2 Timothy 3:16-17 (NIV ‘84)
16 All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness, 17 so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work.
Simply put this verse teaches us that God’s word as contained in the Bible are His Words! His words are useful to us to make us more like Jesus. Through this process, which cannot be done alone, we are made more complete and ready to do the good work God has for us. But scripture being rock solid, perfect, and life changing can get misunderstood or misused. I am going to highlight a few of the ways that I have seen this happen.
There are some dangers that some of these ideas can lead us into. Inerrancy, Inspiration, and authority of Scripture are so good when we remember who did the inspiring what is inspired, and why God did it. It is a good exercise to look at what it doesn’t mean and it isn’t useful for. Scripture, reading, studying, and having others bring it into your life is not for proving to yourself that you are complete. Scripture is part of the process of that happening and the work is never done. If we cannot see the next thing that God has to teach us or the next point of connection with God that we haven’t explored yet then we need more people ti live in authentic community with. The Bible is not a pass or fail report card on our lives, everyone of us has failed, and if you aren’t sure how you are failing then it’s pride. I don’t say that to accuse you or make you feel bad. Knowing where we start and where we are before God is a joyful thing. When we agree with Him about where we are then He lights a raging fire of connection and change. We should always be holding our lives up to the standard of Jesus, seeing we fall short, and running to Him. For you perfectionists out there you have special dangers in this. This is not a checklist and perfectionism does not help you be godly it actually uses shame and self punishment as a fuel to move you in your own mind closer to your standard you have for yourself. God want to walk alongside you as you become more like Jesus and He cares a whole lot more about being in a relationship with you than you thinking you know what you should be like or you trying to do it with your own effort. The rock-solid nature of scripture cannot lull us into a sense of security, it is solid we are not and until we see Jesus face to face we aren’t supposed to be. (Psalm 1, 1 John 3:2)
Knowing Scripture or living in a community of people with a high level of Biblical literacy or theological understanding is great. The danger comes in when we think we can settle on theological preferences and unverified explanations of certain verses. All Scripture is inspired by God but all of our interpretations of that are not. Do you know when a theological principle was first written about? Do you know who promoted it to the church? Do you know what the church taught before or after this theological stance became prevelant. If you can answer those questions you are a giant leap towards taking something you were taught or maybe something that is convenient to believe back to the Bible, and back to the community of believers you connect with on a soul level. Then you can really decide if what you believe comes from lots of verses in the Bible and not just one or two. You can learn about the interpretation that people did to come to that theological conclusion and decide if you trust their work and their conclusion. What the Bible says is never in question, what people have said about it should always be. It is definitely ok to have long held beliefs and it is ok to be passionate about them. It is ok to have confidence in what you believe the Bible teaches that far outweighs your doubt. But if you have never searched out how accurate something is that you hold passionately to or put it to a historical test you can never be confident that you have weeded out as many human errors from that theological principle as possible. (Acts 17:10-15)
Scripture is not for you to weaponize against others. Our first temptation can be to see how awesome scripture is and then decide we will teach, rebuke, correct, and train others. Before we can ever do that we have to let it first be done to us. We have to be taught and be rebuked before we can offer that to those around us. It is a commonly held principle that you cannot give to anyone else what you do not have. If you don’t have $5 you can’t give someone $5. The same holds true with change in someones life from Biblical teaching or correction. If you have never experienced correction yourself or rebuke then you cannot hope to change someones life with a word from Scripture or a principle learned from it’s pages. At best you will say the right thing in the wrong way. When the Biblical king David talked about Scripture he first said it was a “lamp to my feet and light to my path” Psalm 119:105. This means real life change only happens for us in community. We need others to see our blindspots not only to help us but so that we can learn how to see blindspots in others. Then we have to learn how to infuse our relationships with Scripture and it’s principles but first it needs to be infused into us. Like the tea has to touch the water and steep this process requires both time and closeness. If we get excited about what the Bible says because we see how wrong it makes other people look we are in danger of weaponizing it. If we keep those thoughts to ourself then we are at least quitely judgmental and we have only infected our own hearts with bitterness. But if we open our mouths we run the risk of giving people a bad tast for God or His Word when He has the sweetest flavor (Psalm 34). Jesus had a lot to say to the Pharisees who made a profession out of weaponizing Scripture and it isn’t flattering. (Matthew 23:1-4 read it in the ESV and the NLT)
Every one of us is susceptible to using Scripture and our interpretations incorrectly. Rest assured though. We have a great foundation to our faith and we can rely on the direction we are headed because many people throughout history have resisted these dangers. The challenge is to be one of them yourself and to be an entire family that takes the Bible for what it really is. It is better than we can imagine to make us complete and ready to do God’s work but we only shine a candle to it in the amount that we light a beacon piercing the darkness out our collective humanity, always holding ourselves up to to its great light.
Will Regier