Dear Seven,
I sympathize with your dilemma. I’m in the same boat myself. I have wrestled with this for a long time and continue to do so. How does one know what is true and what is not? Most of the time there are good arguments on both (or more) sides of the issue. Most of the time we are arguing about things on which Scripture is sketchy or vague at best. The Bible is not a hand book on ‘the true religion’ in which doctrine and procedure is specifically spelled out.
I have made an interesting (to myself, at least) observation over the past few years. People don’t go to the Bible to find the truth. They first accept a ‘truth’ then they go to the Bible to prove that it’s so. And it works! Trinitarians find ample ‘proof’ in the Bible for their doctrine. Opponents of the Trinity find ample ‘proof’ that it does not exist. Sometimes both sides use the same Scripture! I am currently debating this on another board and you would be surprised at the liberties that are taken with the Scriptures.
We decide on what is so and then we spend our time finding passages in the Bible that ‘support’ our belief while downplaying those that seemingly contradict. The amazing thing about all of this is that the Bible will ‘support’ contradicting theologies. You can find in there exactly what you want to find! Perhaps that is the most amazing characteristic of this remarkable book. I can’t help but feel that God designed it so. Your true self eventually comes out. In the end you find yourself, you find out what it is that you really want.
So we have to ask ourselves what it is that we are looking for before we open that book. You want to believe that God exists? You will find it there. You want to believe that it’s just a book written by men and full of contradictions and errors? You will find that too. You want hope? It’s there. You want controversy? It’s there too. You want a reason to love your fellow man? You will find it there. Do you want a reason to despise your neighbor? You will find that too.
I sometimes feel that the Bible is more a book of questions than of answers. Questions that are to be answered from each of our individual hearts. One thing is surfacing for me that I am slowly accepting. God never intended everything to be black and white. A simple rule book would have been easy for him to produce. A simple procedural manual would have been easy too. He did not choose to do so. Why not? Why all those cryptic passages and seeming contradictions from a God of infinite wisdom? The Bible is doing it’s job. It’s making us search our hearts for what we want, what we truly desire while at the same time providing, in the background, the material that we need to construct a standard of living that God approves.
What do you want? Life on earth? It’s promised there. Life in heaven? It’s promised there too! It’s easy to find someone who is very persuasive with words and one who has worked out some clever theory based on a portion of the Bible and then from that time forward just allow this person (or organization) to do our thinking for us. In time we delude ourselves in thinking that God is ‘using’ this person to sound down ‘the truth’ to us. In reality they are simply theorizing and in the end, they have to start revising their theories as the ‘holes’ become manifest over time. The truth has to be between us (individual) and God. The Bible will help us to scrutinize our hearts and give us the encouragement for doing what we know down deep inside that we should. It is, as Paul said, sharper than any two edged sword and it does divide.
The truth will not be found on a web site or in some theologian’s book or from the manuals of a religious entity. Bits and pieces of the truth might be repeated from those and other sources from time to time but ‘the truth’ is not there. It’s in our hearts and with God’s help and our hard work we can release some of it.
-Seen it all, done it all, can't remember most of it-
Edited by - Frenchy on 11 August 2000 8:31:32