Following on the heels of yesterday’s post, I hope you can see how futile it is to play the childish “my verse is better than your verse” game when discussing theological principles in Scripture.
Because you can take any one topic in the Bible and easily find one verse that seems to contradict another.
That’s why in order to prevent confusion, the Lord was very wise in how He decided to give us His Word.
He didn’t rely on just one verse or one story to communicate His wisdom to us.
Instead, He introduced His patterns and principles to us in a perfect sequential order and then fleshed out those principles through the stories of real people in real situations.
That way we could discern what pleased God and what didn’t and what worked and what didn’t in His economy.
So, again, to reiterate the point I mentioned yesterday, WE MUST VIEW THE BIBLE AS A COMPLETE WHOLE and not as a collection of pieces that can be interpreted in different ways or in any order we please.
You can’t just take one verse or two and use those cherry picked verses as representatives of the whole (which is what a lot of Christian denominations do).
Nor are we allowed to just discard certain verses that when looked at individually seem to contradict other parts of the Bible.
Again, we have to take the Bible as a complete whole.
That’s why it’s so retarded to challenge another person’s theology based on just one or two verses as if those those verses were the final word on any given topic.
It is this exact practice that has led to doctrinal based Christianity as opposed to a religion truly based on the Scriptures.
Again, the more than 20,000 Christian denominations in existence today is evidence that this precisely is what has occurred.
The Scriptures were never structured that way and were NEVER intended to be used in such a fashion.
Heck, even the insanely detailed Mosaic Law with its 613 positive and negative commandments doesn’t provide us with a full picture of what God wanted to communicate to us.
That’s why we have Moses’s Sermon on the Mount at Moab and countless other stories in Scripture.
Again, they were given to us so that we could grow into a true discernment and understanding of the mind of God.
There just ain’t no shortcuts to properly learning the Bible minus reading it from the Book of Genesis and moving forward chapter by chapter and book by book.
Starting your Bible studies from the Book of John in the New Testament just isn’t going to cut it.
Alrighty, now that I got that off my chest, the next time we meet, we’ll jump right back into our exegesis of Joshua and watch God’s divine patterns and principles play out right before our very eyes.
Stay frosty!
So, what do you believe on OSAS, or should we heed the need for pressing on and staying faithful to the end, undeterred?
No, I don’t hold to the OSAS (once saved always saved) doctrine.