Jack Pelham

“Everybody makes mistakes!,” someone will say.

“Nobody’s perfect!,” chimes in another.

At this, most Christians nod along and satisfy themselves that that’s all there is to it.  That is, that making mistakes is simply not a serious problem for the Christian.  That’s what they tell themselves, and the moment they do it, all manner of passages about God’s grace and forgiveness come to mind, settling all over again in their minds what they had already settled—the idea that their mistakes are just not very important.

As with many things in Christian doctrine, however, it’s not that simple.  And who says so?  Well, the Bible.  That’s who.

Let’s take a look at a few passages about error and mistake that the casual Bible student may have never found or considered.  You’ll find my brief notes in red after each passage:

Numbers 15:28 And the priest shall make atonement before the Lord for the person who makes a mistake, when he sins unintentionally, to make atonement for him, and he shall be forgiven.
Even unintentional error was considered a sin under the Old Covenant, and had to be atoned for.  Yes, God would forgive it, but only, it seems, if it were atoned for.  When we make errors, do we think they are such casual things that nothing need be done about them?  Do we assume that they will be forgiven automatically by God?  Or do we rather approach him in order to address the matter with some appropriate sense of gravity and repentance?

2 Samuel 6:7  And the anger of the Lord was kindled against Uzzah, and God struck him down there because of his error, and he died there beside the ark of God. 
Uzzah is the one who had done quite a natural thing; he reached out to steady the Ark of the Covenant when it appear that it was going to topple off the cart on which it was being moved.  His error was that he did not know about, or did not follow, God’s decree that no one was to touch the Ark.

Job 4:18  Even in his servants he puts no trust,
    and his angels he charges with error;
¹⁹ how much more those who dwell in houses of clay,
    whose foundation is in the dust,
    who are crushed like the moth.
If God charges even his servant angels with error, then he will certainly also charge humans with error.  That seems to be the reasoning being voiced here.  (See 2 Peter 2:4-10 and Jude 1:6-7.)

Isaiah 32:6 For the fool speaks folly, and his heart is busy with iniquity, to practice ungodliness, to utter error concerning the Lord, to leave the craving of the hungry unsatisfied, and to deprive the thirsty of drink.
Here, uttering error concerning God does not seem to be the simple mistake of the upright, but the work of fools.  How many preachers and teachers today make errors in their teaching about God?  The problem is of epidemic proportions.

Ezekiel 45:20 You shall do the same on the seventh day of the month for anyone who has sinned through error or ignorance; so you shall make atonement for the temple.
Under the Law of Moses, atonement was required for sins that came about because of error or ignorance.  Would these no longer be sins once the New Covenant was established?
I have to stop here and point out that ignorance is shown here as just as serious a problem as error.  Few believers recognize that God expected his people to know some things in both the Old and New Covenants.  Instead, ignorance is considered a non-sin today by a great many people.

Daniel 6:4  Then the high officials and the satraps sought to find a ground for complaint against Daniel with regard to the kingdom, but they could find no ground for complaint or any fault, because he was faithful, and no error or fault was found in him.
Not even Daniel’s critics could find an error in him.  We should be careful to notice that Daniel was a human—even a human under the Old Covenant.  We must allow for the idea, therefore, that diligent believers can indeed–at least under some circumstances–reach a level of knowledge and righteousness at which they no longer operate in error. To pretend otherwise is to dishonestly dismiss the evidence in this passage.

Romans 1:27 and the men likewise gave up natural relations with women and were consumed with passion for one another, men committing shameless acts with men and receiving in themselves the due penalty for their error.
Here we see, in the first of our New Testament passages on this subject, that there was a penalty associated with at least this particular error.

1 Thessalonians 2:3  For our appeal does not spring from error or impurity or any attempt to deceive, ⁴ but just as we have been approved by God to be entrusted with the gospel, so we speak, not to please man, but to please God who tests our hearts.
Paul assured his audience at Thessalonica that his message did not spring from error, but had been entrusted to him by God.  This was worth noting, as the rest of the world’s philosophy was indeed based in error, as the next passage below will show.  If the message did not issue forth from error, then with what level of diligence and care was it to be properly received?

2 Peter 2:18  For, speaking loud boasts of folly, they entice by sensual passions of the flesh those who are barely escaping from those who live in error.
The apostles made it clear many times that the Christians were being called out of the world, and here we see that world being categorized as one that lived in error.

2 Peter 3:17  You therefore, beloved, knowing this beforehand, take care that you are not carried away with the error of lawless people and lose your own stability.
The error of the world was not something to be taken lightly, but something to be carefully avoided.  And those Christians who did not avoid it would be “carried away” and would lose their stability.  Is error any less serious today?

1 John 4:6  We are from God. Whoever knows God listens to us; whoever is not from God does not listen to us. By this we know the Spirit of truth and the spirit of error.
This one is quite interesting as it seems to take error to a higher level of importance than so many might casually assign it today.  Here, John seems to set error apart as being some of the main business of the spiritual forces that were busy opposing God.  On the other side of that “error” coin, he offers up the “Spirit of truth”, which we can readily identify as the Holy Spirit because of our knowledge of the rest of the scriptures.  This makes it very hard to dismiss error as a mere inconvenience or bother or trifle for the believer.  Rather, it seems to elevate it to a matter of very high importance and seriousness.

There’s really nothing to be added to these passages; they speak quite strongly on this matter—and directly.  We don’t really need to infer much at all to understand this topic with an actionable understanding.

So many, however, do not.  So many believers today, it seems, do not believe that the topic of error is one with which they need concern themselves.  There’s a great quote that has been derived from something Winston Churchill once wrote in a letter:

“Men occasionally stumble over the truth, but most of them pick themselves up and hurry off as if nothing had happened.”

This is how it is with so very many believers today.  They will stumble across some passage in the Bible that flatly disagrees with some point of doctrine or practice that the believer has been holding to for quite some time.  Yet when they discover it, they do nothing of any consequence about it.

I’ve been watching this particular habit for a number of years now because it has become quite natural to the experience of sharing my Bible study findings with others.  For example, where many will tell you that the “foreign gods” of the Old Testament weren’t really gods at all—that they weren’t even real beings at all, but were just imagined entities that stupid idol worshipers were using for make-believe—I would find passages like this one:

Psalm 82

God has taken his place in the divine council;
    in the midst of the gods he holds judgment:
² “How long will you judge unjustly
    and show partiality to the wicked? Selah
³ Give justice to the weak and the fatherless;
    maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute.
⁴ Rescue the weak and the needy;
    deliver them from the hand of the wicked.”

⁵ They have neither knowledge nor understanding,
    they walk about in darkness;
    all the foundations of the earth are shaken.

⁶ I said, “You are gods,
    sons of the Most High, all of you;
⁷ nevertheless, like men you shall die,
    and fall like any prince.”

Here is Yahweh speaking to beings that he himself calls “gods”.  And these gods are clearly not inanimate idols, for he charges them with wrongdoing, explains to them what they should have been doing instead, and pronounces a death sentence on them, telling them that they would “die like men”, the fairly obvious alternative to which is to remain immortal.

But what do most believers do when they stumble across this new information?  Most whom I have observed simply pick themselves up and hurry off with rarely more than a “that’s interesting”.  Then the next time you hear them speaking on the subject of the “foreign gods”, you are apt to witness that they’re still engaging the same error with which they started.

If I understand the Bible correctly, that’s going to be a problem for these folks.  I know a great many people who are exceedingly nice and kind, and who have many admirable qualities, but who are dumb as a brick with regard to correcting themselves out of error—even once they have been told about it.

What’s up with that?

Apparently, they don’t think it’s as important as God does—which is itself an error!

Sure, loads of folks think they like God, but do they know him well enough to be sure?  And some folks don’t like God, but do they know him well enough to be sure?

Here are some things that a lot of folks don’t know about God—things that might change someone’s mind, one way or the other.

God Hates Injustice
Before God established the Earth, Continue reading →

It’s interesting—the unintended consequences that occur when a piece of one’s religious foundation is laid in the wrong way.  It causes all manner of predicaments and there’s really no way to correct for them all unless you strip down to the foundation and set things aright.  Many people can attest to this truism as it plays out in our physical world.  When the foundation for a house is faulty, the house itself pays the price for it.  When a mathematical solution is attempted by use of the wrong formula, the answer pays the price.  When the wrong kind of fuel is used in a car, it ruins the motor’s function.

Well, this principle holds true in religion, too.  When you get the foundational ideas wrong, you should expect to have trouble making the rest of your religion add up properly.

Once upon a time, God created humankind and promised an eternal afterlife for those among them who were righteous.  Again and again he stressed to them that they should live righteously and repent of their sins.  He assured them repeatedly that they would be judged in this fashion:

2 Corinthians 5:10  For we must all appear before the judgment seat of Christ, so that each one may receive what is due for what he has done in the body, whether good or evil.

He even stressed to them that not even the angels were exempt from judgment for their bad behavior, and that the humans wouldn’t be, either:

2 Peter 2:4  For if God did not spare angels when they sinned, but cast them into tartarus and committed them to chains of gloomy darkness to be kept until the judgment; ⁵ if he did not spare the ancient world, but preserved Noah, a herald of righteousness, with seven others, when he brought a flood upon the world of the ungodly; ⁶ if by turning the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah to ashes he condemned them to extinction, making them an example of what is going to happen to the ungodly; ⁷ and if he rescued righteous Lot, greatly distressed by the sensual conduct of the wicked ⁸ (for as that righteous man lived among them day after day, he was tormenting his righteous soul over their lawless deeds that he saw and heard); ⁹ then the Lord knows how to rescue the godly from trials, and to keep the unrighteous under punishment until the day of judgment, ¹⁰ and especially those who indulge in the lust of defiling passion and despise authority.

A great many such passages were written to warn and encourage the believers to “overcome” and to “endure to the end”, lest their faith should be in vain and their eternal destiny lost.

But then came the modern church business and the rush to get tithe payers in the door.  It was necessary to modify the doctrinal foundation such as to make for a “bigger tent” into which more people would be attracted.  Now the promise of eternal life isn’t just for the faithful who would endure righteously to the end; it is extended to anybody who would join the church and say he believed in Jesus.  The focus of what is called “salvation” shifted from living a successful life as a servant and student of Yahweh and Yeshua to merely accomplishing some small number of initiatory steps, such as, for instance, reciting “The Sinner’s Prayer” and/or being baptized.  Those who would do so are assured that their “salvation” has been secured, more or less.  The doctrine of once-saved-always-saved-but-keeping-coming-to-church was invented to keep them coming with those tithes.

Arguments about the specifics of doctrine kept arising and endangered the church business, so the churches began to attack reason and logic and evidence-based thinking as an unspiritual activity that is to be avoided in deference to what was called “faith”—not the original faith of the Bible, mind you, for that was a matter of reliance on and obedience to God and Jesus.  No, this new kind of faith called for them to hold fast, not to the actual words of God and Jesus, but to what they were being told that the Bible means.  It was necessary to give them ways to deal with the cognitive dissonance that would result from the conflict between their new traditions and the original texts, so another interesting thing evolved in the churches:  Things that had been explained by Jesus and his apostles were re-explained as still being mysterious and a great deal of effort was put into mystifying the religion.  “God moves in a mysterious way” became a favorite, and the idea that one can somehow magically “know” things apart from having actual knowledge of them—this would prove essential.  This is how a member can “know” that his eternal life is secured, even though the Bible warns him that his particular pattern of sins are a certain impediment to his invitation into the Holy City.  He “knows” it because he has trained himself to “feel it in his heart”.  What he has imagined in his own mind, he attributes to the very presence and affirmation of God therein.

In this system, “belief” is everything.  Once a person claims to believe in Jesus, the rest of the details are more or less dispensable.  So whether the rush is to get them to the altar or the baptistry, the goal of that rush is to get them to say “I believe”.

But there’s a huge problem with this:  One can say “I believe” in a second, without ever answering the question as to what they believe in.  Sure, the big prize in view is to confess that they believe “in Jesus”, but there’s more to this than meets the eye.  The Bible has 1,000+ pages of information, and there’s no way a person can quickly survey all that information in order to decide whether he believes it all—and certainly not to decide whether he is willing and able to obey it all.  Even so, they’re expected to state a belief in the Bible—a belief that they are in no position to declare responsibly.  But this is not seen to be a problem.

In actuality, however, it’s a huge problem.  In the rush to belief (and “membership”) many are taught to make such claims prematurely, and then they find themselves in several predicaments.  Among them are these:

1. They defend the Bible against critics without even understanding the books in it themselves.
2. They are expected to repeat the assertion that their church is “Bible based” when they don’t even know—and could not possibly know—the degree to which this is true or untrue.
3. They are expected to give an all-or-nothing endorsement of the Bible even though there may well be things in it that they would not agree with if they knew about them.
4. They have signed off on hundreds of things—and not only have they not read them, but they don’t have any training in how to make good sense of them.  They lack good hermeneutical sense, yet they are considered adequate to the task of endorsing the Bible.
5. They have no idea about the process of translation and the differences between Bible versions.  They have no concept of biases among the translators and the churches that sponsored them.

All these issues, however, are considered to be inconsequential because the really important goal has been accomplished:  endorsement of and membership in the local church business.

This is why churches boil down the 1,000+ pages into a few bullet points of “What We Believe”:  it makes it simpler for the initiate to sign off on.

And what do you get from this business scheme?  You get millions and millions of “members” who are not qualified to understand the very Bible they endorse.  Yet you teach them an air of adamancy and dogmatism about those few bullet points of doctrine, and you call their acceptance of it “faithfulness”, rewarding them with praise every time they do it.  This teaches them to be incurious and irresponsible about their beliefs as they keep those tithe dollars coming.

You also get a considerable deemphasizing of matters of morality, as questions of morality tend to split groups and diminish membership.  And this means you’ll find more and more church organizations where corruption takes hold among the leadership, for the members are desensitized to it and are ill-equipped to do much about it.  Where the original Christians were instructed thus: Ephesians 5:11 Have nothing to do with the fruitless deeds of darkness, but rather expose them, the modern believer has been trained to keep his focus on the first two words of Matthew 7:

Matthew 7:1 “Judge not, that you be not judged. ² For with the judgment you pronounce you will be judged, and with the measure you use it will be measured to you. ³ Why do you see the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? ⁴ Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own eye? ⁵ You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.  ⁶ “Do not give dogs what is holy, and do not throw your pearls before pigs, lest they trample them underfoot and turn to attack you.

Never mind that Jesus expected his followers to be able to judge between a speck and a log, what is holy and what is unholy, who is a pig, etc., this modern church generation has got it whittled down to just the first two words, “Judge not.”  This is their new gospel.  And to this, it was necessary for them to redefine “grace” from something that caused the original Christians to work hard and to so “no” to ungodliness into something that continually exempts them from such works!

Even the churches that claim not to do this are doing it consistently.  They let their leaders get away with habitual ungodliness.  They disregard passages of scripture that are problematic for their preferred version of the religion.  They will run off anyone who asks too many questions and raises too many objections, for it rocks their boat too much and endangers the continual success of the business venture.  But of course, this is all done in the name of Jesus, and not in the name of business.

This all puts the sincere believer in quite a predicament—catching him between the facts of the Bible and the cold realities of the church business in which he has found himself entangled.  If his curiosity over the texts prevails—and if his sense of obedience to God trumps his sense of obedience to the church—he will neither be welcome in time, nor wish to remain.  He will discover that the church is not what it was advertised to be.  And then he will have to struggle over what should be done about that.  Most will simply move on to some other church, where they will be less likely to rock the boat again, even though it will need rocking.

A few, however, will come to understand in time that the Bible presents a vast network of facts that must be carefully considered and analyzed in order to understand just what happened and what was taught.  In time, they will understand that what actually happened in Bible times bears little resemblance to what is practiced today in the churches.  They will see that the modern church business is like most other businesses—-giving in to the typical temptations of over-promising and under-delivering, of skimping on quality to save on overhead while exaggerating the benefits of its products and services.

I do not know of a single church that is not guilty of this.  Not one.  And there’s a reason it is like it is—but nobody wants to know the reason.  No, they’d rather make up reasons than to find out the real answer.  That is the predicament that comes with the rush to belief.  Here is what church members are trained to do:

• Suspend judgment and discernment
• Mystify what can be understood
• Claim to “know” what is not known
• Excuse bad behavior where God does not
• Declare belief before checking out the facts
• Be suspicious of fact, reason, and logic
• Give too much weight to the assertions of church leaders

As it happens, these qualities make for terrible students of the Bible.

You can tell a lot about people by observing the patterns of their behavior.  You can figure out what they think about things, and even how they do that thinking.

What is surprising is to discover what things people don’t think about.  Would it surprise you, for instance, to find a bomb squad technician who never thinks to check a bomb for hidden, secondary triggering devices?  Or what about a doctor Continue reading →