Friday, June 3, 2011

Cornerstone of Faith ...

What is truth?  What is fact?  Lawyers argue “the facts of case” each seeking to convince a jury that their own position is the correct one.  But how can both be right, or wrong?  Discerning truth becomes a challenging thing when evil’s influence in pervasive and powerful.  Evil cannot defeat truth, but it can mask it, obfuscate it, bury it in enigma, or make it seem unpalatable.  If evil is able to convince you to question the source of truth, how can you ever know what truth is?  With so many competing voices that all claim to know what truth is, we are faced with the dilemma of choosing where to put our faith and trust.  It is easy to say we will trust our God, but then who’s God?  The God described in the Old Testament of the Bible, the New Testament, the Talmud perhaps, the Quran, Hindu writings, those of Confucius, where do we turn to find a basis, a cornerstone from which to discern truth?

Christians point to the Bible as the source of truth.  But Lucifer has not been idle in putting forth arguments to destroy the credibility of the scriptures.  The idea that truth has been somehow “lost in translation” from scrolls that date back nearly 3000 years has merit from a logical perspective.  Any child who has ever sat in a circle and played the gossip game can attest to this.  Then there is the dilemma that even ancient texts written in the time of the Bible may not be directly attributable to sources we believe to be inspired.  Recently a “gospel of Judas” and a “gospel of Mary Magdalene” have been discovered.  Neither agrees with New Testament writings but both have been put forth as viable additions to our current collection.  Even those that were in existence at the council of Nicaea were debated with some being excluded from what we now refer to as the New Testament.  Add to this the Catholic church’s position that scripture must be the sole province of priests to interpret and what scripture there is had to be preserved and copied in caves for nearly a millennia until the printing press was invented.  Even if we accept the current collection of writings that compose the books of our Bible, there exists today no less than 10 significant “versions” of the same text.  Attempts to simplify the language of the King James version has resulted in widely differing interpretations of the same base texts. 
Science, or rather men who profess that scientific thinking is the only viable method for finding truth, have proposed that the “evidence” of evolution outweighs the miraculous accounts of our creation in the Book of Genesis, therefore the portions of scripture which deal with the fantastic must be allegories written by enlightened philosophers in an attempt to make men better than they are.  These scientists have all but declared that there can be no basis in truth of the Bible, at best idealistic ideas, at worst superstitions designed to control men by appealing to their fears of the unknown and death.  There are “creation scientists” who seek out evidence supporting the ideas of creation and the flood for instance, but as they approach science with a predefined set of ideas they are derided by their peers.  Many modern Christians seek to find a balance between the big bang / evolution and the accounts written in scripture – deciding that where science can be proven, it is there that scripture is in error.
Atheists claim their ideology, or rather lack of ideology, is the fastest growing segment in modernized nations.  The implication is that with higher education, and higher IQ, comes a lack of belief in scriptures.  Atheists assert that intellect is the key to the discovery of truth, and being bound to texts of ancient superstition is merely a cherished part of our past.  They assert that freedom from the ideas of punishment or reward at death liberate one to live in the here and now.  They have a point actually.
It is a wonder that any Christian can maintain faith in our Bible.  But then what is faith but a choice as to what to believe.  The evolutionist chooses to believe that despite the inability to take base elements from the periodic table and create life, it was done anyway.  They believe that even though it requires billions of years as the variable to evolve, combined with trillion to one odds, it happened as theorized anyway.  There are many facts on the other side of the evolutionist aisle, enough to cause doubt in the mind of any true scientist, making the theory of evolution one of choice as well.  The Atheist too must also make a choice not to believe in anything beyond what they can see, feel, touch, and describe.  Atheists do not do well with mysteries, and completely discard supernatural phenomenon, until it happens to them.  Belief is about choice first and foremost.
To answer the question of the accuracy of the content of our Bible, and the validity of the books that were included in it, one must examine the question “why” would it be our basis of truth.  The purpose of the Bible is not to define condemnation for evil, it takes no such volumes to accomplish such an obvious goal.  Rather, the Bible is a love letter that speaks incessantly of hope, love and redemption.  The Bible is given to man by a God who explains why evil exists, how to be free from it, what love means, and of an eternal destiny that will unite us with Him in the absence of all evil permanently.  The Bible is about making an informed decision as to whether to follow the God who stands behind its inspiration.  If the Bible is a lie, then the God who purports to be behind it does not exist.  There is no middle ground.  God cannot expect man to make an informed decision to follow Him based on partial truth, omissions of critical facts, or ideas that were lost in translation.  Man can only choose to love God if an accurate picture of God is provided in scripture.
If what is in the Bible is incomplete, then we do not have enough information to make our decision for or against the God of the Bible.  If the information in the Bible has been altered by the designs of men, then the God who stands behind it cares not enough to preserve His own letter to us.  If the information is mere allegory then why is it presented as fact.  If the Bible is a lie, whether in part, or in full, then hope is a lie – redemption is a myth – purpose and individuality are meaningless – and death is the only real escape from the evil that surrounds us and inhabits us.  The Bible if accurate, answers all these dilemmas and gives us a complete picture of love and of evil.  Not all the things that occur in scripture are by the will of God.  Many are acts committed by men in various circumstances that illustrate evil and the consequences of evil.  But with every instance of death or destruction in the scriptures are even more instances of mercy whether accepted or rejected.
Those Christians who seek to integrate competing ideas of evolutionism and creationism are attempting to blend completely counter ideologies.  We were either created by design, or not.  There can be no middle ground.  To try to annul portions of scripture is to deny the power of the God who stands behind them.  Why bother with scripture at all, if the God behind it is a liar.  Those Christians who believe we should take the writings of Paul out of the Bible, equally deny the God who has stood behind our Bible for nearly 2000 years.  The Bible has been preserved at great peril by those who chose to abandon their homes and run from persecution in order to preserve the sacred word.  To have them die in vain for the writings of Paul, so that “modern enlightened” Christians who do not like what Paul says can remove them only now, is to have their martyred deaths and persecuted lives for nothing.  That too is not a picture of a God in whom I would serve.
But if the Bible is not a lie, if it is indeed the absolute truth, then love is real – a finality to evil is real, both in me and around me.  If the Bible is the unvarnished truth it does not change over time.  The study of it will yield even more truth as we submit ourselves to the God who was its inspiration and protector for all these generations.  The God who means to communicate with us through the instrument of His written word, longs to lead us to understand it as it was meant to be understood.  He longs to show us the deeper meaning in the stories, lives, writings, songs, failures, and successes we find throughout scripture.  He does not bury the truth in numerology that would require a supercomputer to decode.  He presents it plainly in language the audience of the day could understand.  Its principles and values live on as if written only yesterday.  Its message is truly timeless, as truth itself is timeless.
One could argue that every religion has “sacred’ texts, and that our Bible is no different than any other competing set of written works.  But there is one difference that remains, in every other religious ideology lives the notion that service must be offered in order for favor to be granted.  Only does our Bible teach about a God who does the work of saving His creations from evil – even while they choose to number themselves as His enemies.  Our God reaches out to us in love, even before we know who He is.  Our God does the work of reforming, transforming, and recreating a new character within us as we submit to Him.  In every other ideology, man finds enlightenment through his actions or abstentions – only in the Bible is man offered wisdom as a gift.  Only in the Bible are the enemies of God loved by Him, with incessant offers to save them from the evil they choose to embrace.  This difference is substantial.  It is the reason why Christianity and the scriptures behind it offer a better life than ALL the other competing ideologies.  Man simply cannot save himself.  This is a demonstrable scientific fact.  Only the Bible offers man a future without evil as a gift.
Those who argue that the Spirit of God has informed them to disregard portions of scripture are essentially arguing that God cannot make up His own mind about His word.  If God is the God behind the scriptures, why would His Spirit decide some of them should not be there?  In order for God to be God He must be consistent.  In order for truth to be truth it too must be consistent and accurate.  If the Bible contains inaccuracies or partial truths it cannot claim to be “the” truth.  Our interpretations of the meaning of scripture varies, but the words themselves remain, unchanged, and there by the intentions of a loving God.
Scripture can be used as a cornerstone of faith.  One must ultimately make a choice as to what to believe.  But putting our faith in scripture is our best hope to discover what truth is.  It is a choice to put our faith in something over which we have no control.  It is an act of trust in the God who is behind the words in His book.  It then becomes a doorway into discovering who He is, what it means to love and be loved.  It is our gateway to truth.  We will finally know truth, when we see Him face to face.  For Christ is truth.  Everything about Him is truth.  Everything about His Father, and His Spirit are truth.  There is no guile, no deceit, no omission of facts, no exaggerations, no partial truths in anything that God has said to us, or will ever say to us.  It will forever be only truth, and with that truth will come the freedom of truth, the beauty of truth, and the truly profound discovery of truth itself.  I make this choice gladly and would happily encourage anyone else to do the same.  In God, and in His word, I safely put my trust, for He alone is truth.

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