are not the Gate-Keepers. Jesus said of Himself, “I am the gate; whoever enters through me will be saved [kept safe]. They will come in and go out, and find pasture” (Jn 10:9).

Nobody can take away God’s call on your life: “However, those the Father has given me will come to me, and I will never reject them” (Jn 6:37 NLT). As a believer, your life is “…hidden with Christ in God” (Col 3:3) – it is kept safe where thieves cannot “…break in and steal” (Mt 6:19). At worst, all they can do is hurt you in earthly terms, as Jesus said in Lk 12:4, “I tell you, My friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body and after that can do no more”. Jesus was not talking here only about unbelievers who persecute Christians; He was also talking about anyone who tries to steal your assurance of salvation, including, and especially, other believers. No one else is ‘religious’ enough to even want to steal your assurance! And that, then, is the other major harm that these people do.

But the truth of the matter is this: if you have a relationship with Jesus Christ, then no one can take that away from you, no matter how much they might try to devalue your faith and beliefs. They can quote scripture at you all they like but you know, you know that you’re safe. And there ain’t a thing they can do about it.

Let me say it again: you do not need to pay any heed to what these people say. You do not need to be afraid of them. They have neither power nor authority over you. Your salvation depends on Jesus, not on pleasing men; giving them cause to have a good opinion of you. The fear of man has to do with voluntarily placing the ownership of our life in the hands of men. We change our behaviour in order to be accepted. Well, there’s no need to do that, not ever. It’s not about pleasing men at all, not even other believers who want you to conform. Your life belongs to God, not to the Gate-Keepers. Proverbs 29:25 (KJV) says that “The fear of man bringeth a snare but whoso putteth his trust in the Lord shall be safe” Put in more modern English, the Good News Bible says, “It is dangerous to be concerned with what others think of you, but if you trust the Lord, you are safe” (Prov 29:25 (GNB))

And finally, to me, the crowning verse is this. In 1Cor2:15, in the middle of a treatise on handling others’ insistence on ‘doctrinal correctness’, St. Paul says that:

Did you see that? If you are a spiritual person, that is, guided by the Holy Spirit, you can do all the thinking and reasoning about your beliefs, thinking things through, coming up with answers, and learning new things about God, and nobody – nobody! – can judge you. You are simply not subject to others’ judgement – period.

Maybe none of this makes any sense to you; maybe you have never encountered one of these people, at least not on the forums. But I’d wager you will have encountered them in ‘real life’. Maybe you’ve heard certain street preachers (And I’m not tarring them all with the same brush here!) saying harsh things about you being a ‘sinner’, or maybe someone has knocked on your door, and under the pleasant veneer you have detected a hard, unbending religion. Maybe you’re in a church where the leadership is strict and authoritarian, and permits neither questions nor deviation from the ‘norm’. Or maybe there’s someone at your place of work who tells you that as far as God is concerned, your best is simply not good enough and is worthless in eternal terms. You see, we are all subjected to these kinds of people, and I’m here to tell you today that you do not need to take any notice of them, whether you are a believer or not.

Don’t get me wrong; I firmly believe that these ‘harsh’ people are people who believe in, and love the Lord Jesus Christ. I also firmly believe though, that they are acting from a tragically misguided^[4]) view of God (again, as detailed in this article) and that their actions are based mainly on a desire to see people believe in what they see as a ‘right doctrine’. In other words, they want others to live their religion in the same way as our harsh friends do. But until God reveals more of His loveliness, His gentleness and His mercy to these people, they simply will not be able to see it, so blinded are they to God’s goodness; blinded indeed by their religion. Doctrine has become more important then walking with Jesus. This is why I try to be gentle with them; they are simply wayward children who do not understand. There is more on this in this article, which in general is themed similarly to this one.

No, the reason I wrote this present article was to encourage those who have been attacked by these people and (as is usual in these situations) had their faith and/or ‘salvation status’ called into question. You’ve been told you are an heretic; you have been told these are ‘demonic lies’ and that you are ‘in danger of hell fire’, that you are in gross error and you need to change your ways, and that it’s especially bad because you are publishing these ‘lies’ in the public domain for everyone to see. I know the arguments and the threats of these people; I have seen them so many times and they are boringly familiar.

But be encouraged! God thinks so much more highly of you than you can possibly imagine, and He has His best for you in your life no matter what the Gate-Keepers would like to say. Remember they can’t touch your salvation; they may rock your boat, but only if you let them by taking notice of their threats.

Remember this: These people are NOT the Gate-Keepers. Your salvation is safe and secure in Christ, and their words mean absolutely nothing!  Isn’t that great?

Do Not Fear the Gate-Keepers!

Some years ago now, I published an essay describing how I felt that God is being misrepresented by the Church because of various doctrines that make Him seem somehow ‘less attractive’ to people outside the Church^[1]. Doctrines that give people a really good set of reasons why they would never ‘darken the doors’ of a church building – and I really don’t blame them.

Not much has changed since that essay was written. Church attitudes change at a less-than-glacial pace; I think it’s true that, in religious circles, ideas, attitudes and doctrines remain more set-in-stone more than in any other part of society. That said, when I say that  not much has changed, it’s probably more accurate to say that this is really true only in the most hardened churches, where the inmates are partly deaf to the Voice of the Spirit. Encouragingly, in some places, people are coming to realise more and more that past attidues should be left behind and more ‘modified’ attitudes adopted in the light of things that God has said to them. I suppose that this is what church growth actually looks like in practice; as the individuals in a given congregation have their attitudes slowly and gently modified by the Spirit, so then the congregation as a whole gradually reflects those attitudes in increasing measure. And if I can change, despite having once been one of those apparently hardened people, then I guess anyone can^[2]. It’s also quite instructive to me in that, in the past, I have usually majored on what individual spiritual growth looks like, and not really said much about what it looks like at a congregational level. I’m still learning!

At any rate, the essay is still applicable today, and even more so in that I now have a series going – my series ‘The Problems of Evangelicalism ‘ – for which it is particularly relevant. And so here’s the essay, unchanged from its first publication, except for my usual tidying-up of asterisked footnotes into properly-indexed ones.

Here is the essay:

“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” 2Cor10:5 (KJV)

I’ve recently identified the driving force behind my contentious blog posts, my forum postings (usually contesting posts by religious hard-liners) and my attitudes in general towards things spiritual.

It’s simply this: I feel passionately that the God that I love has been grossly misrepresented by certain current Church doctrines and attitudes. It is apparent to me that the Gospel of a God Who loves everyone, and saves people entirely by Grace, has been watered-down by several seriously-flawed, man-made ideas.

Jesus said, “But in vain they do worship me, teaching for doctrines the commandments of men” (Mat 15:9 (KJV)) – in other words, things from men’s imaginations being taught as if they are truths worth stating as part of your belief structure (which is basically what a doctrine is).

Now, St. Paul wrote of ‘the weapons of our warfare’ being mighty in God for the destruction of [spiritual] strongholds (2Cor10:4). And the current spiritual strongholds that are in place are that God is seen as a horrible, evil, vicious, judgemental dictator; partly because of how certain people portray Him, and partly because of doctrines that have been held as true – in my opinion, erroneously – by the Church.

And it’s time to tear down these strongholds – these ‘imaginations’ – and that’s why I post as I do. These horrible man-made ideas, that malign the name of God and besmirch His Character, are indeed the ‘imaginations’ that need to be torn down, and the reason they need that is because, as the verse above says, they exalt themselves against the knowledge of God.

Let’s look at the verse again:

“Casting down imaginations, and every high thing that exalteth itself against the knowledge of God, and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ” 2Cor10:5 (KJV)

‘Exalting’ means ‘lifting up’, so what we are saying here is that these ‘imaginations’ – doctrines made up by men – are lifted up against the knowledge of God; they give Him a bad name, if you like, and skew humanity’s perception of Him. They portray Him in ways that are simply untrue.

And so I am completely fed up with my wonderful God being portrayed as horrible, by these ‘imaginations’, and by people who really should know better.

Let me be more specific, and use a few examples.

The Doctrine of Hell

Of course, the first up is the doctrine of Hell, as espoused by most people in the current Evangelical branch of the Church. This doctrine states that if a person does not believe in Jesus in this life, then when they die they go to Hell where they will be tortured forever.

This awful doctrine speaks of a cold, heartless god who, quite arbitrarily, sends people who have never heard the gospel, to this Hell place.

To quote from Rob Bell,

“Millions have been taught that if they don’t believe, if they don’t accept in the right way, that is, the way the person telling them the Gospel does, and they were hit by a car and died later that same day, God would have no choice but to punish them forever in conscious torment in hell. God would, in essence, become a fundamentally different being to them in that moment of death, a different being to them forever. A loving heavenly Father who will go to extraordinary lengths to have a relationship with them would, in the blink of an eye, become a cruel, mean, vicious tormenter who would ensure that they had no escape from an endless future of agony. Does God become somebody totally different the moment you die?

“That kind of God is simply devastating. Psychologically crushing. We can’t bear it. No one can. And that is the secret deep in the heart of many people, especially Christians: they don’t love God. They can’t, because the God they’ve been presented with and taught about can’t be loved. That God is terrifying and traumatizing and unbearable.

“And so there are conferences about how churches can be more “relevant” and “missional” and “welcoming,” and there are vast resources, many, many books and films, for those who want to “reach out” and “connect” and “build relationships” with people who aren’t part of the church. And that can be helpful. But at the heart of it, we have to ask: Just what kind of God is behind all this?

“Because if something is wrong with your God, if your God is loving one second and cruel the next, if your God will punish people for all of eternity for sins committed in a few short years, no amount of clever marketing or compelling language or good music or great coffee will be able to disguise that one, true, glaring, untenable, unacceptable, awful reality.”

– Rob Bell, Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived

Everything that exists was created by God. If Hell exists, then it too must have been created by Him. But I find it hard, nay, impossible, to believe that God has indeed created Hell. It’s quite simple to tell, really: we’ve just said that by Him all things were created (Col 1:16); and without Him nothing was created that has been created (John 1:3) and, put simply, God cannot have created Hell because in Him there is no darkness. And he’d have to be a pretty dark person to have created Hell, but of course He’s not. And therefore Hell does not exist, or at least not the Hell that is portrayed in modern Christian doctrine.

(1Jn1:5)
You see, that Hell doctrine has to have increasingly complex arguments put in place to defend it, where really it (the doctrine) should not exist at all and it is simpler and far more realistic to simply discard the whole doctrine.

I too was brought up in the faith believing in the doctrine of Hell, and would you believe that I almost rejoiced in thinking that those who did not agree with me were destined to burn there. How sick was I? And yet I do think that some people believe this but without really thinking it through. They are just parroting what they have been told. There are so many other arguments I could make on this subject, but this is not the place for them. Click here for my blog’s resource page on Hell, which also includes my own personal opinions, for what they’re worth.

And, in fact, there are encouraging signs that individuals like me in the Church are ‘privately’ coming around to the point of view that God does not, and never has, condemned people to eternal suffering based on their theology. Here’s an interesting article on that subject.

‘Angry God’

The next travesty and slur on the Character of  God is the Doctrine of ‘Angry God’. Now it’s not named as such in any doctrinal handbook, but it’s inferred by most Christian doctrine that god’s holiness is so pure that he can’t bear to look upon sin, and his ‘wrath’ is so great that he has to ‘punish’ people for sin. He’s a god of destruction, one that kills women and children and commands his servants to hamstring all their enemy’s donkeys. Over to Jeff Turner for a good summary of the way that God is seen by most people – and what Jesus does to banish that notion:

“The sad truth is that we have all inherited a portrait of God that looks far more like Mt. Olympus than Mt. Zion, and it’s an inheritance that most are too terrified to discard. In our Western traditions God is often presented as being cold, austere, distant and judgmental. We imagine Him surrounded by dark clouds, with a scowl sprawled across his angry mug.

“He’s very eager to be pleased, but, unfortunately, extremely difficult to please. He is a hermit that is notoriously difficult to coax out of hiding and even harder to keep around because the slightest scent of sin can send him bolting for the hills in a rage. In fact, one of our imagined deity’s greatest weaknesses is His sin allergy. Wherever there are humans behaving badly, you can be sure he’ll be absent. Where there are broken people doing broken things with their broken lives, God will not be present, for in our mythology human sin works like Kryptonite against him, forcing Him to retreat and separate Himself from us.

“He is mostly sad and mad, and rarely, perhaps when his enemies bite the dust, glad. He is heartbroken over our lack of devotion and disinterest in prayer, but is himself quite disinterested in the everyday events of our lives. He is a demented Santa Claus of sorts, who tightly clenches the naughty list – which we’ve all landed on, by the way – and dreams of filling our spiritual stockings with the burning coals of judgment. When he looks at [a nation], he doesn’t see individual people who desperately need love and mercy, but a widespread, faceless blob of darkness, deserving judgment. He’s sickened by our lack of fervency, repulsed by our spotty church attendance records, and gets all up in arms when our summer vacation extends over a Sunday morning. To put it simply, He’s angry.

“The God that a large percentage of us imagine and pay homage to is disgruntled, disappointed, and disapproving. While some may be fortunate enough to have imagined Him in His true state, my experience has been that 9 out of 10 people, myself included, do not see Him rightly. We’ve been subjected to hours of teachings that have subtly sown into our minds the idea that He is primarily a legal deity concerned with rights and wrongs, and this subconscious programming is absolutely killing us. I would even venture to say that it is the leading cause of anxiety, fear, discontentment, and depression among Christians. In all of this fear, turmoil, and mythology, however, Jesus Christ, the Word made flesh, still stands in our midst, combatting these false ideologies, and seeking to shine the light of Grace upon the face of His Daddy.”

– (From Saints in the Arms of a Happy God: Recovering the Image of God and Man, by Jeff Turner, and quoted in better context in my previous article ‘The Ultimate ‘Bad Witness’‘)

And as beautifully written by someone I know on Facebook,

“Many people live their lives in depression and anxiety from the theology through which they find their existential meaning, fearful of the future, confused about God and thus about themselves, walking around believing they are rotten to the core, and that God is disgusted with them and would wrathfully destroy them except that he sees them through the appeasing violence done to Jesus. This is a prison for the mind and heart. It is not the Abba that Jesus revealed, nor is it the revelation of the sons and daughters of God, nor is it the life abundantly Jesus came to give, nor is it the power of the kingdom of heaven that dwells within us.

“Now my goal is to help Christians deconstruct this false, baseless idea of existence, and the structures of reasoning that have imprisoned their mind, and give them permission to break free of fear and believe and trust in an extravagantly good Father, who is revealed in the Son, [Whose] love is an endless ocean that you cannot escape as long as you exist, because your existence is energized by nothing less than infinite love. There is no other reason for you to exist except for love” [emphasis mine]

Yes, be assured that Father God is good – as represented by Jesus. Anything else is a complete misconception. Want to know what Father God is like? He’s just like Jesus: “He who has seen Me has seen the Father” (John 14:9) and “The Son is the radiance of God’s glory and the exact representation of his being” – (Heb 1:3).  And in Him there is no darkness – none whatsoever! Let’s read that Scripture (1Jn1:5) again:

‘God Hates Gays’

I’ve written about this many times before, but the principle of persecution of, well, not just gay/lesbian/transgender (LGBTQ) people, but other ‘minorities’ too, is just the tip of the iceberg. The Old Testament is full of lists of people who, supposedly, God will not permit in the ‘assembly’, that is, people who are not allowed to worship him. This list includes all those who are not of the tribes of Israel, and even within those tribes, there are many minorities – lepers, those who have been ’emasculated by cutting or crushing’, those with various skin conditions, women on their menstrual cycles – the list goes on. And it’s no different in today’s church – people are ostracised for all kinds of offences, the main ones of course being those that can be ‘supported’ by mistranslated and/or out-of-context Scripture verses (which basically anyone who knows their Bible can do; it’s easy to find a Scripture somewhere that will seem to support your point of view!). Oh, and those who do not toe the party line! Basically, anyone who is different, anyone who does not ‘fit in’; that person is ripe for ostracism. While this is not always a doctrine as such (although the gay persecution stuff is; there are at least six Scriptures that are misinterpreted so that gay people can be ‘scripturally’ discriminated against), it is still a major black mark against my Loving Father in the eyes of the world. What the world sees is that Christians – and therefore God – hate gays. The Church does not properly represent God on this matter! “I desire mercy, not sacrifice” – (Hosea 6:6) – God would rather people were good to each other instead of being religious! More of my musings on how the Church treats LGBTQ people can be found here, here, here, and here. But the point is that these practices are a major stumbling-block as perceived by someone considering coming to faith. And it’s a stronghold; an ‘imagination’. I understand that people are afraid of ‘differences’, but surely in the Church Family, there must be a better way than the dysfunctional practice of ostracism. Whatever happened to ‘live and let live’?

The ‘Bad Witness’

Then there’s the question of the people who profess Christianity but who come across as all harsh, judgemental^[3], vindictive and unbending. Like those I describe in my article – ‘Bad Witness’. These people see the Holy Spirit as a Convictor^[4]) (actually only one step from an Accuser) rather than a Comforter, and Jesus as yet another Lawgiver rather than Him being the end of the Law (Rom 10:4 (KJV)). These people can be found in their droves on religious forums. They portray Father as an angry Dictator, as we have already seen. So, all three Persons of the Godhead are maligned at the same time! And I therefore go on the forums to present the alternative view: that actually God likes the people He has created (including the harsh people!). Sometimes these people claim that I am not a Christian, and one forumite in particular was rather dischuffed that I didn’t support him at all, despite me claiming to be a believer and from that he concluded my salvation state was nil. But of course I’m not going to support him in his transmitting opinions that I feel to be toxic to others. How can I support someone I don’t agree with? But if he was ill, in need, hungry or in need of encouragement, I’d be right there beside him (except I think he lives in America so he’s too far away!)

In some ways, these people are living examples of what a person would have to become like if they are to mirror their heavenly father as they actually see him, if they believe that he’s like that too. If their god is harsh and judgemental, then they are going to portray him as harsh and judgemental. So in a way, they are just representing god in the best way they can; the problem is that, in the eyes of the world, they represent the real, loving, living God, and what the world see is, of course, awful! In a very real way, this ‘Bad Witness’ is actually an extension of the ‘Angry God’ doctrine above; what we are seeing here is merely the manifestation of that image of god to the world for them to see, and for them to be disillusioned with. Who would want to come to Church when they think it will be populated by people such as these? Naturally, these nasty types are just in the minority – most churches, including mine, are full of the sweetest, Christlike people – but can you really blame outsiders for tarring us all with the same brush?

So, that’s just four of these entrenched ideas and concepts – Imaginations – in the Church that are so destructive; there are more but these will do for now.

You see, if we really examine our doctrines on these ideas, they all, without exception, portray our loving Father God in a very bad, harsh and horrible light. Light that is as much darkness as it is light, in fact. I would even go as far as saying that this represents a Pagan, yin/yang, Karma-style (what goes round, comes round) god than a living, loving Creator.

Just because everyone believes in a particular doctrine, does not mean that that doctrine is correct. Acceptance of the majority opinion does not make a doctrine true; it is simply more likely that nobody has questioned it! Ironically, here’s a Rick Warren saying which states exactly that (the irony being that Rick is, as far as I know, one of the people who believes in Hell, and is probably against same-sex marriage 😉 )

I believe that a new revival is slowly and carefully making its way through the Church in this day. A revival where people are waking up to seeing just how fantastic God is, how loving, kind and inclusive. Jesus’s message was not just for the people of Israel in the First Century; it was for all men everywhere and in every time (John 17:20). In this time, we in the Church need to include everyone in the message of Good News which is that God loves us and sent Jesus to show us that, in all that He did and suffered, He will stop at nothing to show us this amazing Truth.

Please be assured: this isn’t supposed to be a rant in any way. I’m just explaining where I’m coming from in my writings. You know, God is so much ‘nicer’ than how many believers – even sincere ones – portray Him, or at least, who believe these untrue things about Him because they haven’t really thought them through in any great depth, and/or they have simply believed what they’ve been told without questioning it. Maybe they don’t realise how destructive these ideas are, but let me assure you that the world outside the Church sees the problems caused by these doctrines really clearly. And it’s also counter-intuitive; most people outside the Church, believe it or not, actually think that God is Good. It’s just some of the Christians who claim to represent Him that they have the problem with!

So, these are just some of the ‘Imaginations’ that need to be cast down. If you can see yourself in any of these descriptions, please ask Jesus what He thinks. And let Him change you, in His own good time! And, if you are someone who already knows that God isn’t like these imaginations, please feel free to let everyone know. Although, I appreciate that you probably already do!

Bless you!

A little over five years ago, I wrote the piece ‘What the Bible says’, in which I describe the [what I feel is an] unhealthy reliance on the Bible by many, if not most, Evangelical Christians.

As part of my series on ‘The Problems of Evangelicalism‘, I was going to write a piece on just that subject, but that would have been superfluous given that I have already done so – and my views, and the truths the article describes, have not changed in the meantime.

However, I have had more ideas on the subject, and so, rather than just reblogging it, I have incorporated those ideas into the original essay, thereby producing what is an updated, revised and enhanced version. I have not differentiated these new comments in any way; they now form part of the new essay.

The particular ‘Problem with Evangelicalism’ described in the essay, then, is that of Evangelicalism having an overemphasis on the Bible instead of on Jesus, and the problems that this causes.

Here we go:

One of my online friends posted the other day this interesting little nugget:

And I have to say I fully agree with him.

So many times nowadays, I actually feel like saying to people, like, look mate, I actually don’t care ‘what the Bible says’, because a) what Jesus says is more important, b) it’s not a Rulebook anyway, and c) who’s to say what the Bible really ‘says’? 40,000+ denominations tells me that no-one really knows exactly ‘what the Bible says’ anyway!

It also got me thinking along other lines too.

You see, I’m also noticing that, in our efforts to show Fundamentalists that actually our ideas are ‘Biblical’ (in that, like most things, you can find justification for them in the Bible), we are finding that the Bible is once again becoming the set of Rules by which we who have discovered Grace are trying to make our points to the legalists. And that has to be counterproductive. Even the Rulebook itself says that if it is law, then it is no longer Grace (Rom 11:6). To coin an analogy from Sun-Tzu, we are therefore picking the wrong terrain for our battles, and falling back into the trap of fighting on the ground of their choice.

You see, it is nowadays apparent that no longer do people sit and talk about Jesus; we sit and talk about the Bible instead. It’s as if the Bible is what we now have in common, rather than being one in Christ. The focus is the Bible. And so the focus is all wrong.

I mean, really, when a believer is firmly established in his faith, in a lot of ways the Bible can actually take more of a back seat, although this will of course vary from person to person. The Bible is no longer our primary source of ‘things from God’ or ‘knowledge of God’; instead, that Source is Jesus.  In fact, it should ideally have been Him all along. This is why it is important to cultivate, in the new believer as well as the old, a total reliance on Jesus rather than shifting the focus to the Bible.

And so I don’t pretend that I hold the Bible in the same esteem that others do. I mean, if anything, I hold it in even higher esteem than many Fundamentalists do because I give it the respect it deserves but without dishonouring it by elevating it to a position it was never meant to occupy.

But I have noticed that when beginning a conversation with other believers, there’s almost this ‘dance’ where everyone tacitly agrees to agree that the Bible is where it’s all at, and they (tacitly or overtly) agree to have their discussions using that as an axiom. Well, I’m being very careful about that nowadays.

I still find that I almost don’t want to mention (and so I don’t!) that the Bible is no longer as important now I am on to the solid food of following Jesus. This is because, as I explain below, this almost loses my credibility with those with whom I am having the discussion. Indeed, if I do mention the Bible’s lowered importance in one of those conversations, I find that the conversation suddenly changes to being about the primacy of the Bible rather than being about the original point of discussion, whatever that was. Which tells me that actually the point was either a) not important anyway, or b) just another way of getting the conversation around to the Bible again. It does seem with these people to be ‘all or nothing’ (I suppose that’s black-and-white culty thinking) in that if there’s the slightest whiff that I don’t hold the Bible as highly as they do, then they think I don’t believe any of it. Again, that’s a serious flaw not only in their logic (which they don’t use anyway) but also in their conclusion.

Sure, I still love reading my Bible, at least when I can tune out the grey, dusty voices of the Legalists, who have tainted the Scriptures with their deadly interpretations. (There’s that point again: interpretation!) But, for me, the Bible is no longer the primary source of my knowledge of God. In fact, it’s even broader than that. In my current stage in my faith walk, I no longer need or depend on others’ ideas, nor affirmation of my own ideas by others. Sure, I read interesting ideas which I feel free to hold or to discard as I see fit. Sometimes I post things by other people because they express what I wanted to say so much better than I could have done.

But nowadays I find that I hear, and listen to, Jesus Himself, and I learn so much directly from Him.

This sort of thing gives the Legalists apoplexy, because they can’t stand it that some of us have a Relationship with Jesus outside of the Bible. ‘Dangerous’, they call it. A ‘slippery slope‘.  Well if they want to stay in their ruts, that’s fine with me. But out here in the deep ocean, where there is no bottom and I rely entirely on God to keep me afloat, out here is where the real faith is. They sing about it in their song ‘Oceans‘, and I still find that song profound because it reflects my own experience.

But in reality, and ironically, those who should be boldest – those who claim to have a solidity of faith undergirded both by the Bible and by their claim of a relationship with Jesus – they are the ones who are the most afraid to venture out ‘where no-one has gone before’, into the deep waters of bottomless faith.

Keith Giles puts it like this:

“Do you know anyone that constantly claims, “That’s not Biblical” to everything they don’t agree with?

“Yeah, just ignore them.

“Some say we cannot trust the Holy Spirit to guide us, and that’s why we need a Book. But I have never gone to the Book when I have needed wisdom or guidance. I have always gone to my knees, and listened.

“The idea that we can trust a Book more than the Holy Spirit is actually an idea that is refuted by the same Book.

“Can we get it wrong if we follow the Spirit? Of course. And you don’t have to look very hard to see a few thousand years of people getting it wrong by following the Book, either.

“Our capacity to “get it wrong” is unlimited. But, I would argue, we have a much better chance of getting it right if we learn to discern the voice of the indwelling Holy Spirit which leads us into all Truth and provides wisdom and insight directly from God’s heart to our own.

” ‘If anyone lacks wisdom, let him ask of the Lord who gives generously to all.’ – James 1:5 [Notice it doesn’t say, ‘Let him search in the Book…’]

“What God did a few thousand years ago is comforting, but I am concerned that many of us may be missing what new and exciting thing God may want to do in our life TODAY if we keep holding on to those stories of what God did back then.

“Don’t fear to trust the Holy Spirit and to listen to the voice of the Good Shepherd.”

– Keith Giles

Brilliant. I couldn’t have put it better.

Someone once asked me what part the Bible played in my life nowadays. Here’s my reply:

“It used to play a big part. But now I have moved on to solid food. I have stopped trying to ‘prove’ things from the Scripture for others; I have stopped trying to convince grey people that the Bible is multi-interpretable, and I have stopped trying to show arguments from a Scriptural point of view for the benefit of those who still treat it as a Rulebook.

“I have had it with people using a 4,000yr old (in places) book to make Jesus irrelevant in today’s world, because they have to stick to the Rules laid down essentially by Moses the Prat. I no longer hold to their viewpoints, so there is no point in pretending that I still do, even to show them things from their own Rulebook.

“I now listen only to the One Whom I trust above all others, and occasionally I will pick up ideas or prompts from people who also hear His voice. Here is the problem that is the root of all Fundie Christian problems: that God is no longer trusted enough to be allowed to speak to His people. The idea that God will never contradict Scripture is not only contradicted in Scripture itself, but it is also a non-Scriptural idea held up, incorrectly, as a ‘Biblical ‘principle’.

“I am sick of judgemental people who place their own judgements above those of God. So, there we are. Bible firmly in its place”

Lately, though, I have realised that, in a very real way, everyone who reads the Bible places their own judgments above the words in the Bible. That’s what is called ‘interpretation’; that’s the way things actually should be. The problem with Evangelical and other Fundamentalist belief systems is that those interpretations are then claimed to be the one-and-only way in which a given passage should be interpreted, because those interpretations are subject to pre-existing group dogma; they’re ‘pre-defined’, if you will. And so their claim that the Bible provides objective truth to prevent the believer straying off into error is incorrect, because what they think of as the objective truth of Scripture is always going to be subject to the subjective interpretation of a text by an individual, a leader or a group (again, usually the leadership) and so it’s actually not objective truth at all. It’s just truth as understood by a particular group. And just because a lot of people believe something doesn’t make it true.

Of course, as I mentioned earlier, the problem with ‘demoting’ the Bible in ‘discussions’ with grey people is that what I say is always going to be reduced in value because I apparently don’t hold the Bible in the same esteem as they do. But since there has already been a sort-of breakdown in communication in that we are interpreting the same Bible in different ways, then that very difference of opinion reduces my credibility in their eyes anyway. Which isn’t really my problem, of course, and each of us has to follow the Spirit both in our lives and in hearing what God is saying to us, either through the Bible or through other channels.

But I do hold the Bible in high esteem, of course, and when I speak of ‘putting it in its place’ I mean that it should be restored to its rightful place. In other words, it is a book – a very special book, but a book nonetheless – which is full of insight, wisdom, amazing stories, and also some not-so-good stuff too. Its primary function is to point us to Jesus. Sure, that’s not its only function, but it’s the Bible’s primary function (Jn 5:39). If we fail to let the Bible point us to Jesus, then it has failed in its primary task. No, the ‘rightful’ place of the Bible is to be very firmly removed from the throne of people’s lives – where many believers have placed it – and to allow Jesus back onto that throne. The Trinity is ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’; these days it seems that many modern believers have replaced this with ‘Father, Son and Holy Bible’. In other words, the problem is with the people, not the Bible; they are using it incorrectly and elevating it to a position it was never intended to occupy. At Jesus’s ‘trial’, in John 19:15 Pilate asked, ‘Shall I crucify your king?’ And the priests replied, ‘We have no king but Caesar!’. They were rejecting the Kingship of Jesus in favour of a worldly system of kingship, that of Rome. In the same way, by putting the Bible above Jesus, modern-day Bibliolatrists^[1] are effectively saying, ‘We have no king but the Bible!’

I would say that my ‘relationship’ with the Bible has come full circle. I began reading the Bible when I was about seven years old. Didn’t get very far. My secondary school was a Public School^[2] which was set up in 1812 for the education of the sons of Methodist ministers, so I was educated in a Christian background and Scripture was a part of daily study.

At the age of 18, on July 12th, 1980, I began my actual walk with Jesus, responding to an ‘altar call’ at a tent crusade (actually God propelled me to the front!), and it was just what I needed. My life changed from that point onwards and I was increasingly conscious of Jesus at my side, and saw His influence in my life on a daily basis. Over the following years, I got to know the Bible inside-out, walked with Jesus, and also with others; although the emphasis was on both Bible and Jesus, gradually, as with all these things, the Real Thing is supplanted by the written accounts of it. That said, though, I did not lose sight of my first Love, Jesus Himself. I had had such an experience of God, as a young Christian, that no amount of Pharisaical layering of rules and other baggage on top of that Relationship could ever snuff it out entirely. And so when I entered my ‘dark night of the soul‘ in 1999, its main function was to allow me to rid myself of all the baggage and to walk free.

Once that process was complete to Father’s satisfaction, the subsequent encounter I had with God was new, powerful, real and unexpected^[3], but still rooted in my already existing Relationship with Him. It was just like I’d never been away. And one of the fruits of that long period of change was that I no longer relied as much on the Bible. One of the things that God had pruned away, so to speak, in that time, was the emphasis on Scripture and He replaced it with a far more emphatic emphasis on Jesus and my Relationship with Him.

Interestingly, my knowledge and memory of Bible verses was still intact. I can still recite whole sections of Scripture should I need to do so. But the Bible very much takes a back seat as I simply walk freely in the Spirit.

There are some people I know who never read the Bible, but are in a strong Relationship with Jesus. For them, the Bible just turns them off, and detracts from the Person of Jesus.

Fundies might say, well, how can you know Jesus apart from the Bible?

Well that’s a very silly question when you think about it. Most of what I know about, say, my friend in my aircraft owners’ group, I know because I have sat and talked with him, flown with him, talked to his wife, and all that. I’ve known him for years. He’s my friend. He has never had a book written about him (although his late dad had an autobiography, but that’s a different story!). It’s the same with Jesus. Jesus exists outside of the Bible; yes we can learn more about Him from the Bible, and read of others’ experiences with Him from the Bible, but you can only really get to know Him by actually meeting Him and spending time with Him.

What Fundagelicalism^[4] has purveyed for many decades now is a cheap bait-and-switch imitation. Come to Jesus! And here’s how: read the Book! Bait = Jesus. Switch = Book. It’s funny too but Jesus actually turns this around and helps people to get to know Him despite the best efforts of the Fundies who, really, don’t trust the Spirit at all, and want to do all His speaking for Him, usually by quoting Bible verses.

In other words, the emphasis has shifted from the real to the hypothetical, and from the Living to the written. “And … you refuse to come to Me to have Life” (Jn 5:39).

It’s sad that those of us rediscovering the primacy of Jesus are labelled as heretics, by the very ones whose concept of Jesus is based mainly in book knowledge, and experiential knowledge is counted as being from ‘deceiving spirits’. And conversations with such of these Grey People always degenerate into, again, that ridiculous dance around the authority of the Bible and its extent in determining how well we can know God. It’s posturing, and it’s pathetic. Tell me: Who is best placed to talk about what they know of Jesus: those who read about Him or those who actually know Him personally, not just from a book? Is the former not much more than a case of the ‘blind leading the blind’?

This emphasis on the Bible is exemplified in conversations with Evangelicals, where most of the time there is a tacit assumption that the authority/inerrancy/infallibility/etc. of the Bible is unquestioned and already accepted. But the assumption that those who are at a different place in their walk will accept that premise is not going to produce a good conversation, and it will always degenerate again into discussions about the Bible. You see the problem? Any time we want to talk about God, or Jesus, or the Spirit, we end up talking about what ‘the Bible says’ about Them rather than what is our personal experience of Them. This of, course, may be because those arguing with people who have a real Relationship with Jesus don’t have one themselves, and so they really don’t know the One about Whom they are talking. But that’s never my judgment call to make.

And so, this dependence on the Bible means that God isn’t allowed to speak to His people, in any way He wants to, any more. He’s only allowed to use the Bible and what it says in there.

Well, try telling Him that! He’s bypassing all that by just doing what He wants all over the world, irrespective of what people’s Bibles tell them He should be doing.

All around the world, people are finding new freedom in Christ; in Christ, not the Bible. In fact, modern ‘understanding’ of the Bible has been thoroughly polluted by nasty and erroneous doctrines and ideas from Evangelicalism, which have been espoused for so long that they are now accepted as ‘normal’. I mention a few of these doctrines in this post. As I hinted above, I now find it hard to read the Bible profitably because of all the years and layers of dusty, dry legalism and bad exegesis (interpretation of Scripture) caused by many long years under the thrall of those doctrines. Like it would be for a former member of a cult, the old interpretations and taught meanings – based on ideas of humans (Mt 15:9; Mk 7:7) – are what come to the fore as I read certain passages, and as such these verses have been poisoned for me. I feel quite badly done by about that, actually, like I have been robbed of all the fruit and glory of those passages. I am, however, fortunate in listening to teachers like Don Keathley and Francois du Toit, whose love of the Scriptures is not only infectious but also their teaching is wholesome, and you can tell.

My final point about Evangelicalism’s unhealthy elevation of the Bible is that there’s almost an irony in all this, too.

Allow me to explain. People who look in at Christianity from the outside see the attitudes of, well at least Fundamentalists, but also Evangelicals too, regarding the Bible. They see their dependence on it, and their adherence to millennia-old rules and laws that clearly have no business being incorporated into modern-day laws. They see the obvious problems with their stubborn disbelief in evolution, insistence on modern-day adoption of cultural norms from ancient times like the subjugation of women and persecution of people of ‘different’ sexualities^[5].

Let’s be honest: Christianity would be a lot more believable if they’d only drop their stubborn holding on to the obviously wrong things in the Bible. People ‘out there’ aren’t stupid. They know those beliefs in ‘The Bible is always right!'^[6] are obviously wrong. Anyone with any common sense can see this.

But, of course, Biblical inerrantists are blind to this; instead, they see it as a virtue to hold these attitudes and views in the face of what they see as ‘opposition’. But believing in the Bible at the expense of disregarding modern scientific findings and other modern cultural advancements is purely risible, and punctures the credibility of all who believe in the Bible in that way.

And so, they actualy drive away intelligent, thinking, honest people who would otherwise make very good believers, simply because they cannot believe what Evangelicalism says that they must believe about the Bible in order to be counted as ‘Christians’.

And therefore, once again, Evangelicalism repels people from Jesus instead of attracting them; it turns them away at the gate, turns them away from a lifetime of following the One Who loves them above all else, turns them away from that Love on the basis of their own obviously erroneous doctrine about the Bible. And that’s reprehensible.

But I want to finish this essay on a positive note. My aim is always the encouragement of my readers!

I must say I do get the impression that, for those who have the hearts to receive it, the Grace message of Jesus is the thing they have been looking for all their lives. Some of us were sidetracked into rule-keeping. Some of us were snatched away as soon as we heard the message and met Jesus for the first time. And to be fair, some of us in fact needed to enter through the path of legalism, because only by seeing its hopelessness could we even begin to look for something more.

But once our eyes were opened to Grace, oh! the wonder! Oh, the freedom! For some of us, detoxification was needed. For others, straight in to Grace with no messing about. But however we got here, God has His hand on us, and He will never let us go! So, while the Bible, when interpreted by the Spirit of Truth, is useful, remember it is not God; it never has been and it never will be. No matter what your reverence for it, and I am sure that reverence is not misplaced, make sure that the Spirit – Whom God has poured into our hearts – is always the One Who has the last word. Then you will be hearing directly from God Himself.

Grace and Peace to you.

Almost exactly ten years ago, I was in a worship meeting where there was high worship in the Spirit; those who have experienced this will know exactly what I mean^[1]. In this particular instance, the Presence of God was manifested not only in His tangible and ‘felt’ presence, but also in the sparkling in the room and the way the air actually felt ‘thicker’. This is a level of worship which is rarely attained except where God chooses so to manifest His Presence in that way. It’s nothing that we do for that to happen; it’s just what God does sometimes. In this kind of worship, there is healing, there is release for the captives, and there are public and private words from God for people either singly or congregationally. You don’t emerge from such worship the same as you were when you went in 😀 

Anyway, during that meeting, Jesus shared some wisdom with me that I then felt I really couldn’t keep to myself, and so I shared the fruit of this, well, ‘inspiration’, I suppose you could call it, on my blog. This was what gave rise to the piece ‘Graven Image‘, and I reproduce it here, with a bit of additional commentary^[2] at the end. I feel it is particularly relevant for my series, ‘The Problems of Evangelicalism’, and may shed a little light on the complex reasons why such problems exist. Here we go:

Graven Image

“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image” (Ex 20:4 KJV)

In this, the second of the ‘Ten Commandments’ given to Moses on Mt. Sinai, God forbade the Israelites to make for themselves any idols, or ‘false gods’, or indeed even an image (statue or whatever) of God Himself. Unlike the other nations in the area at that time, they were not to use idols to worship, but instead they had to worship the One God Himself.

It’s easy to see why. If you think about it, if the people gave any worship – or ‘worth-ship’ – or value – to what was essentially just a wooden, metal or stone statue, before long they would believe that the statue itself was God and that God is like the statue.  Apart from giving the statue the worship and attention that is God’s alone by right, they would also create in their minds and hearts and expectations a completely unrealistic picture of what God is really like. Clearly, you can’t represent God in all His love, power, majesty and splendour in a 30ft tall ‘graven image’, no matter how well decorated it is! There are many other reasons too, but this is the main one for the purposes of this post.

Fast-forward many centuries from Mt. Sinai to the time of Jesus. The religious authorities followed a strict system of rules, regulations and observances that not only they, but everyone else, had to follow. For various complex reasons, which I will go into in a later post, God was seen as a harsh, vengeful and implacable autocrat, and people were only acceptable to God by a) following an increasingly rigid and detailed set of rules and b) participating in blood sacrifices (involving the killing of animals). Departure from these rules would result, not in the threat of ‘hell’ as our religious people threaten with these days, but in a system of various punishments ranging from exclusion from the assembly (like being excommunicated) right up to the death penalty which would be administered by the barbaric practice of stoning. And, remember, all this would be done ‘in the name of’ the god they worshipped.

So effectively the religious authorities of the time had made a ‘graven image’. They had built themselves an image of God in their minds and in their writings, and they thought that God was like that image. This image of God they had made was of course, like all graven images, completely incorrect; even in the Old Testament, God describes Himself as a God of Love, which their graven image did not reflect. They had set up, in the place of the Loving Father, a man-made, stone-faced image of a ‘nasty god’ which bore no resemblance to the loving Creator of the Universe. Ask any person even nowadays what they think of God, and the chances are that they think of him as an angry old man up in Heaven just looking for people to get radgy with. This is the legacy of the graven image that these people worshipped – and, sadly, that many people still worship today.

But then Jesus came onto the scene. Jesus, the Man Who is God. Jesus, the Man Who came to show us what God is really like. Showing right from the start how much He wanted people to enjoy life – His first miracle was the one where He turned water into wine; and not just any old wine, but strong wine! – and how much He wanted people to be free of the horrible things that happen like sickness and death, by performing His healing miracles. The significance of Jesus’s miracles was not simply to show us who He is, nor just to help those whom He healed (although these were of course important in themselves), but to show us the nature of God’s Kingdom, and thereby the nature of the King Himself.

If you like, Jesus was – and is – God’s ‘graven image’ of Himself, made by Him and honoured by Him. Here at last is the Image of God, not made of wood, stone or metal, but as a Man, as a human. Col 1:15 says, “He is the image of the unseen God, the firstborn of all creation”. Here is the Absolute, the Ultimate. Here is Jesus. He’s the One Who shatters the graven image made so popular by religious people, the image of the ‘nasty god’, and replaces it with the Real Thing. And, guess what? He still does the same today.

This, then,  is why the ‘graven image’ was forbidden. Because anything less than the Real Thing – Jesus – falls woefully short of the mark!

The picture of the Easter Island statues at the top of this post was not just to illustrate the idea of a stern, frowning ‘graven image’. I also wanted to poke some fun at the idea of a static, set-in-stone concept of God, with this cartoon.

(For those who don’t remember the Pez sweet dispenser, click the image below to be taken to the Wikipedia article on it):

So there we go. Yes, I could have removed the humourous bit from the end, because some might feel it detracts from the ‘seriousness’ of the piece, but to be fair, a) It’s not really all that serious and was not presented in such a way as to be so; and b) Too many people these days feel that humour detracts and distracts from serious things; such people are usually miserable so-and-so’s and I will have no part of their shenanigans! So the humour stays!^[3]

Anyway, my comments will, I think, be few^[4], except to put the piece in the context of the series it’s a part of, The Problems with Evangelicalism. 

The honest truth is that most, and likely all, of us carry around in our head and heart our own ‘Graven Image’; our concept of what God is like. Depending on the personality, the upbringing, the education, the life experiences, as well as the personal encounters a person may have had with God, and above all, that person’s faith/religious background, that Graven Image is going to look different for each Christian. And the effect of this is that that concept will influence to a greater or lesser extent how each Christian treats others; how much they reflect Jesus – Who was indeed God’s ‘Graven Image’, but this time the real thing – and that will affect that Christian’s ‘witness’. How much Jesus is ‘transmitted’ through a Christian’s actions and attitudes is one of the main factors that influence others’ belief – or otherwise – in the existence and nature of God. And that Graven Image will have been strongly influenced by what others, usually in our formative years, taught us about God. A brilliant example would be Sonny Ray’s story, as related in one of the earier articles in this series.

For me, I remember, both at school as a teenager, and as a congregant listening to ‘children’s ministry’ in churches, just how much of it was Old Testament (OT)-based. I remember there being an especial emphasis on the Ten Commandments, and of course David and Goliath^[5] as told in 1 Samuel chapter 17.

The Ten Commandments teaching is introduced early into a child’s indoctrination so as to make them immediately subject to the Mosaic Law^[6]. Unfortunately, this makes people ‘educated’ in this manner far more resistant to the Grace message because they have been taught from a very early age that following God is all about a set of Rules, and no exceptions.

Yes, we were taught about Jesus’s life, ministry, death and Resurrection. For the adults, in church, there was talk of ‘repentance’ and forgiveness and all that. And of course the worship was spectacular. Sometimes, the Presence of God was tangible and overwhelming, but not all of the time.

Somehow, though, the way in which that vengeful OT god is related to the God of Grace of the New Testament (NT) God, as revealed by Jesus, and the way in which it was connected to ‘salvation’, was never actually explicitly made^[7]. Sure, they acknowledged that that god was a god of justice, holiness, vengefulness, and judgment, and yes (occasionally) of Love, but there was a disconnect between that god and the NT view of God. It was never explained adequately, nor was any attempt ever made to do so that I know of. Certainly not in my hearing, anyway. I suspect that this lack of connection was (and is) partially because no-one really knew how to reconcile the ‘angry god’ of the OT with the God revealed by Jesus, and so the problem was just brushed under the rug^[8]. Part of this is due to the failure to appreciate the Bible as ‘progressive revelation’; that is, the concept that those who wrote the OT did not know as much about God as did those who wrote the later books/letters in the NT. Certainly, the OT writers never imagined that Someone like Jesus would come along to show us what God is really like (John 1:18).

Therefore, the revelation of God was ‘progressive’ in terms of the thinking that human understanding of God, and beliefs about Him, had ‘progressed’ since the times of the OT. And the same is true today. Therefore, any Bible interpretation that puts as much emphasis, weight or even ‘credibility’ to OT passages as it does to NT passages, and also fails to take into account the experiences, knowledge and fruits of modern-day believers, is doomed to failure. In a very real sense, this reading of the Bible under the assumption that it is infallible and inerrant, and that everything that it says is non-contradictory and that the whole thing is factually true, is the underlying cause of such contradictory beliefs about God. And these contradictions can only really be handled either by acknowledging that the Bible is neither inerrant nor infallible and reading it as such, or by allowing oneself to slip into cognitive dissonance.

This kind of ‘flat-reading’ thinking – where all the parts of the Bible are seen as carrying equal weight, and therefore worthy of equal emphasis – is what gives rise to common Evangelical clichés like ‘God is Love, but He’s also holy/just/righteous’ and similar^[9]. Where the clear and textually absolute statements of, “Whoever does not love does not know God, because God is love” (1 John 4:8) and the parallel text “This then is the message which we have heard of him, and declare unto you, that God is light, and in him is no darkness at all” (1 John 1:5) is relegated to subjection to all the other verses that describe God in a much more threatening manner. What they fail to notice is that all the other terms such as ‘holy’, ‘just’ and ‘righteous’ are adjectives – descriptive words^[10] – whereas ‘Love’ is a noun. Therefore, if God is Love, then those other attributes – holiness, righteousness and justice – absolutely must be shaped and coloured by the underlying nature of God, which is Love. Of course, even the definition of Love isn’t always all that clear, and even what we do have has been twisted by Evangelicals, and other Fundies, to mean, well, whatever they want it to mean. You will no doubt have noticed that ‘Love’ is used as an excuse for all manner of unpleasantness and abuse in churches, simply by using the word ‘Love’ as an excuse for such behaviour. For Christians, really, if they’re going to follow their Rulebook sincerely, then surely the definitive description of Love is found in the famous passage in 1 Corinthians 13:4-8a and should be used by them to define what Love means and looks like. For completeness’ sake, here’s what it says:

So for me, then, if what someone claims to be Love does not fit with that definition, then it’s not Love.

Which brings us back to the Graven Image.

Does the Graven Image, that each of us holds inside, match with Jesus; the One Who exemplified the Love in 1 Corinthians 13? If not, then be prepared for Jesus to gently help you to modify it in your own heart. Be encouraged! Remember that none of us has an entirely correct view of what God is like, nor will we do so until we see Him face to face (which is also in 1 Corinthians 13, at verse 12!): “Now we see but a dim reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known”. – 1 Cor 13:12. So, don’t feel bad about having your own ‘Graven Image’: first of all, how else are you supposed to hold any concept of God; secondly, if it makes you look to Jesus more, then that’s never going to be a bad thing; thirdly, remember we are under Grace, and not Law (Rom 6:14), so the Ten Commandments (of which, as we have seen, the ‘Graven Image’ commandment is one) are already fulfilled in Jesus and we are no longer subject to them, not that, as Gentiles^[11], we were ever really supposed to be ‘under’ it in any case; fourthly, it’s up to Jesus to make you more like Him anyway – it really isn’t your problem. Your task is simply to rest in His Grace and enjoy His Presence, and let Him do the changing as and when He deems it to be the right time! Trust Him; He knows what He’s doing! Philippians 1:6 (KJV) says, “Being confident of this very thing, that he which hath begun a good work in you will perform it until the day of Jesus Christ”, leading to Jude 1:24(KJV) where it says, “Now unto him that is able to keep you from falling, and to present you faultless before the presence of his glory with exceeding joy…” [Emphasis mine]

Faultless. That is an absolute term^[12]. Hold on to it. Believe it. Rejoice in it!

Grace and Peace to you all

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