April 30, 2014
The Importance of the Source
In doing
reports for college classes I’ve sampled a variety of worship services and
sometimes the differences are subtle, other times startling. One pastor dressed
casually in jeans, stood behind a music stand and glanced at typed notes.
Another pastor dressed casually in slacks and a tie, stood behind a podium and
glanced at typed notes, but he also read scripture references from the open
Bible he held throughout the service. For me, the Bible gave one
pastor the edge over the other simply because he referenced the authority he held in his hands. Jesus went to the synagogue on the Sabbath and when he stood
up to read the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to him. Unrolling the
scroll he read a passage. “Then he rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the
attendant and sat down. The eyes of everyone in the synagogue were fastened on
him, and he began by saying to them, “Today this scripture is
fulfilled in your hearing.” (Luke 4:17 NIV)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
1 comment:
Gail;
-----One of the biggest reasons I am so at odds with this temporal life is that most information resources are unreliable. A person desirous of truly knowing things either gathers information from reliable sources, or he must go glean it all from his own research and assemble it by his own theories. Thankfully, enough reliable sources are reasonably available to be able to figure out the truth about most things. The problem is that most people do not take the vetting of their sources seriously. As a result, their preacher might surely hold up a Bible while preaching Black liberation theology, or white supremacy, or that Jesus was Satan’s brother and we each will become a God like Jehovah, or any other venue of hog tripe. And that’s just the religious consideration of the problem. The political consideration is even worse. Witness Barrack Obama, Harry Reid, Nancy Palosi. Nuff said.
-----I could become a fool alone and everyone else be wise. Then the travesties befalling me would be my own, of which I would most likely be blissfully ignorant, being a fool and all. But taking seriously the Lord’s call to proceed from the fear of Him into the realm of knowledge and understanding eventually leads us to the awareness of how culture is so predominantly made of trusting and believing what’s told to each other and mimicking what’s seen done regularly. When this simple process occurs with no regard for honest assessments of the characters of the folks we listen to and mimic, then culture begins to paste over itself layer after layer after layer of social disease. Being the few who carefully vet the character of our sources, we not only suffer the crushing burdens and wounds of a sick society, but to add insult to injury, we also discover from where those ills came and how they came. That’s hard to take quietly!
-----So important is knowing the integrity of a source that even the Bible spends much of its message legitimizing itself as the source. So well does it do this that almost every scoffing scientist can only brush the Bible aside with summary dismissal, because if he entangled himself in honest debate with the Bible's details, artifacts, and derivative facts, he would have to either repent or dismiss himself as either a liar or an idiot. Moreover, the Bible legitimizes God’s prophets as directly as is their importance to such a convincing degree that a prominent Rabbi in the second century AD contorted the histories of Cyrus, Darius, and the Xerxes, and Artexerxes of Persia to drop 135 years from the Jewish calendar so that the first 483 years of Daniel’s prophecy would stop pointing to Jesus’ crucifixion as the cutting off of the Anointed One.
-----When it comes right down to the brass tacks, God made sure that our information source for being alive in knowing Him was well legitimized. Beyond that, He expects us to vet all our information sources. And if we do that He will paste layer after layer after layer of additional truth and understanding onto our relationship with Him.
Love you all,
Steve Corey
Post a Comment