Scripture: A Living God

 

I have long felt that a living God can do better than requiring adherence to a book written by men. These verses are to argue that the original citizens of the kingdom promoted love as led by God directly rather than obtaining rules and knowledge from a book. If the focus is love and God is love, then we should not need to worry about people ‘hearing’ God tell them to do dastardly things. As of now, the Christian God is not exactly love and he ‘says’ to do all kinds of stupid things like quitting school to become a missionary.

 

Isaiah 54:13-14a

All your children will be taught by the Lord, and great will be their peace. In righteousness you will be established: Tyranny will be far from you; Terror will be far removed; it will not come near you. If anyone does attack you, it will not be my doing; whoever attacks you will surrender to you.

This is part of the prophecy that the Jews were expecting to come to pass with respect to the Messiah. Notably, all this peace has not yet come to pass and so it cannot be understood that Jesus fulfilled the part about children being taught by the Lord. Nor can it be a promise for heaven since heaven would have no such enemies attacking and surrendering. Thus, it is expected that God will teach directly which is what Jesus taught ought to occur. Perhaps the fleeing from God’s voice and the grasping of man’s book has prevented this prophecy from coming to pass. If Christians would let go of the book and focus more on loving others, surely peace would come quite quickly.

 

Matthew 13:52

He said to them, “Therefore every teacher of the law who has become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven is like the owner of a house who brings out of his storeroom new treasures as well as old.”

Teachers of the law know a lot of old things, but if they have become a disciple in the kingdom of heaven then they will also be able to bring about new things as the Spirit guides. The point is that such a person should not be resting solely on old texts; he or she should be finding new and revealed information that is not found within the texts of old.

 

Matthew 23:8-10

But you are not to be called ‘Rabbi,’ for you have one Teacher, and you are all brothers. And do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called instructors, for you have one Instructor, the Messiah.

This seems pretty clear to me that all mankind is equal and that, if we obey Jesus, we should be learning directly from God himself as we follow Jesus’ instructions to love. This is not to say that others cannot help and guide, but that they would not be our authority. And yet, man is indeed our authority if we make the Bible the authority since none of it was written by Jesus himself. Jesus did not desire a book—he claimed that the Spirit would come and teach us.

 

John 10:4-5

When he has brought out all his own, he goes on ahead of them, and his sheep follow him because they know his voice. But they will never follow a stranger; in fact, they will run away from him because they do not recognize a stranger’s voice.” 

It is noteworthy that Jesus said his sheep would distinguish between voices as opposed to books. He did not say his sheep know the right book or will look everything up to see if it matches what someone else claimed to be God’s word. His sheep know his voice and they flee the voice of others.

 

John 14:26

But the Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you all things and will remind you of everything I have said to you.

To be fair, Jesus said this to his disciples and thus it may not apply to anyone else. Still, if the Spirit is capable of teaching all things, then why must we use a book? Jesus specifically said that our teacher is to be God and not man so I would have to assume that following the spirit of love is better than following a book.

 

John 16:13

Howbeit when he, the Spirit of truth, is come, he will guide you into all truth: for he shall not speak of himself; but whatsoever he shall hear, that shall he speak: and he will shew you things to come.

The main purpose of the Spirit, it seems, is to guide in truth. Trusting a book instead of allowing the Spirit to guide will quench the Spirit. One can always argue that the Spirit guides as one reads the Bible, of course, and yet still those professing to believe in the Bible cannot come to any decent agreements on what everything means. Clearly the Spirit is not guiding. That, or we ‘know’ that everyone else is not a true follower since we know that we personally are seeking and yet no one agrees with us about everything so clearly they must not likewise be seeking. This proves they are not being guided even though we can have faith that we are. Of course, if the Spirit is doing it, then what good is a pastor or teacher? One could just read the book his or her self and be guided by the best teacher: the Spirit.

 

John 16:25

Though I have been speaking figuratively, a time is coming when I will no longer use this kind of language but will tell you plainly about my Father.

To be fair, Jesus is speaking to the disciples so perhaps this only applies to them. However, if God is not speaking plainly to everyone else, then we have no means by which to trust the disciples apart from their word—the word of man. God does not want us to be trusting man, but on him alone, right? How can we trust God alone when there is always a man in between telling us what God wants?

 

Ephesians 1:17

I keep asking that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the glorious Father, may give you the Spirit of wisdom and revelation, so that you may know him better.

Paul is specifically praying that God would teach the Ephesians directly. He did not pray that they could understand Paul better but that they would learn from God directly so that they can know God better. And notably, at the time of writing this, there existed no such Bible to blindly follow. The early Christians did not use a Bible.

 

Colossians 2:18-19

Do not let anyone who delights in false humility and the worship of [messengers] disqualify you. Such a person also goes into great detail about what they have [not] seen; they are puffed up with idle notions by their unspiritual mind. They have lost connection with the head, from whom the whole body, supported and held together by its ligaments and sinews, grows as God causes it to grow.

The King James Version indicates that such a person goes into detail about what they have not seen while the NIV version claims they go into detail about what they have seen. We should also keep in mind that the word ‘angels’ truly means ‘messengers’ generically. The Bible refers to John the Baptist as an ‘angel’ but they clearly chose not to translate it that way. When leaving this as messengers and keeping the ‘not’, this sounds a lot like what we do today. We worship messengers such as Paul and go into great detail about things we did not see ourselves. We put Paul on a pedestal and make all kinds of crazy assumptions without truly knowing anything. We should not be talking about things that others have seen as if we know them as facts if we have not seen such things ourselves. We know nothing of what is written as truth, but we can still draw conclusions by first thinking “if” this is true followed by continual caution that it may not indeed be true.