This blog has been on my mind for some time but this principle has hit home especially hard recently. When you’ve been in church long enough you learn lots of “church language” that is NOT found in the Bible. One very common example is the phrase “God works in mysterious ways.” This and many other things we hear regularly but ARE NOT TRUE. Actually God has very clearly revealed in scripture what he is doing. The fact that your preacher says things like this proves he does not understand his Bible properly. This phrase is used when something has happened and the preacher can’t explain it. When sickness comes in a person’s life and prayers are not fixing it, someone has to make excuses for why the sickness stays. Stop blaming God first of all. The Calvinistic theology you hear week after week teaches you that God is causing your sickness. This is NOT TRUE! God is NOT making you sick. The sin cursed evil world around you is making you sick. People around you make bad decisions and sometimes Christians get hurt. God did not cause that drunk driver to hit your loved ones car head on. The outcome of the false teaching you hear week after week that gives you the earthly promises that belong to Israel causes you to question God when the bad news comes. God DOES NOT promise you healing like the preacher tells you. God promises you GRACE as you go through the things we face on this sin cursed earth. Why do you or your children blame God and curse God when the bad news comes? Because you promised them Israel’s promises of earthly prosperity and healing and those things don’t come. So what are they left to do but blame God? This is one of the worst results of the spiritualizing of the Bible. We promise our kids and ourselves things Jesus said to Israel and then they don’t happen. Instead of evaluating our doctrine we ask God why me, and blame him for allowing things to come into our lives. God IS NOT causing drunk driving and sickness! This is an outcome of sin and the people around us making bad decisions. The benefit of blaming God or Satan for things they actually did not do is, we don’t have to blame ourselves. The fact of the matter is, many of the bad things that happen in our lives are a result of previous bad decisions we have made. But it’s far too easy to blame God or Satan for our bad decisions and Calvin has made this very easy. When you teach people that God is orchestrating every aspect of our lives then you can easily pass the buck on to someone else. Blaming God has caused countless Christians to give up on God and leave the church. Imagine if those people had been properly taught that God does NOT orchestrate everything, and that our decisions matter and have consequences. Imagine if they had been taught properly that God does not make us sick and cause us to lose our loved ones because this is a result of the sinful world around us. The promises you find in those prayer promise books are usually full of Israel’s promises. This of course explains why the promises most times don’t work. God is dealing with the world in GRACE right now. Paul clearly explains this. When God starts dealing with the world’s sin problem again you will not want to be here. If you are saved by God’s grace and by Christ’s finished crosswork you can be thankful that the things we go through here on earth are only temporary. Yes they hurt, and yes sometimes they are hard to understand but don’t blame God for things he had nothing to do with.

Jer 32:35  And they built the high places of Baal, which are in the valley of the son of Hinnom, to cause their sons and their daughters to pass through the fire unto Molech; which I commanded them not, neither came it into my mind, that they should do this abomination, to cause Judah to sin. 
 
Man’s sin and pride cause him to devise all sorts of evil that God had NOTHING to do with. When your theology proves that it does not hold up, rather than giving up of God, maybe you should find a way that everything in the Bible proves itself true. This can only be found in rightly dividing your Bible as instructed by your Apostle Paul.

When you start searching the internet for information on Dispensational Bible study you will quickly run across people telling you that we “chop up the Bible.” Peter Ruckman’s book against what he calls Hyper-Dispensationalism even shows a blindfolded man chopping up the bread of life on the cover. I don’t mind at all reading information against what the Bible teaches literally because I’m after truth regardless of the outcome. Let’s put this label to the test. I am 100% willing to examine if I am chopping up the Bible, are you? As a right divider of the Bible, I believe the Bible is to be taken literally, exactly as it is written. In other words, I completely trust the Holy Spirit. What this means is I believe EVERY VERSE as it’s written. This means that when the writers of scripture address a specific group of people, I believe it. This means that the red letters in the Bible ARE NOT instructions for me in the age of grace we are living in now. So, when Jesus says baptism is REQUIRED, keeping the law is REQUIRED, selling your possessions is REQUIRED, giving away your coat and your money to ANYONE that asks is REQUIRED, following the people that sit in Moses’ seat is REQUIRED, enduring to the end is REQUIRED, I believe the verses AS WRITTEN TO WHOM they are written. I understand and believe ALL the red letters just exactly as the Holy Spirit put them in the Bible, do you? Jesus plainly spoke and clearly taught his earthly ministry was to Israel. I want to follow Jesus, so I believe him AT HIS WORD. Modern Christianity claims to be following scripture but what do they do with MANY of the things Jesus said? Churches are full of people claiming to follow the red letters, but they don’t know what they say. Preachers are hard at work giving “spiritual” applications to the things Jesus said literally. Preachers are hard at work explaining away the clear instructions Jesus spoke. You are told that Jesus didn’t really mean to give things away, but you should just not “love your money” and you should be “willing to” and have a “giving heart.” DO you understand there are many things found in the red letters that you are NOT taught literally, and you don’t follow? Here is the difference. I believe every word in the red letters EXACTY as they stand, word for word. I also understand to whom they were written, and I leave them to whom the Holy Spirit inspired them. We read, study and teach the OT as well as everything Jesus said here. Yes, ALL scripture is profitable, but this verse does not say ALL scripture is too me specifically. To the contrary, some scripture clearly claims to be to certain groups of people. Why are you changing it? Why do you sit in churches across America and listen to preachers change the clear teaching of scripture? I teach every word as written, most of Christendom picks and chooses which verses to use as a proof text based on the doctrines and beliefs they want to uphold. So, I ask you plainly, who is doing the chopping? Me because I let the words stand as written to whom they were written? Or you as you change the meanings, audiences, and applications so you can keep doing what you’ve been doing? If you claim that the red letters in the gospels are the direct instructions for you today, you are following the Allegorical interpretation of the Bible. Why, because Jesus never said his words were your instructions, someone had to teach you that because it’s not in the Bible. On the other hand, Jesus told Paul he was sent specifically to the Gentiles with new information for living in the age of grace. But you are never taught this. Why?