CAN YOU PROVE ANYTHING FROM THE BIBLE?

Dear Friends,

It is very clear from the Bible that the Lord wants us to be fat. The world tells us that we should be slim and lean, ready to run a marathon, but the Bible says that fat is the Lord’s. If fat is the Lord’s it must be good. Now it is clear that if something is from the Lord and good, He will want us to have more and more of it. So, He wants us to have more and more fat in our diet and as part of our bodies. As it says in Leviticus 3:16b, “All fat is the Lord’s.”

However, someone else will say the opposite. They will publish a “Christian” lifestyle book and say we should only be eating a plant based diet. Why? The Bible is clear that we should never eat fat and never eat blood. All meat sold has traces of blood in it, so we should eat no meat. As well, we should eat a diet high in carbs, with no fat. Why? Leviticus 3:17 says, “It shall be a statute forever throughout your generations, in all your dwelling places, that you eat neither fat nor blood.”

Then we talk to our skeptical friend. The skeptic says, “The problem with you Christian’s is that you believe the Bible. But you can prove anything with the Bible. If you can prove anything with the Bible, it should be ignored.” So, what do we say? Here are a couple of initial points.

First, encourage your Pastor and “small group leaders” to regularly preach (or lead) through whole books of the Bible. There is a time and a place to look at one verse in one book and another verse in another book and show how they teach some large Biblical truth or important Biblical theme. However, if our main Biblical diet is a verse here and a verse there, we will easily fall into reading the verses out of context and provide a new context which comes from our culture/mind. The Bible comes to us as 66 books. So we need to read each book as a book. Encourage (and pray for) your Pastor that he will learn how to preach through a book well to the glory of God. His preaching will model how to understand the Bible and encourage you to read the books in the Bible from beginning to end, and read the whole Bible from beginning to end.

Second, just as we have experiences someone twisting our words out of context, so it is that people can, and will, twist the words in the Bible out of context. Sometimes this “twisting” is done by a huckster, sometimes by someone who has several PhD’s and teaches at a prestigious university. Our “skeptic” friend has not given up on all speech because speech can be twisted out of context, so they should not write off the Bible because it can be twisted out of context.

Third, commit to learn how to read and interpret the Bible well yourself. This is a lifelong commitment or at least it should be. Just because you can read a menu does not mean you know how to read well. The better you get at reading well, and the more you know what the Bible says from Genesis to Revelation, the more you will be able to calmly refute the “twisters” and the skeptics. By the way, you cannot read the Bible well if you do not read it humbly. Actually all “good reading” of any text requires humility, but humility is especially required when we read the Bible. When we read the Bible, we are reading “God’s word written”.

George+