Assumption Bible Quotes

Too often we assume that God has increased our income to increase our standard of living, when his stated purpose is to increase our standard of giving. (Look again at 2 Corinthians 8:14 and 9:11).

Don't believe something just because you want to, and don't embrace an idea just because you've always believed it. Believe what is biblical. Test all your assumptions against the precious words God gave us in the Bible.

The assumption that the gospel can be reduced to a note card is already off on the wrong track.

Tell me sir if you will, where in the Bible does it state that it’s ok to judge others based purely on assumption? Can you see now who is the lesser evil between the two?

The telescope destroyed the firmament, did away with the heaven of the New Testament, rendered the ascension of our Lord and the assumption of his Mother infinitely absurd, crumbled to chaos the gates and palaces of the New Jerusalem, and in their places gave to man a wilderness of worlds.

We must admit that simply knowing the contents of the Bible is not a sure route to spiritual growth. There is an aweful assumption in evangelical churches that if we can just get the Word of God into people's heads, then the Spirit of God will apply it to their hearts. That assumption is aweful, not because the Spirit never does what the assumption supposes, but because it excused pastors and leaders from the responsibility to tangle with people's lives. Many remain safely hidden behind pulpits, hopelessly out of touch with the struggles of their congregations, proclaiming the Scriptures with a pompous accuracy that touches no one. Pulpits should provide bridges, not barriers, to life-changing relationships.

That, right fucking there, that was what he hated about them. All of them. Their arrogance. That fucking self-satisfied superiority. Their smug assumptions that they understood what was best for everybody, that they couldn't possibly be wrong. For the Bible told them so.

Whether [new Protestant church movements] place their emphasis on new worship styles, expressions of the Holy Spirit’s power, evangelism to seekers, or Bible teaching, these so-called new movements still operate out of the fallacious assumption that the church belongs firmly in the town square, that is, at the heart of Western culture. And if they begin with this mistaken belief about their position in Western society, all their church planting, all their reproduction will simply mirror this misapprehension.

Before we can be confident we are reading the Bible accurately, we need to understand what assumptions and values we project onto the Bible:

There is also a widespread assumption that the Bible is supposed to provide us with role models and give us precise moral teaching, but this was not the intention of the biblical authors. The Eden story is certainly not a morality tale; like any paradise myth, it is an imaginary account of the infancy of the human race.

The responsible use of the Bible must begin by acknowledging that these books were not written with our modern situations in mind, and are informed by the assumptions of an ancient culture remote from our own.

Let’s begin with a simple assumption. Since God has a will for us, He must want us to know it. If so, then we could expect Him to communicate it to us in the most obvious way. And how would that be? Through the Bible, His revelation.

If we're not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We're members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I'll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer "being fed," I'm out the door. This is not biblical Christianity. Scripture is clear that when we become Christians, we become-permanently and spiritually-a part of the church. We become part of the family of God, with all the responsibilities and expectations that word connotes in the non-Western world.

In this book I will challenge you to reconsider several assumptions you may have regarding biblical rest. I’ll ask you to expand your definitions to include things you may not have previously considered. But be assured, my purposes are not to undermine God’s rest. I only wish to bring clarity to the topic.

Given our abundance, the burden of proof should always be on keeping, not giving. Why would you not give? We err by beginning with the assumption that we should keep or spend the money God entrusts to us. Giving should be the default choice. Unless there is a compelling reason to spend it or keep it, we should give it.

Thomas Merton, of course, constitutes a special threat to Christians, because he presents himself as a contemplative Christian monk, and his work has already affected the vitals of Roman Catholicism, its monasticism. Shortly before his death, Father Merton wrote an appreciative introduction to a new translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which is the spiritual manual or “Bible” of all Hindus, and one of the foundation blocks of monism or Advaita Vedanta. The Gita, it must be remembered, opposes almost every important teaching of Christianity. His book on the Zen Masters, published posthumously, is also noteworthy, because the entire work is based on a treacherous mistake: the assumption that all the so-called “mystical experiences” in every religion are true. He should have known better.

You think I hate men. I guess I do, although some of my best friends...I don't like this position. I mistrust generalized hatred. I feel like one of those twelfth century monks raving on about how evil women are and how they must cover themselves up completely when they go out lest they lead men into evil thoughts. The assumption that the men are the ones who matter, and that the women exist only in relation to them, is so silent and underrunning that ever we never picked it up until recently. But after all, look at what we read. I read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and Wittgenstein and Freud and Erikson; I read de Montherlant and Joyce and Lawrence and sillier people like Miller and Mailer and Roth and Philip Wylie. I read the Bible and Greek myths and didn't question why all later redactions relegated Gaea-Tellus and Lilith to a footnote and made Saturn the creator of the world. I read or read about, without much question, the Hindus and the Jews, Pythagoras and Aristotle, Seneca, Cato, St.Paul, Luther, Sam Johnson, Rousseau, Swift...well, you understand. For years I didn't take it personally. So now it is difficult for me to call others bigots when I am one myself. I tell people at once, to warn them, that I suffer from deformation of character. But the truth is I am sick unto death of four thousand years of males telling me how rotten my sex is. Especially it makes me sick when I look around and see such rotten men and such magnificent women, all of whom have a sneaking suspicion that the four thousand years of remarks are correct. These days I feel like an outlaw, a criminal. Maybe that's what the people perceive who look at me so strangely as I walk the beach. I feel like an outlaw not only because I think that men are rotten and women are great, but because I have come to believe that oppressed people have the right to use criminal means to survive. Criminal means being, of course, defying the laws passed by the oppressors to keep the oppressed in line. Such a position takes you scarily close to advocating oppression itself, though. We are bound in by the terms of the sentence. Subject-verb-object. The best we can do is turn it around. and that's no answer, is it?

Negroes want to be treated like men: a perfectly straightforward statement, containing only seven words. People who have mastered Kant, Hegel, Shakespeare, Marx, Freud, and the Bible find this statement utterly impenetrable. The idea seems to threaten profound, barely conscious assumptions. A kind of panic paralyzes their features, as though they found themselves trapped on the edge of a steep place.

As Christians we ought to fear being on the wrong side of the holy, apostolic, and universal church more than we fear being on the wrong side of discredited assumptions about progress and enlightenment.

One of the great tragedies and errors of the way people have understood the Bible has been the assumption that what people did in the Old Testament must have been right ‘because it’s in the Bible’. It has justified violence, enslavement, abuse and suppression of women, murderous prejudice against gay people; it has justified all manner of things we now cannot but as Christians regard as evil. But they are not there in the Bible because God is telling us, ‘That’s good.’ They are there because God is telling us, ‘You need to know that that is how some people responded. You need to know that when I speak to human beings things can go very wrong as well as very wonderfully.’ God tells us, ‘You need to know that when I speak, it isn’t always simple to hear, because of what human beings are like.’ We need, in other words, to guard against the temptation to take just a bit of the whole story and treat it as somehow a model for our own behaviour. Christians have often been down that road and it has not been a pretty sight. We need rather to approach the Bible as if it were a parable of Jesus. The whole thing is a gift, a challenge and an invitation into a new world, seeing yourself afresh and more truthfully.

Today more than ever, we are in need not only of godly pastors and Bible teachers, but also godly lawyers, politicians, diplomats, judges, doctors, economists, educators, artists, carpenters, mechanics, and used car salesmen who see their jobs as a way to honorably represent God's ways in daily living.

But if the Scriptures are the unbreakable word of God, as Jesus seems to have thought they were, then a different approach is needed. Maybe it’s my interpretation, or my assumptions, that need challenging. Maybe there is something I don’t know. Maybe the answer is in there, and I just need to look a bit harder. Maybe I’m the one who is broken, rather than the Bible.

The usual assumption is that the Satanic ceremony or service is always called black mass. A black mass is not the magical ceremony practiced by Satanists. The Satanist would only employ the use of a black mass as a form of psychodrama. Furthermore, a black mass does not necessarily imply that the performers of such are Satanists. A black mass is essentially a parody on the religious service of the Roman Catholic Church, but can be loosely applied to a satire on any religious ceremony.

I am convinced we are in the midst of a paradigm shift. That what used to hold us in community no longer works. That the spiritual offerings of yesteryear no longer help us thrive. And that, just like stargazers of the sixteenth century had to reimagine the cosmos by placing the sun at the center of the solar system, so we need to fundamentally rethink what it means for something to be sacred. Paradigm shifts like this happen for two reasons. First, because there is new evidence that refutes previously held assumptions--think of how Charles Darwin's _Origin of Species_ transformed our understanding of evolutionary biology and the historical accuracy of the Bible, for example. Second, because older theories prove irrelevant to new questions that people start asking. And that's what is happening today. In this time of rapid religious and relational change, a new landscape of meaning-making and community is emerging--and the traditional structures of spirituality are struggling to keep up with what our lives look like.

In Matthew’s gospel, Jesus’s sayings in the other gospels about the “kingdom of God” are rendered as “kingdom of heaven”; since many read Matthew first, when they find Jesus talking about “entering the kingdom of heaven,” they have their assumptions confirmed and suppose that he is indeed talking about how to go to heaven when you die, which is certainly not what either Jesus or Matthew had in mind. Many mental pictures have grown up around this and are now assumed to be what the Bible teaches or what Christians believe.9

Imagine you are in a classroom and they hand you a test with many interesting multiple choice questions, until you get to “Can you just explain what exactly you believe how the Universe started?” & here are the options. a) The Big Bang b) It’s always been there c) God! or Gods d) A bowl of cherries e) I don’t know…. If you choose (a) then what or who & why caused it? & the test continues…..If you choose (b) that would be my choice. If you choose (c) then who or what created God or Gods? And where do they come from? And if you think they have always been there, the same thing could be said about the universe. If you choose (d) It doesn’t make sense, it is odd, an anomaly, not supposed to be etc :) if you choose (e) then you are being honest. There’s nothing wrong with not knowing. You can make “assumptions” or “pretending” that you know or a book (bible) “knows” or “tells” you but I just don’t buy that. The beauty of it is that you are here today & you can be thankful & enjoy all the life that you have ahead of you. And the test (life) continues with more wonderful questions and experiences :)

As I pondered over the facts that the light of reason is not only despised, but by many even execrated as a source of impiety, that human commentaries are accepted as divine records, and that credulity is extolled as faith; as I marked the fierce controversies of philosophers raging in Church and State, the source of bitter hatred and dissension, the ready instruments of sedition and other ills innumerable, I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down. With these precautions I constructed a method of Scriptural interpretation, and thus equipped proceeded to inquire—What is prophecy? in what sense did God reveal Himself to the prophets, and why were these particular men chosen by Him? Was it on account of the sublimity of their thoughts about the Deity and nature, or was it solely on account of their piety? These questions being answered, I was easily able to conclude, that the authority of the prophets has weight only in matters of morality, and that their speculative doctrines affect us little.

It was evangelicals' sense of rudderlessness - their desire for an authority to guide them in questions of dogma, life, and worship - that led them to rediscover liturgy and history in the first place. The irony was that in their smorgasbord approach to non-Protestant tradition, in their individualistic rejection of the rules of any one church in favor of a free run of the so-called church universal, in their repudiation of American nationalism in favor of cosmopolitanism, young evangelicals were being quintessentially evangelical and stereotypically American, doing as they pleased according to no authority but their own. The principle of sola scriptura was far clearer in theory than in practice. No matter evangelicals' faith that, with the 'illumination of the Holy Spirit,' 'Scripture could and should interpret itself,' too many illuminated believers came to different conclusions about what the Bible meant. Inerrantists who asserted their 'literal' interpretation with absolute certainty could do so only by covertly relying on modern, manmade assumptions. Other evangelicals were now searching for similar assurance in the authority of church history and the mystery of worship.

Meanwhile, I continued my academic work in religious studies, delving back into the Bible not as an unquestioning believer but as an inquisitive scholar. No longer chained to the assumption that the stories I read were literally true, I became aware of a more meaningful truth in the text, a truth intentionally detached from the exigencies of history. Ironically, the more I learned about the life of the historical Jesus, the turbulent world in which he lived, and the brutality of the Roman occupation that he defied, the more I was drawn to him. Indeed, the Jewish peasant and revolutionary who challenged the rule of the most powerful empire the world had ever known and lost became so much more real to me than the detached, unearthly being I had been introduced to in church. Today, I can confidently say

As a society we are only now getting close to where Dogen was eight hundred years ago. We are watching all our most basic assumptions about life, the universe, and everything come undone, just like Dogen saw his world fall apart when his parents died. Religions don’t seem to mean much anymore, except maybe to small groups of fanatics. You can hardly get a full-time job, and even if you do, there’s no stability. A college degree means very little. The Internet has leveled things so much that the opinions of the greatest scientists in the world about global climate change are presented as being equal to those of some dude who read part of the Bible and took it literally. The news industry has collapsed so that it’s hard to tell a fake headline from a real one. Money isn’t money anymore; it’s numbers stored in computers. Everything is changing so rapidly that none of us can hope to keep up. All this uncertainty has a lot of us scrambling for something certain to hang on to. But if you think I’m gonna tell you that Dogen provides us with that certainty, think again. He actually gives us something far more useful. Dogen gives us a way to be okay with uncertainty. This isn’t just something Buddhists need; it’s something we all need. We humans can be certainty junkies. We’ll believe in the most ridiculous nonsense to avoid the suffering that comes from not knowing something. It’s like part of our brain is dedicated to compulsive dot-connecting. I think we’re wired to want to be certain. You have to know if that’s a rope or a snake, if the guy with the chains all over his chest is a gangster or a fan of bad seventies movies. Being certain means being safe. The downfall is that we humans think about a lot of stuff that’s not actually real. We crave certainty in areas where there can never be any. That’s when we start in with believing the crazy stuff. Dogen is interesting because he tries to cut right to the heart of this. He gets into what is real and what is not. Probably the main reason he’s so difficult to read is that Dogen is trying to say things that can’t actually be said. So he has to bend language to the point where it almost breaks. He’s often using language itself to show the limitations of language. Even the very first readers of his writings must have found them difficult. Dogen understood both that words always ultimately fail to describe reality and that we human beings must rely on words anyway. So he tried to use words to write about that which is beyond words. This isn’t really a discrepancy. You use words, but you remain aware of their limitations. My teacher used to say, “People like explanations.” We do. They’re comforting. When the explanation is reasonably correct, it’s useful.

I'm not the only person who carries a lot of assumptions when I read the Bible, and it can be tough to entertain the idea that the Word of God has different perspectives in it. Biblical apologists spend all their time weaving these different viewpoints into a single frame, in an effort that often looks like squids playing Twister: fascinating, appalling, and hard to follow. We've seen what this approach to history can sow: a destructive oversimplification of the Church's past. Americans treat their national narrative in much this way, too. We simplistically teach a single story in our history classrooms, of brave rebels who left cultures of tyranny and heroically crossed the Atlantic to found a nation built on freedom and justice. When we speak of our national sins, such as the genocide committed on Nation Americans or the brutal, longterm economic extraction of wealth from black bodies via slavery and segregation, we seem to dismiss these troubling matters as things that happened in the remote past but that have been resolved today.

In every age there are threads of continuity and discontinuity. What may be different from age to age is the political organization, the kind of economy that exists and how it works, the architectural style, the nature of the calamities that occur - such as war, famine, natural disasters, or social upheaval - the dominance or absence of religion, life expectancy, the scope of medical care, and any number of other factors that impinge on daily life. In these areas, life in seventeenth-century America, for example, was very different indeed from life in the twentieth. At the same time, if Christian assumptions can be accepted, life in these two times also shared some things. Human nature has remained unchanged as created and fallen, as has God in his character and purposes, as has the truth of the revelation he has given us in the Bible, as has the significance of his redemptive acts and most importantly the birth, death, and resurrection of Christ. These have not changed. They are the threads that are woven through ages that, in many other ways, have no connections with each other at all. They give continuity to life amidst its many jarring discontinuities. For this reason, there is only one Gospel applicable to all people in all places and believed in the same way in every age. If this were not so, Christian faith would mean something entirely different today from what it meant last century, and faith would mean something entirely different in America than in Asia, Europe, or Africa.

We’ve been instructed to reject any trace of poetry, myth, hyperbole, or symbolism even when those literary forms are virtually shouting at us from the page via talking snakes and enchanted trees. That’s because there’s a curious but popular notion circulating around the church these days that says God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops. From walking with Adam and Eve through the garden of Eden, to traveling with the liberated Hebrew slaves in a pillar of cloud and fire, to slipping into flesh and eating, laughing, suffering, healing, weeping, and dying among us as part of humanity, the God of Scripture stoops and stoops and stoops and stoops. At the heart of the gospel message is the story of a God who stoops to the point of death on a cross. Dignified or not, believable or not, ours is a God perpetually on bended knee, doing everything it takes to convince stubborn and petulant children that they are seen and loved. It is no more beneath God to speak to us using poetry, proverb, letters, and legend than it is for a mother to read storybooks to her daughter at bedtime. This is who God is. This is what God does.

1. Divine Writing: The Bible, down to the details of its words, consists of and is identical with God’s very own words written inerrantly in human language. 2. Total Representation: The Bible represents the totality of God’s communication to and will for humanity, both in containing all that God has to say to humans and in being the exclusive mode of God’s true communication.[11] 3. Complete Coverage: The divine will about all of the issues relevant to Christian belief and life are contained in the Bible.[12] 4. Democratic Perspicuity: Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.[13] 5. Commonsense Hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts. 6. Solo Scriptura:[14] The significance of any given biblical text can be understood without reliance on creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks, such that theological formulations can be built up directly out of the Bible from scratch. 7. Internal Harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into single, unified, internally consistent bodies of instruction about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors. 8. Universal Applicability: What the biblical authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all Christians at every other time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching. 9. Inductive Method: All matters of Christian belief and practice can be learned by sitting down with the Bible and piecing together through careful study the clear “biblical” truths that it teaches. The prior nine assumptions and beliefs generate a tenth viewpoint that—although often not stated in explications of biblicist principles and beliefs by its advocates—also commonly characterizes the general biblicist outlook, particularly as it is received and practiced in popular circles: 10. Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, so that together those affirmations comprise something like a handbook or textbook for Christian belief and living, a compendium of divine and therefore inerrant teachings on a full array of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.[15]

The young are usually full of self-confidence, with grand dreams and ambitions. Up to a certain age, we believe that all of our plans will work. Many of our peers advise enthusiastically, “Go for it!” That advice may be encouraging and what we want to hear—but it’s in our own best interests to seek the experience and wisdom of those who have lived life with all its ups and downs, successes and failures. If we listen carefully to these older, wiser folks, we can avoid the pitfalls our own exuberance might plunge us into. Resist the assumption that older people are out of touch with today’s world—that their hard-earned wisdom is not relevant to our modern situations. The temptation is to wonder what they could possibly tell us about relationship problems or career choices when they haven’t the first clue about how to send a text message or change the settings on a computer. Never confuse knowledge—especially of technical things—with wisdom.

Law of Causality. It "cannot be proved, but must be believed; in the same way as we believe the fundamental assumptions of religion, with which it is closely and intimately connected. The law of causality forces itself upon our belief. It may be denied in theory, but not in practice. Any person who denies it, will, if he is watchful enough, catch himself constantly asking himself, if no one else, why this has happened, and not that. But in that very question he bears witness to the law of causality. If we are consistently to deny the law of causality, we must repudiate all observation, and particularly all prediction based on past experience, as useless and misleading.

I’d rather not write my own story, for in doing so I have assumed that I possess a writing ability equal to that of God. And that assumption will result in a story that is certain to have a bad ending.

If a person understands what the Bible says, and if he does not impose his own stupid assumptions upon it, then the Bible will never appear contradictory to him. He will never see even one apparent contradiction in the Bible. This is because the Bible never contradicts itself. However, if he does not understand the Bible, then he might perceive some apparent contradictions. Since the Bible does not contradict itself, he must assume that these are only apparent contradictions, and that the Bible is in fact contradicting his false beliefs and foolish assumptions. Nevertheless, as long as he perceives these apparent contradictions, he cannot affirm what the Bible teaches. He must study to grasp the true meaning, and to purge himself of false ideas, including many religious traditions that have been invented by the theologians. Then he will see that the contradictions never really existed in the first place.

Our faith doesn’t magically make our assumptions about Jesus and the Bible true. Faith can’t turn a falsehood into truth. Rightly understood, it’s not a blind belief in the unbelievable; it’s a rational belief based on a preponderance of evidence.

I say this with all my humility, To the fundamentalists particularly. This is not meant for those of faith, Who never claim ideological supremacy. What do the dumbbells of bible know, About the bold serendipities of love! What do the captives of koran know, About the welcoming language of the dove! What do the vultures of vedas know, About the elimination of assumption! What do the militants of atheism know, About the sweetness of assimilation! I learnt my religion on the streets, Like Jesus, Gautama, Shams and Shankara. Given the choice between dogma and love, The human always chooses love over dogma. Love finds new meaning in every age, Each amplifies the glory of the last one. Those who fear expansion out of insecurity, Deserve only pity not serious consideration. But beware o lovers, hate not those, Who stand as obstacle in your love. Lovers are born to conquer hate and fear, To reciprocate them is to dishonor love.

This brings us to the second Enlightenment assumption often taken for granted today: that political beliefs and attitudes come in two packages, and that everyone has to choose one or the other.

God intentionally includes these kinds of paradoxes in the Bible because they work to divide those who have a heart to know God from those who simply want to know about God. Jesus taught in parables for the same reason—so that only those who had a heart for Him would come to understand them. In fact, the entire Bible was written with this assumption: only those who have a personal relationship with God will truly be able to understand it. To those outside of a relationship with God, the things that are only understood in the context of intimacy with God appear to be in conflict.

Van Til's insight… was that antitheism actually presupposes theism. To reason at all, the unbeliever must operate on assumptions that actually contradict his espoused presuppositions — assumptions that comport only with the Christian worldview. The unbeliever's efforts to be rational and to find an intelligible interpretation of his experience are, then, indications that he bears a knowledge of God the Creator within his heart, though struggling to suppress it (as the Bible itself speaks of sinful man's condition)

Dr. Burroughs couldn’t believe that human footprints could even potentially be found in 300 million-year-old sediment (by humanistic evolutionary reckoning). So, based on his religious assumptions, he believed the prints must’ve been made by an animal that had human-like feet and walked in a stride like humans. The problem is that there are no animals that have feet like humans and strides like a human. So, as an arbitrary speculation, he proposed that an unknown giant bipedal (“walked on two-feet”) amphibian made the prints.

People don’t know. And the more I thought about this, the more I realized there are a lot of assumptions all of us have about Christianity that simply aren’t biblical.

Answering the ultra-literalists The fundamental error these ultra-literalists make is they fail to recognise how Jesus and the Apostles reinterpreted the Old Testament. Instead texts are made to speak about present and future events almost as if the New Testament were never written. The implicit assumption is that somehow Old and New Testament run at times parallel into the future, the former speaking of Israel and the latter of the church, almost independent of one another (see Figure 2.2).

Whatever you are going through—and it is a safe assumption that we are always going through something—it is not to affect your peace. God is above your circumstances, and He is greater than your sin. Bring it all to Him—your sin, your trials, your everything. Bind yourself to the things that really matter and the One who can govern them. And rest. Be at peace and be well.

It is also wrong to think that Bible exposition can’t have a very strong focus on human need. Nearly all Bible texts do address such existential issues directly or indirectly. However, if we start with our questions and only then look to the Bible for answers, we assume that we are asking all the right questions—that we properly understand our need. However, we need not only the Bible’s prescription to our problems but also its diagnosis of them. We may even have maladies we are completely unaware of. If we don’t begin with the Bible, we will almost certainly come to superficial conclusions, having stacked the deck in favor of our own biases and assumptions.

If a person understands what the Bible says, and if he does not impose his own stupid assumptions upon it, then the Bible will never appear contradictory to him. He will never see even one apparent contradiction in the Bible. This is because the Bible never contradicts itself.

I soon realized that in large part their resistance to any new information rested on the structure of their faith. Convinced that this or that assumption about the Bible was true, they believed that faith in God was also viable. In other words, they entertained faith in an ultimate authority because they had faith in proximate authorities. However gently you challenged their assumptions about the Bible, you effectively challenged their ability to believe in God at all. Now imagine asking anyone more directly to grapple with their understanding of God—the changing face of God. The level of resistance is predictable. Finally,

which concludes that Judaism is one of the earliest Arabic religious cults. In that sense, The Hebrew Bible and the Islamic Qu’ran are two books which talk about the one and same Arabian culture and geography but at different periods and circumstances. Judaism and its book (contrary to ages-old assumptions) are part and parcel of ancient Arabian culture and history that have absolutely nothing to do with western spirituality or culture.

Most biblicists carry on with unperturbed confidence in biblicist assumptions and beliefs, paying little attention to the ramifications of multiple counterclaims about rival biblical teachings. Why and how can this be? The answers are multiple, and I can offer only conjectures about some of the possibilities here.

In Paul’s judgment, it was not appropriate to offer a careful Bible exposition to an audience who not only disbelieved in the Bible but also was profoundly ignorant of even its most basic assumptions. Evangelistic occasions are, then, one place where more topical Christian messages may be appropriate.

Yet another liberal tendency is the claim that if an organization is not a church, it does not have to follow the New Testament commands regarding such activities as women teaching the Bible to men. The reason I say this is indicative of a liberal tendency to avoid the authority of Scripture is that, while we may agree that parachurch organizations are not required to do everything that the New Testament commands for churches, nevertheless, when a parachurch organization does those same things that the New Testament talks about for churches, it is required to follow the same rules that the New Testament lays down for churches. It is not as if we can set up a separate organization next door to a church and then say that the rules no longer apply to us. This is another argument that is not usually made by thoroughgoing egalitarian writers, because to make this argument someone has to assume that the New Testament restrictions on women in ministry do apply to a church situation. That is an assumption egalitarians are not willing to make.

In the end, when the Chicago inerrantists call out “naturalism, evolutionism, scientism, secular humanism, and relativism” - the “usual suspects” of crimes against inerrancy - they are throwing up a whale of a red herring (not to mix marine metaphors). In reality, none of these presuppositions are necessary in order to conclude that the Bible contradicts itself. For instance, a Muslim is not any of these things; the Muslim believes in supernatural revelation, miracles, creation, absolute truth - all the essentials. But the Muslim can still detect errors in the Bible. Moreover, so can the Christian. I speak here from experience. I was an inerrantist, until I wasn’t. I never doubted the supernatural; I never doubted the possibility of special revelation; I never doubted that some things are just objectively true. In fact, it was precisely because of my faith in the Bible that I came to recognize that it was not inerrant. I believed that because it was inerrant, it could certainly survive a little critical scrutiny. Based on that assumption, I proceeded to scrutinize the text, and found that given consistent principles of exegesis, the construct of inerrancy could not be sustained. I neither wanted nor expected to discover what I discovered, but my faith in the Bible’s inerrancy contained within it, as they say, the seeds of its own destruction.

The earliest known copies of Jewish Scriptures in Hebrew dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries CE, and among them the differences were mostly small and insignificant. Taking them as witnesses to the earlier texts from which they were copied, it seemed logical to conclude that these many homogeneous texts must have derived from a common original via a highly accurate scribal tradition. But evidence from the Dead Sea Scrolls seems to contradict this conclusion. Among the hundreds of biblical manuscripts discovered there, many of which are more than a thousand years older than anything scholars had ever seen before, we find not uniformity but diversity, including many significant differences. The logical assumption now is that Jewish Scriptures became more uniform and free of variants over time, as scribes gradually established a more or less standard edition.

The Firstborn Over All Creation   (Col. 1:15–20) This passage includes a powerful defense of Christ’s deity. Apparently, a central component of the heresy that threatened the Colossian church was the denial of the deity of Christ. Ironically, throughout the centuries some cults have used the phrase “firstborn over all creation” (1:15) to undermine Christ’s deity. The assumption is that if Jesus was born at creation, then He is more like us than He is like God. The Greek word for firstborn, however, can refer to one who was born first chronologically, but it most often refers to preeminence in position or rank (Heb.1:6; Rom. 8:9). Firstborn in this context clearly means highest in rank, not first created (Ps. 89:27; Rev. 1:5) for several reasons: • Christ cannot be both “first begotten” and “only begotten” (see John 1:14, 18; 3:16, 18; 1 John 4:9); and, when the firstborn is one of a class, the class is in the plural form (1:18; Rom. 8:29), but “creation,” the class here, is in a singular form. • If Paul were teaching that Christ was a created being, he would be agreeing with the heresy that he was writing to refute. • It is impossible for Christ to be both created and the Creator of everything (1:16). Thus, Jesus is the firstborn in the sense that He has the preeminence (1:18) and that He possesses the right of inheritance “over all creation” (Heb. 1:2; Rev. 5:1–7, 13).

דברים Deuteronomy deuteronomy may well be the first book to pose the problem of modernity. Its authors struggled with issues conventionally viewed as exclusively modern ones, such as the historical distance between past and present, the tension between tradition and the needs of the contemporary generation, and the distinction between divine revelation and human interpretation. Seen from this perspective, ancient Israel’s Deuteronomy becomes a remarkably contemporary text, one that challenges its readers to rethink their assumptions about time, about Scripture, and about religion.

Westerners often talk of each person's uniqueness, and the need to find self-fulfillment through finding the exact fit for our gifts; the Bible has far more to say about self-sacrifice and service, and almost nothing about self-fulfillment (though I believe we often find deeper fulfillment than we could have imagined when we give ourselves to service and sacrifice!). Westerners are more likely to be eager to do things speedily; Southerners are mostly much more interested in doing things well, and, in Christian terms, patiently building for depth. I think we are too readily seduced by the worldly and in fact humanist assumption that we can fix everything through our own efforts.

At the very heart of the message of the New Testament is a Hebraic approach to the Almighty and His Good News. This approach is so vastly different from the Greek (and modern, Western) mindset, that without some basic appreciation of this foundational truth and perspective, the New Testament can be so totally misunderstood and misused as to render it’s central message null and void.   In his book “Distinctive Ideas of the Old Testament", Professor Norman H. Snaith make this point very emphatically when he states that:     “The aim of Hebrew religion was Da’ath Elohim (the Knowledge of God); the aim of Greek thought was Gnothi seauton (Know thyself).  
   Between these two there is a great gulf fixed.  We do not see that either admits of any compromise.  They are fundamentally different in a priori assumption, in method of approach, and in final conclusion…
   The Hebrew system starts with God.  The only true wisdom is Knowledge of God.  ‘The fear of God is the beginning of wisdom.’  The corollary is that man can never know himself, what he is and what is his relation the world, unless first he learn of God and be submissive to God’s sovereign will.  
The Greek system, on the contrary, starts from the knowledge of man, and seeks to rise to an understanding of the ways and Nature of God through the knowledge of what is called ‘man’s higher nature’.    According to the Bible, man had no higher nature except he be born of the Spirit. We find this approach of the Greeks nowhere in the Bible.    The whole Bible, the New Testament as well as the Old Testament, is based on the Hebrew attitude and approach… “     The great Jewish Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote, "The Greeks learned in order to comprehend. The Hebrews learned in order to revere. The modern man learns in order to use" (‘God in Search of Man’ p34)

not everything happens according to our cultural mindset and we have to make allowances in our mind for that – we have to question every single assumption we make about people who are separated by time, language, geography and culture.  And we must especially question ourselves when those assumptions are about the Bible and the life, and times, and way of thinking of those in first century Israel.  There is almost nothing more crucial in this life than understanding what our Messiah was talking about,

Since the orthodox Christian church continued to slip farther and farther toward the belief that sex was evil, the doctrine of the “Ever-Virginity” of Mary was established. This was the belief that Mary conceived as a virgin, but also remained a virgin even after giving birth to Jesus and thereafter for the rest of her life. The Catholic Church rejects the idea that Mary had other children, although the Bible speaks of the brothers and sisters of Jesus. The doctrine of “virginity” was established around 359 A.D. The doctrine of the bodily Assumption of Mary was formally developed by St. Gregory of Tours around 594 A.D. This doctrine stated that Mary, the mother of Jesus, was taken up into heaven to be seated at the side of Jesus. The idea has been present in apocryphal texts since the late fourth century.

The Bible was written with the assumption that we are the rational and spiritual beings God made us to be, giving us the created dignity of marrying our belief with reason. Christian faith is true not only because we really want to believe it but also because the truth it believes is the most plausible of all explanations.

during the latter part of the seventeenth and through the eighteenth centuries, while ordinary churchgoers continued to live in the world of the Bible, intellectuals were more and more controlled by the humanist tradition, so that even those who sought to defend the Christian faith did so on the basis that it was “reasonable,” that is to say, that it did not contradict the fundamental humanist assumption.

Like Marx before her, Zino had a great theory that hinged on completely unrealistic, even idealistic, assumptions. Capitalists are people, no more or less trustworthy than socialists. People choose the path of least resistance, and for most people that includes cutting corners. No, most CEOs don't read the Bible. But they do love to quote it. It convinces the masses to cede all power over to corporations, and that any failure is simply their own fault. It argues well - seductively - for the virtual elimination of government and any sort of regulation of power. People cling to the 'free hand of the market' as a perfect god. They're so eager for a solution that can be neatly applied to every situation that they're desperate to overlook it's faults.

Prayer is spending time with God. ~ Sharon Espeseth         Covered     “And pray in the Spirit on all occasions with all kinds of prayers and requests” (Ephesians 6:18).     Looking back, I recall the many times that I had done stupid things, yet somehow I didn’t get hurt. Specifically, I remember my university days as being full of stupidity. For instance, one cold November evening I decided to leave a house party and walk home. This wouldn’t have been so bad, however, it was 2:00 in the morning, I hadn’t told anyone I was going, and I had to walk 45 minutes to get home. When I think back, I shudder. Any number of bad things could have happened to me.   I made some poor choices, and although I suffered the consequences I sometimes felt as if the consequences were not as bad as they could have been. It recently occurred to me that I was being watched over and protected. I now know that my family frequently prayed for me.   Although I wasn’t serving God at the time, I was being covered in prayer by those who were. I am now led to believe that people I didn’t even know were praying for me. I make this assumption, not because I now know these people, but because I witnessed people praying for complete strangers.   In church and at Bible studies, prayer requests are often made for those we do not know. As part of a Christian writer’s group, I receive prayer requests via email for people I may never meet in my lifetime. Listening to Christian radio stations, prayer requests are voiced for others throughout the country and the world. As a member of many Christian associations, I receive newsletters and phone calls requesting prayer for strangers.   More recently, I witnessed first hand the outpouring of love for strangers through prayer. I was traveling east with a van full of women. We were excited about the conference we were going to together. However, on our drive we saw a slowdown of traffic on the opposite highway. There were police cars, ambulance, and fire truck lights flashing. In the centre of it all was a car, overturned on its roof. Another car was near with a smashed front end. The accident scene looked horrible. We automatically stopped our chatter and took a moment to pray aloud for the victims in the accident. We prayed for complete strangers. Although we may never know who they were, we followed Jesus’ directive to love our neighbours.   It’s comforting to know that my family and I are being prayed for. And I will continue to pray for people I don’t even know.       Prayer is my "alone" time with God. ~ Ruth Smith Meyer        

We need to be careful not to read the challenges of our own hearts, our personal assumptions, and our cultural assumptions about gender into the Bible, creating roles that don’t reflect the wisdom and love of Christ.

this “right to marry” argument has enormous contemporary cultural traction in the West, which requires explanation if it is indeed obviously worthless. I suspect that the felt force lies in another contemporary Western cultural assumption, that it is necessary to be sexually active to be a fulfilled, or even a properly adult, human being. We could no doubt trace the root of this assumption to Freud, but I trust it is evident once named, displayed repeatedly in our popular music, in the Hollywood assumption that the existence of a “40-Year-Old Virgin” is self-evidently hilarious, in our newspaper advice columns that prioritise sexual satisfaction as a personal need, and in countless other ways.18 The (Protestant) churches have visibly surrendered to this cultural assumption, making marriage an inevitable part of Christian maturity for much of the twentieth century. We looked askance at ministerial candidates who were not married and constructed church programmes on the basis that the only single people around were young adults preparing for marriage or widows.

As Strauss demonstrated with inescapable lucidity many decades ago, the two nativity stories of Matthew and Luke disagree at almost every point, one exception being the location of Jesus' birth in Bethlehem. [...] Matthew assumes Jesus was born in the home of Mary and Joseph in Bethlehem, and that they only relocated to Nazareth in Galilee after taking off for Egypt to avoid Herod the Great's persecution. Luke knows nothing of this but instead presupposes that Mary and Joseph lived in Galilee and "happened" to be in Bethlehem when the hour struck for Jesus' birth because the Holy Couple had to be there to register for a Roman taxation census. [...] For the moment, my point is to suggest that Luke and Matthew both seem to have been winging it, just as they did with their genealogies. They began with an assumption and tried to connect the dots. This time, their common assumption was that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Whence this assumption? Was there historical memory that Jesus was born there? Hardly; if there had been, we cannot account for Mark's utter lack of knowledge of the fact. No, it seems much more natural, much less contrived, to suggest that Matthew and Luke alike simply inferred from their belief in Jesus' Davidic lineage that he must have been born in Bethlehem. [...] Matthew and Luke both placed the birth of Jesus in Bethlehem because they mistakenly thought prophecy demanded it. They went to work trying to connect the dots with narrative or historical verisimilitude, but with limited success.

This is a wake up call. Don’t press the snooze alarm. The barbarians are at the gates, and, because they encourage breeding beyond the ability of the breeders to house, feed, and educate the breedees, violence and social disorganization continue. As the most Christian nation on earth watches its civilization dissolve like a Dove bar fallen off of that ark, attempts to enforce irrational superstitious solutions will accelerate. That Branch Davidian thing was a sample. Lots of other messiahs are waiting. Maybe we can have court-ordered Branch Davidian Social Services counseling for people who won’t share their wives with their god’s anointed. Maybe courts can acquit murderers if they believe a god’s finger was on their trigger. Maybe the barbarians will actually succeed in assuring that books, pictures, ideas, doctors, judges and military commanders share their vision. Then we will have a lot of interesting tribal warfare. One useful defense will be humanistic hermeneutics. Hermeneutics is a fancy word for biblical interpretation. When religious types want to make something simple sound holy and mysterious, they often give it an important sounding high falutin’ name. This practice contrasts sharply with the usage of secular humanists, who, in explaining their views, employ simple words, that fall trippingly from the tongue, like ‘eupraxophy.’ Hermeneutics can be an important weapon to use against religious fanatics in the coming ARCW. The hard core nut cases—those who would control every aspect of our lives by forcing us to accept their understanding of the will of their god—tend to share certain operational assumptions. These include the belief that: (1) Every word of the Bible is true. (2) The English translation of the Bible authorized by King James the First of England, completed in 1611, Common Era, is the only fully acceptable, authoritative, and inspired-by-god translation of holy scripture. This translation is accurate in every respect, including punctuation marks. (3) The Bible is the basis of all morality. Without it there can be no morality. (4) The United States of America was established, and should be governed, according to biblical principles. (5) The Bible is without error. (6) No part of the Bible is in conflict with, or contradictory to, any other part. (7) Hermeneutics can be used to clarify and explain those truths of god in the Bible that might appear, to finite minds, to be in conflict. The goal of hermeneutics is to reconcile all portions of the ‘Word of God’ (the Bible) into a seamless, complete, infallible, and final statement of all past and future history (the latter is called prophecy), of divine law, and of how humans should behave and understand morality. The Bible, properly interpreted, is the final word on everything.

Another part of the problem is that exegetes have for years simply not been trained in the political thinking of the ancient world, so that just as we have exported sixteenth-century theology back into ancient Galatia and made Paul’s letter address our post-Reformation concerns in their own terms, we have exported modern political assumptions back into ancient Asia Minor and made Revelation, and Paul too for that matter, address our political anxieties in their own terms.

The Reason for God, Timothy Keller argues that grace breaks decisively from the “performance narrative,” understood as the attempt to ground one’s status before God either partly or wholly in one’s performance in any number of moral or ritual areas.17 This performance narrative also rhythms contemporary society, crystallizing in what Michael Sandel calls the “tyranny of merit,” namely the assumption that the only factor limiting success is a lack of effort or ability and we can achieve anything if only we want it desperately enough. So both in terms of religion and in terms of daily life, we rate our success and our worthiness by our performance.

After all, the Bible seems simply to assume the reality of God, with little or no concern for establishing that assumption on rational grounds. Others have criticized that to argue for God’s reality outside of appeal to the power of the Story of God is to conjure an anemic philosophical deity who bears little or no resemblance to our main Character.

For the first fifty years of America’s history, there were hardly any biblical defenses of slavery. The cultural assumption of slavery was so strong that no one needed to defend an institution that seemed natural to most white Americans.10 It is remarkable to note that an evil this great and pervasive in American society was initially met with little resistance.

These retorts suggest I am the problem for pointing out the assumptions behind someone's language instead of the language causing harm on its own. They represent a refusal to take responsibility for the ways that words burn people and a desire to remain above the heat, relying on the dictionary and the Bible to justify using expired words and metaphors.

So every society, be it religious or secular, totalitarian or multicultural, urban or agricultural, will be organized according to many overlapping figures that cohere into a dominant plausibility structure: small- and large-scale pictures and performances of truth woven into the fabric of the daily assumptions, rituals, actions, and choices of the people who live in that society and acting as a powerful catechesis into a particular way of viewing the world.

On the other hand, if you spent those thirty years, or three thousand years, primarily studying mental phenomena, you might draw a different conclusion. The simple point here is that multiple theories, or multiple moments of awareness, may best be validated when they are brought into conjunction with moments of awareness or perspectives that are radically different. Whether our perspective is Christianity, Buddhism, the philosophy of Greek antiquity, or modern neurobiology, the way forward may be to overcome the illusions of knowledge by engaging deeply, respectfully, and humbly with people who share radically different visions. I think there’s a common assumption from a secular perspective that the religions of the world cancel themselves out in terms of any truth claims: Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism say many different things on many fronts, so when you shuffle them all together, they all collapse into nothing. In that view, the only moment of cognition that seems to be left standing is science, with nothing to bounce off of because religions have canceled each other out. It’s also often believed that the contemplative traditions feel they already know the answers. You set out on your contemplative path and are guided to the right answer. If you deviate from that, your teacher brings you back and says, “Not that way. We already know the right answer. Keep on meditating until you get to the right answer.” That is completely incompatible with the spirit of scientific inquiry, which seeks information currently thought to be unknown, and is therefore open to something fresh. As I put these various problems together in my mind, a solution seems to rise up, which is a strong return to empiricism and clarity. What don’t we know and what do we know? It’s very hard to find that out when we only engage with people who have similar mentalities to our own. As Father Thomas suggested, Christianity needs to return to a spirit of empiricism, to the contemplative experience, rather than resting with all the “right” answers from doctrine. The same goes for Buddhism. In this regard I’m deeply inspired by the words of William James: “Let empiricism once become associated with religion, as hitherto, through some strange misunderstanding, it has been associated with irreligion, and I believe that a new era of religion as well as philosophy will be ready to begin . . . I fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever were, or can be, of the religious life.”99 We may then find there are indeed profound convergences among multiple contemplative traditions operating out of very different initial frameworks: the Bible, the sutras, the Vedas, and so forth. When we go to the deepest experiential level, there may be universal contemplative truths that the Christians, the Buddhists, and the Taoists have each found in their laboratories. If there is some convergence, these may be some of the most important truths that human beings can ever access.

Your assumptions are your windows on the world. Scrub them off every once in a while, or the light won’t come in.’ ” Colleen’s face scrunched up. “What Bible passage is that?” “It’s not the Bible, it’s Isaac Asimov.

Summing Up Paul’s characterization of the sexual misbehavior in Romans 1: 24-27 as “degrading” and “shameless” requires that we understand this form of moral logic. This language must be understood in the context of an honor-shame culture in which public esteem is valued very highly, and where male and female roles are clearly and sharply delineated. In this context, the reference to “their women” in Romans 1: 26 probably does not refer to same-sex activity but to dishonorable forms of heterosexual intercourse. The reference to degrading acts between men probably refers both to the ancient assumption that same-sex eroticism is driven by excessive passion, not content with heterosexual gratification, and also to the general assumption in the ancient world that a man was inherently degraded by being penetrated as a woman would be. Although the need to honor others is a universal moral mandate, the specific behaviors that are considered honorable and shameful vary dramatically from one culture to another. In the past, the church has often contributed to the toxic shame of gay and lesbian persons by the ambivalent response, “We welcome you, but we abhor the way you operate emotionally.” What is shameful about the sexual behavior described in Romans 1: 24-27 is the presence of lust, licentiousness, self-centeredness, abuse, and the violation of gender roles that were widely accepted in the ancient world. The church must wrestle with whether all contemporary gay and lesbian committed relationships are accurately described by Paul’s language. If not, then perhaps this form of moral logic does not apply to contemporary committed gay and lesbian relationships.

It’s always divine revelation versus made-up stuff.

If we’re not careful, our individualistic assumptions about church can lead us to think of the church as something like a health club. We’re members because we believe in the mission statement and want to be a part of the action. As long as the church provides the services I want, I’ll stick around. But when I no longer approve of the vision, or am no longer “being fed,” I’m out the door.

Summing Up In the midst of polarized and polarizing debates, it is important to ask, not only what a text says, but what it means. This entails determining the moral logic that shapes biblical prohibitions or commands—discerning why a text says what it does and clarifying its underlying values and assumptions. Determining this underlying moral logic is particularly important when interpreting Scripture in cross-cultural contexts. At numerous points in the history of Christian interpretation of Scripture, the church has needed to exercise its imagination to discern a wider and more encompassing form of moral logic underlying biblical commands and prohibitions. This book seeks to accomplish such an exercise with a renewed and widened imagination regarding the moral logic underlying Scripture’s discussion of same-sex intimate relationships.

Summing Up We see the presence throughout Scripture of contrasting patriarchal and egalitarian streams. These tensions are best resolved by the eschatological vision of the New Testament, which holds in tension the ways in which we “already” have entered into the new life of the world to come (and thus have left patriarchy behind) and the ways in which we still live in this world, and have “not yet” fully entered into the life of the world to come (and thus are still bound, in some ways, by the structures of society, including—in the ancient world—patriarchal structures). But the canonical witness as a whole portrays the egalitarian vision as the eschatological destiny of human life, and invites people to live into that destiny, as long as such life does not disrupt the everyday functioning of the Christian community. This means that the hierarchy of the genders cannot be used today as a form of gender complementarity, which is allegedly violated by same-sex intimate relationships. However, to the extent that hierarchical assumptions shape the Bible’s negative portrayal of same-sex eroticism (and such assumptions are evident in multiple places), these texts may be limited in their ability to speak directly to same-sex relationships today—in a context where such hierarchical assumptions no longer apply.

God would never stoop to using ancient genre categories to communicate. Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way. In addition to once again prioritizing modern, Western (and often uniquely American) concerns, this notion overlooks one of the most central themes of Scripture itself: God stoops.

The man that never says “no” when questioned on subjects of which he is entirely ignorant, to avoid, as he imagines, being thought ignorant, but confidently puts forward guesses and assumptions as knowledge, will be known for his ignorance, and ill esteemed for his added conceit. An honest confession of ignorance will command respect where a conceited assumption of knowledge will elicit contempt.

Speaking to ancient people using their own language, literary structures, and cosmological assumptions would be beneath God, it is said, for only our modern categories of science and history can convey the truth in any meaningful way.

No foundation can be laid other than that which is laid, which is Christ Jesus. That’s the foundation of the creation side, but what’s the foundation of the evolution side? The foundation of evolution is made-up stuff. Both sides use the same physical evidence but each side uses a different foundation to reach conclusions about what the physical evidence means.

address the concerns of a contemporary audience, which are not necessarily the same as the biblical authors’. Both approaches are valid and helpful, yet systematic theology should be grounded in biblical theology. Otherwise, modern readers are more prone to commit eisegesis, inserting their own meaning into the text. In that case, reader’s assumptions guide the study and systemization of the Bible’s teaching.20

Christ loved His people with a responsible love. In His loving, He took on Himself all the sins of His people. These were sins which He had not personally committed and for which we had no right to blame Him. And yet, on the basis of the covenant union, He assumed responsibility. The ground of our salvation is nothing less than Christ’s assumption of that responsibility. In the same way, a husband may not be to blame for a particular problem in his marriage. But whether he is at fault or not, he remains responsible. Christ was never to blame for anything that God held Him responsible for, and yet He assumed the responsibility for all our sins. You would think that we as husbands who do share so much of the blame would find it easier to assume the responsibility. But the flesh revolts, and we do not want to take an ounce of responsibility over the measure of our blame—and frequently, we want even less than that. Another way of saying this is that husbands don’t want to love their wives the way the Bible tells them to.

So how did an entire generation of billions of people today come to universally accept planet Earth as being 4.6 billion years old? The answer is simple: It is because most people just believe what they are told, and errant scientists have crammed their guesswork down their throats. Today, we are inundated daily with newspapers, magazines, newscasters, and schoolteachers regurgitating scientist’s theories. But, friend, let us call a spade a spade; a theory is a guess! Therefore, the theory of macroevolution and the big bang theory are nothing more than speculation. And these two theories demand a very old Earth and universe to be true, so scientist — without definitive evidence — falsely assume they are! And, unfortunately, their guesses are being taught as truth to our children in schools. Thus, we have the perfect storm for festering evil: A generation of Biblically illiterate kids are growing up believing whatever their teachers teach them in school, which contradicts the Bible trueness! Friend, the great “end time” deception is in full force! Paul wrote about it: “evil men and seducers shall wax worse and worse, deceiving, and being deceived. But continue thou in the things which thou hast learned and hast been assured of … And that from a child thou hast known the Holy Scriptures” (II Timothy 3:13-15). As a 3 year Chemistry/Biochemistry majored collegiate student with a 3.84 GPA, let me assure you there is not a single test a scientist can perform to absolutely, positively verify the age of something! The tests all involve assumptions — including radiometric dating — and therein lay the error. Are you really going to throw away hard, cold, ancient, Biblical “end times” prophetic evidence, including the 7 day Creation story’s amazing prophetic verbiage, all of which support the truth of a 6,000 year old Earth, to believe in mankind’s scientific guesses? Allow me to tell you first HOW the world was created, for the answer is in Scripture! Then we will investigate how the great “end-time” deceptive theories like macroevolution & the big bang arrived, claiming a very old universe. Friend, the method God used to create the world is blatantly flaunted in a miracle Jesus performed twice. I want you to seriously consider the miracle, for it appears God wanted the miracle to be remembered above ALL other miracles, because it is the ONLY one contained in ALL 4 Gospels. And rightly so, for it should be contemplated by all: The

Our bodies have been created not only by God but also for God..We are driven today by whatever can bring our bodies the most pleasure. What can we eat, touch, watch, do listen to, or engage in to satisfy the cravings of our bodies?..in his love, gives us boundaries for our bodies: he loves us and knows what is best for us..[there are] clear and critical distinctions between different types of laws in Leviticus. Some of the laws are civil in nature, and they specifically pertain to the government of ancient Israel..Other laws are ceremonial..However, various moral laws..are explicitly reiterated in the New Testament..Jesus himself teaches that the only God-honoring alternative to marriage between a man and a woman is singleness..the Bible also prohibits all sexual looking and thinking outside of marriage between a husband and a wife..it is sinful even to look at someone who is not your husband or wife and entertain sexual thoughts about that person..it is also wrong to provoke sexual desires in others outside of marriage..God prohibits any kind of crude speech, humor, or entertainment that remotely revolves around sexual immorality..often watch movies and shows, read books and articles, and visit Internet sites that highlight, display, promote, or make light of sexual immorality..God prohibits sexual worship-- the idolization of sex and infatuation with sexual activity as a fundamental means to personal fulfillment..Don't rationalize it, and don't reason with it-- run from it. Flee it as fast as you can..We all have a sinful tendency to turn aside from God's ways to our wants. This tendency has an inevitable effect on our sexuality..every one of us is born with a bent toward sexual sin. But just because we have that bent doesn't mean we must act upon it. We live in a culture that assumes a natural explanation implies a moral obligation. If you were born with a desire, then it's essential to your nature to carry it out. This is one reason why our contemporary discussion of sexuality is wrongly framed as an issue of civil rights..Ethnic identity is a morally neutral attribute..Sexual activity is a morally chosen behavior..our sexual behavior is a moral decision, and just because we are inclined to certain behaviors does not make such behaviors right. His disposition toward a behavior does not mean justification for that behavior. "That's the way he is" doesn't mean "that's how he should act." Adultery isn't inevitable; it's immoral. This applies to all sexual behavior that deviates from God's design..We do not always choose our temptations. But we do choose our reactions to those temptations..the assumption that God's Word is subject to human judgement..Instead of obeying what God has said, we question whether God has said it..as soon as we advocate homosexual activity, we undercut biblical authority..we are undermining the integrity of the entire gospel..We take this created gift called sex and use it to question the Creator God, who gave us the gift in the first place..[Jesus] was the most fully human, fully complete person who ever lived, and he was never married. He never indulged in any sort of sexual immorality..This was not a resurrection merely of Jesus' spirit or soul but of his body..Repentance like this doesn't mean total perfection, but it does mean a new direction..in a culture that virtually equates identity with sexuality..Naturally this becomes our perception of ourselves, and we subsequently view everything in our lives through this grid..When you turn to Christ, your entire identity is changed. You are in Christ, and Christ is in you. Your identity is no longer as a heterosexual or a homosexual, an addict or an adulterer.

The Creation-evolution debate isn’t about the observations, and it’s not one set of assumptions versus another set of assumptions.

Whenever we have any experience, we interpret the experience. We interpret every observation. We then insert our interpretations of our experiences into our worldviews. We accumulate interpretations of experiences in our worldviews. Our worldviews seem like reality, but they aren’t real. We could call our worldviews “worldly wisdom.” They aren’t the wisdom that God imparts, but God speaks to us about His wisdom as compared to worldly wisdom.

I knew I had to let go of my religious assumptions and let the Jesus of Scripture be who the Bible says he is, and not whom two thousand years of church history and tradition say he should be.

From “ha-satan” meaning “The Opposer” or “Adversary”, Samael is known in the Talmudic texts as being the same as Satan, the chief of Evil Spirits who is known as “The Venom of God”. Samael is said to have twelve wings rather than the six of normal angels, a favored assumption.  Samael as the Angel of Poison is to the Luciferian as a symbol of self-mastery and using the world around us to grow in power and strength, always internal, sometimes external depending on the individual desire. Luciferians seek to devour the essence of life, the essence of humanity. All life is made stronger by devouring another; this is the law of nature. To be honest to the self, to present challenge and overcome such is to attain a foundation upon the path of mastery. —Michael W. Ford, Bible of the Adversary

My preference is for inspirational literature, though such a choice is a personal one. But for the interested, here are some to consider: Zen, the Reason of Unreason; The Wisdom of Confucius; the Torah; the Holy Bible; Tao, to Know and Not Be Knowing; The Meaning of the Glorious Koran: An Explanatory Translation; As a Man Thinketh; The Essential Gandhi; Walden, or, Life in the Woods; the Book of Mormon; The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius; and the Upanishads. There are a myriad of options. Just make sure to select something that was written before our hyperconnected era and yet seems timeless. Such writings can challenge our assumptions about what really matters.