Since I’m sure that we are all vulnerable to these errors when it comes to Holy Scripture. I wanted to share some quotations from Tim Challies’ blog that I found interesting and very timely

“One of the many divine qualities of the Bible is that it does not yield its secrets to the irreverent and the censorious.”
—J.I. Packer

“The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

“I hold that the words of Scripture were intended to have one definite sense, and adhere rigidly to it—To say the words do mean a thing merely because they can be tortured into meaning it is a most dishonorable and dangerous way of handling Scripture.”
—J.C. Ryle

“Inasmuch as all Scripture is the product of a single divine mind, interpretation must stay within the bounds of the analogy of Scripture and eschew hypotheses that would correct one Biblical passage by another, whether in the name of progressive revelation or of the imperfect enlightenment of the inspired writer’s mind.”
—The Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy

“We approach Scripture with minds already formed by the mass of accepted opinions and viewpoints with which we have come into contact, in both the Church and the world.It is easy to be unaware that it has happened; it is hard even to begin to realize how profoundly tradition in this sense has moulded us.”
—J.I. Packer

“God sometimes blesses a poor exegesis of a bad translation of a doubtful reading of an obscure verse of a minor prophet.”
—Alan Cole

The original article can be found: Here

In Christ,

Thanks Dan for posting this. Those are excellent quotes.

It is true that even those of us who believe in inerrancy will sometimes come up with different views on some doctrines, but we will agree on the essentials.

Stan

Those are great Dan. Interestingly, there is a post from the Heidelblog along the same lines today. Here it is:

Any Text Without a Context is a Pretext for a Prooftext

So said my homiletics (preaching) prof, Derke Bergsma. I don’t know if that aphorism was original to Derke (he often quoted R. B. Kuiper to us in class, e.g., “Men, there are three points to every sermon, the text, the text, the text” and “preach the text, the whole text, and nothing but the text, so help you God.”) but it stuck with me. One way to be sure to handle the text of Scripture well and accurately is to place it in its original context. Failure to read Scripture against its original background will have unhappy consequences.

During my sojourn, in the late 70s, in a broadly evangelical SBC congregation (with a strong dose of Campus Life, Navigators, and a dash of Crusade), Bible studies were often of the sort where the group leader would open in prayer, read a passage, and then throw it open for discussion. Yes, I recall people saying, “To me, this passage says….” The good news is that we were studying Scripture earnestly and prayerfully. The bad news is that we were often studying Scripture without any knowledge of the original context of the passage. The result of our ignorance of the original context was usually that the passage was lifted out of its original historical context, out of its literary context, and re-contextualized into our contemporary context. The objective Word of God became a subjective word from God. The Word to us became a word about us.

In a variety of ways I’ve been reminded again recently of the importance of accounting for the original context when reading Scripture. Throughout its history the church has often struggled to remember the original context of Scripture and to read Scripture in light of the original context, to find herself in the Scriptures (rather than the inverse). Beginning in the patristic era the church sought ways to make the Scriptures more immediately “relevant” (there’s nothing new under the sun). Thus, one father taught that our Lord did not stand in a boat to teach because of a practical problem but in order to teach us about the nature of the church (boat = church). In that way the context of text was shifted from it’s original setting and translated into our context. Another influential father wrote that it actual history of the Ark narrative wasn’t nearly as important or obvious as the theological and moral truths embedded in the narrative. These fathers didn’t deny the historical truth of Scripture but they did marginalize it in favor of the doctrinal sense (i.e., the allegorical sense) and the moral or tropological sense of Scripture.

This approach to Scripture intensified over the centuries. There were reactions, in the 9th and 13th centuries seeking to return the attention of the church to the biblical history, to the original context, but the tendency to relocate Scripture into our time, to interpret Scripture in light of our experience, persisted until the Renaissance and the Reformation. The Renaissance writers (exemplified by Erasmus) grounded Scripture again in its original context but, in reaction to the some of the exaggerated medieval interpretations, tended to minimize the theological implications and focused on the implications for piety and for morality. In this way they anticipated aspects of the later pietist movement. The Reformers were more theological in their reading of Scripture, though they were also concerned about drawing out the implications of a passage for piety and morality. They tended to ground their reading of Scripture in the historical, original setting and sense of Scripture. None of the Reformers exemplifies this more than Calvin, whose commentaries continue to be valuable because he read Scripture in context and paid attention the intent of the human author and to the intent of the divine author (the Holy Spirit) of Scripture. The Protestants, however, didn’t suggest that Scripture has as many meanings as there are readers. it has implications and there are good and necessary inferences (to borrow from the Westminster Confession of Faith) but our reading of Scripture is always grounded in the original setting and in the original intent as understood in light of its setting and through the grammar of the passage.

There are real problems with ignoring original context and original intent. First, we effectively lose the Scriptures. If the Scriptures really mean what they mean to this reader, and that reader (no matter if those readings contradict each other), then there is no text of Scripture. The reader becomes the text because the reader is determining the text. The irony here is that, in popular evangelical piety, this way of reading Scripture is rampant and yet, in those same settings one is quite likely to be warned about the dangers of “postmodernism.” Well, nothing is more “postmodern” than denying original intent and privileging (as they say) the reader over the author! When it comes to subjectivism and deconstructing texts, the French could learn from the evangelicals.

A second great problem is that invariably, when the text is decontextualized from its original setting and re-contextualized in our setting Scripture is no longer a historical text but it is turned into a myth or a moral story. If the text can be removed from history then it doesn’t really matter if it’s historically true so long as it’s morally true. Moral truth without historical truth may work for modern liberalism but it didn’t work for the Apostle Paul, who wrote that if Jesus wasn’t historically, actually raised from the dead then our faith is worthless. Paul didn’t know anything about the moral truth of Christianity without its historical reality. On this see J. Gresham Machen’s Christianity and Liberalism.

A third problem is that deconstructing Scripture this way fundamentally corrupts its message. When we treat Scripture thus, when we lift passages out of their context, even under the context of “applying them,” we change the message of the text. This is the brilliance of Dr Bergsma’s aphorism. Any (biblical) text, without a (its historical, grammatical, canonical, and literary) context, is a pretext (an opportunity falsely taken) for a proof-text (a text abused by a preacher or Bible study leader to make a point that is not actually being made by the text itself). Historically, the most frequent result of the abuse of Scripture this way is to make the text to be about “me” or “us” rather than about Christ (however revealed in the text), his objective moral law, his saving acts and Word, and his church (in whatever epoch of redemptive history). Scripture is not, in the first instance about “us” or “me.” In the first instance Scripture is about God the Holy Trinity. It is about creation, redemption, and consummation. It’s about the progress of redemptive history and revelation. It’s about the salvation of his people in Christ. We come into the story rather late. It has massive implications for us. We do have to find ourselves in the story that God has written but it is great mistake to make the text about us.

For these reasons I’ve often been nervous about whatever the latest preaching or Bible Study “model” is supposed to be, whether it is the “idols of the heart” or find the “purpose” of the text or even Christian experience. Each of these, in their own ways, seem to me to find a way, however subtly, to move the focus of the story away from Christ and back to me. The text becomes about “us” or “me” or my life (and sometimes about the preacher). As sinners we have a powerful, almost overwhelming incentive and drive to re-write the story and if we can do that in pious sounding ways then it’s harder to detect. After all, who can object to searching our our own personal idols or to making concrete practical applications of the text to daily life or to explaining Christian experience?

Well, not every text is about the “idols of my heart.” To ask that question (or any other) about every text is effectively to return Protestant hermeneutics to the worst uses of Quadriga. In such an approach, one begins with the assumption (a priori) that the passage must say something the idols of my heart and proceeds to find the idols, even if the text, on its own terms, doesn’t intend to speak directly to that question in this passage. Yes, I have idols that need to be torn down and replaced with Christ’s Lordship, but we mustn’t flatten out Scripture so that every text is a mere variation on the same moral theme. Yes, there is a purpose (a telos) to every text but, in some approaches, that “purpose” usually turns out to be what the medievals called the “tropological” sense, i.e., the “moral sense” of Scripture. When it’s there, in the text, it has to be preached but approaching Scripture with a strong model like this tends to flatten out the story. The same is true for that model which asks Scripture first of all what it says about Christian experience. The Word does speak to Christian experience but not every passage is meant to do so. Yes, it’s even possible to abuse a redemptive-historical approach such that every passage becomes a test of the preacher’s cleverness at pulling Jesus surprisingly from the text as a magician pulls a rabbit from the hat. There’s no question whether it’s going to happen. It’s only a matter of when and how. The intended message of a passage must be determined in light of the original historical context, grammar, genre, and canonical context.

The point is to preach and to teach “this text.” What contribution to the canon does this particular text make? What is distinctive about this passage, read in its narrow context, in its broader canonical context, in its historical context, and in its grammatical context? That is the question that the Bible Study leader or the preacher must answer. The preacher/teacher must always also relate this passage to others and see the unity of Scripture. As we learned from Van Til, we must always account for the one (that which unifies) and the many (that which distinguishes) and we can only do that as we begin with and pay close attention to the context.

Source

Nate

Text removed by author....

Thanks Dan. Link updated.

Nate

Since this post started with some favorite quotes by authors outside the Bible and about the Bible, here are a few more about the value of Scripture and a life with Jesus… Hope the reader can set asside prejudices and just enjoy.

There is too much of self and too little of Jesus in the ministry of all denominations.

The object of all ministry is to keep self out of sight, and to let Christ appear.

The student of the word should not make his opinions a center around which truth is to revolve. He should not search for the purpose of finding texts of Scripture that he can construe to prove his theories, for this is wresting the Scriptures to his own destruction. The Bible student must empty himself of every prejudice, lay his own ideas at the door of investigation, and with humble, subdued heart, with self hid in Christ, with earnest prayer, he should seek wisdom from God. He should seek to know the revealed will of God because it concerns his present and eternal welfare. This word is the directory by which he must learn the way to eternal life.

In the days of Christ the rabbis put a forced, mystical construction upon many portions of Scripture. Because the plain teaching of God’s word condemned their practices, they tried to destroy its force. The same thing is done today. The word of God is made to appear mysterious and obscure in order to excuse transgression of His law. Christ rebuked these practices in His day. He taught that the word of God was to be understood by all. He pointed to the Scriptures as of unquestionable authority, and we should do the same. The Bible is to be presented as the word of the infinite God, as the end of all controversy and the foundation of all faith.  {COL 39.1}

The Bible is its own expositor. Scripture is to be compared with scripture. The student should learn to view the word as a whole and to see the relation of its parts. He should gain a knowledge of its grand central theme-- of God’s original purpose for the world, of the rise of the great controversy, and of the work of redemption. He should understand the nature of the two principles that are contending for the supremacy, and should learn to trace their working through the records of history and prophecy to the great consummation. He should see how this controversy enters into every phase of human experience; how in every act of life he himself reveals the one or the other of the two antagonistic motives; and how, whether he will or not, he is even now deciding upon which side of the controversy he will be found.  {CT 462.1}

Every part of the Bible is given by inspiration of God and is profitable. The Old Testament, no less than the New, should receive attention. As we study the Old Testament we shall find living springs bubbling up where the careless reader discerns only a desert.  {CT 462.2}

The Old Testament sheds light upon the New, and the New upon the Old. Each is a revelation of the glory of God in Christ. Christ as manifested to the patriarchs, as symbolized in the sacrificial service, as portrayed in the law, and as revealed by the prophets is the riches of the Old Testament. Christ in His life, His death, and His resurrection; Christ as He is manifested by the Holy Spirit, is the treasure of the New. Both Old and New present truths that will continually reveal new depths of meaning to the earnest seeker.  {CT 462.3}

Here’s a parable of how some hear what they want to hear at the expense of the truth! You can create you own ending....!

“Compassion"?

A parable by Dan Phillips

A Visitor’s Center one day was manned by twin brothers Nick and Knack. A car pulled into the parking lot, disgorging a breathlessly eager visitor.

“May we help you?” offered Nick genially.

“Yes, thank you!” bubbled the newcomer. “All my life I’ve been longing to travel Route 49! Can you show me the most direct way?”

Nick paled.

“Oh, I’m very sorry, but you don’t want to go Route 49.”

“But I do!” insisted the visitor.

“Let me rephrase myself,” amended Nick. “You may want to, but you really mustn’t.  The road goes along nicely at first, but then you’ll see a bunch of roadblocks and obstacles laid across it, slowing you down and warning you off. These impediments aren’t really a problem; they’re actually a good thing....”

“How can they be a good thing,” the visitor cuts in angrily. “This is my dream! I want to zoom, not be slowed down.”

“I was going to say,” continued Nick, “they’re a good thing because otherwise you’ll shoot straight off the stub of a broken bridge and plummet 800 feet to your death on the rocky rapids below.”

“Oh,” said the visitor, turning a bit white himself.

“He says,” observed Knack, leaning forward, putting down his latte and stroking his soul-patch.

“The map says,” countered Nick.

“Map?” asked the visitor.

“Yep, right here,” replied Nick, spreading out the item itself on the counter. “See that red X there? It means bridge out.”

“You say it means that,” snarked Knack. “I say it means ‘X marks the spot.’”

“Oh, come on,” retorted Nick. “There’s a legend at the bottom of the map, for crying out loud! See? ‘Bridge out!’ It isn’t rocket science.”

“Scholars now realize that ‘X’ means many different things in different cultures. Besides, you’re talking as if that’s the only map,” drawled Knack. “This one shows a clear, delightful road right where our visitor wants to go. See?”

“That’s in crayon!” exploded Nick.

“You got something against crayon?” inquired Knack.

“No,” Nick shot back. “I have something against people destroying themselves.”

“Psh,” Knack sneered. “You just want safety in rules. The visitor’s a daring seeker. He should seek. The journey is what matters, not the destination.”

“Seek death?” Nick replied. “I think he’ll care plenty about the destination when his car shoots off into space.”

There was an angry silence, broken by a sob. It was the visitor, who has tears running down his cheeks.

“All I know is I’ve yearned to go down Route 49 as long as I remember. Some kids mocked me, others ridiculed me and were mean to me, but the desire has always been there. I can’t conceive of not wanting to go down Route 49. It’s what my heart tells me to do, and I have to be true to my heart, don’t I? I can’t lie. It defines me. You can’t separate this desire from me. I can’t imagine not wanting to go that way. It fills my dreams. I even have a T-shirt. See?” He pulled open his blazer and displayed the garment.

“I understand,” crooned Knack. “There is nothing wrong with you or with what you want. And there’s nothing wrong with going that way. For you, it is the only way. And in fact, I want to help you. I will personally go ahead of you and remove all the blocks, chains, signs, speed bumps, and ropes that have been stretched across the road. I will mount a parade for you — a Route 49 Pride parade. I will lobby to prohibit people from speaking against traveling Route 49. I will side with you against all the harsh, rule-happy Route 49 nay-sayers. In fact, I will get my brother here fired, because he made you feel bad about wanting to go Route 49. He doesn’t care about your feelings, as I do. He doesn’t have any love or compassion for you, and I’ve got buckets of both. Nick’s all about rules and maps and shutting you out and playing it safe; I’m all about love and compassion and justice and being bold and daring. Nick is shallow, reactionary and not helpful. I’m deep and thoughtful and helpful. So you just get in your car, and you go go go!”

As the visitor beamed, Nick sprang to block the door. “Whoa whoa whoa, not so fast! Look, friend — how you feel about Route 49 doesn’t change the facts: the bridge is out! My feelings aren’t the map, your feelings aren’t the map. Go that way, and you will die! I don’t want you to die. I don’t think it’s loving or compassionate to give you bad information that means your death. The people who put up those signs and those obstacles knew what they were doing, and they did it because they care about people like you. It shouldn’t be easy an comfortable to go down that road. It wouldn’t be compassionate of me to focus on giving you a smooth ride to your own destruction, and it isn’t “bold” and “daring” to head off to certain doom. Enabling you isn’t really helping you. And look, I can show you other ways to go, or I can try to find other ways to help — but don’t go that way! It’d be the end of you.”

Silence fell again for a moment, then:

“We could call a five-year moratorium on this,” offered Knack.

“But I want to go that way now,” countered the visitor.

“The map says what it says now, and it isn’t unclear,” said Nick. “It’s said that for a long time, and nothing’s changed.”

The visitor looked back and forth between the brothers, confused. He knew which brother’s advice he liked best, which brother told him what he wanted to hear, but… was that the wisest way to decide?

PREMISE: the bridge was indeed out, and the map was indeed accurate.

QUESTION: which brother actually showed love and compassion?

You can find the original posting here: http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2011/01/compassion-parable.html

At first blush this excerpt may not seem to fit the subject of this thread. However, think again… Isn’t one of the reasons for altering the Gospel to make it less offensive?  And, to make ourselves an accomplice in our own salvation? Hence, to hear what we want to hear??  I italicized my favorite statement below! Enjoy !!!

The Folly of Doctoring the Gospel

By: Charles Haddon Spurgeon

Dear brethren, you and I believe in the doctrines of the gospel. We have received the certainties of revealed truth. These are things which are verily believed among us. We do not bow down before men’s theories of truth, nor do we admit that theology consists in “views” and “opinions.” We declare that there are certain verities, essential, abiding, eternal, from which it is ruinous to swerve.

I am deeply grieved to hear so many ministers talk as if the faith were a variable quantity, a matter of daily formation, a nose of wax to be constantly reshaped, a cloud driven by the wind. So do not I believe! I have been charged with being a mere echo of the Puritans, but I had rather be the echo of truth, than the voice of falsehood.

It may be want of intellect which prevents our departing from the good old way, but even this is better than want of grace, which lies at the bottom of men’s perpetual chopping and changing of their beliefs.

Rest assured that there is nothing new in theology except that which is false; and that the facts of theology are to-day what they were eighteen hundred years ago. But in these days, the self-styled “men of progress” who commenced with preaching the gospel degenerate as they advance, and their divinity, like the snail, melts as it proceeds; I hope it will never be so with any of us.

I have likened the career of certain divines to the journey of a Roman wine cask from the vineyard to the city. It starts from the wine-press as the pure juice of the grape, but at the first halting-place the drivers of the cart must needs quench their thirst, and when they come to a fountain they substitute water for what they have drank. In the next village there are numbers of lovers of wine who beg or buy a little, and the discreet carrier dilutes again. The watering is repeated, till, on its entrance into Rome, the fluid is remarkably different from that which originally started from the vineyard.

There is a way of doctoring the gospel in much the same manner. A little truth is given up, and then a little more, and men fill up the vacuum with opinions, inferences, speculations, and dreams, till their wine is mixed with water, and the water none of the best. Many preachers—and I speak it with sorrow—have built a tower of theological speculations, upon which they sit like Nero, fiddling the tune of their own philosophy while the world is burning with sin and misery. They are playing with the toys of speculation while men’s souls are being lost.

Much of human wisdom is a mere coverlet for the absence of vital godliness. I went into railway carriages of the first class in Italy which were lined with very pretty crochet-work, and I thought the voyagers highly honoured, since no doubt some delicate fingers had sumptuously furnished the cars for them. The crochet work was simply put on to cover the grease and dirt of the cloth. A great deal that is now preached of very pretty sentimentalism and religiousness is a mere crochet-work covering for detestable heresies long since disproved, which dared not appear again without a disguise for their hideousness.

With words of human wisdom and speculations of their own invention men disguise falsehood and deceive many. Be it ours to give to the people what God gives to us. Be ye each of you as Micaiah, who declared: “As the Lord liveth, whatsoever the Lord saith unto me that will I speak.” If it be folly to keep to what we find in Scripture, and if it be madness to believe in verbal inspiration, we purpose to remain fools to the end of the chapter, and hope to be among the foolish things which God has chosen.

Note: The above excerpt is from “Faith,” a lecture delivered at the Conference of Ministers and Students educated at the Pastors’ College, Tuesday 16 April 1872.

Origin: http://teampyro.blogspot.com/2011/01/folly-of-doctoring-gospel.html

Dan Hagan - 29 November 2010 10:19 AM

“The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

Was Tozer a 10 Commandment pusher?

It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.  1Cor 1

Notice it does not say:

It is because of your correct decision that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

Larry - 29 March 2011 04:50 PM

Dan Hagan - 29 November 2010 10:19 AM

“The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

Was Tozer a 10 Commandment pusher?

It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.  1Cor 1

Notice it does not say:

It is because of your correct decision that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

Pardon me… “10 Commandment pusher?” Where did that come from? I know of Tozer; but I don’t know his theology well. I simply thought that his words supporting the concept of using scripture to validate scripture were appropriate, correct, and.... scriptural! That’s all! Where in any of these quotations do you see the implication of, or support for “self-decision”?

In Christ,

I wonder, what is wrong with the 10 Commandments. Did you guys realize that it is the only part of all of God’s legislation that He made a point of delivering through His own discourse to the people? No middlemen involved.

The people heard His voice directly, feared and trembled, but that was it. Deut. 5:22 says that after God had pronounced one by one of these 10 Commandments, He “added no more. And he wrote them in two tables of stone, and delivered them unto [Moses]”.

So, we can say that Moses acted just as an “office-boy”, for he got the stone tables which contained solely the copy of God’s speech to the people. No interference of any man in the writing of such basic document of all that is moral and ethical in the universe, in its version for the human beings.

Dan Hagan - 30 March 2011 05:50 AM

Larry - 29 March 2011 04:50 PM

Dan Hagan - 29 November 2010 10:19 AM

“The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

Was Tozer a 10 Commandment pusher?

It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.  1Cor 1

Notice it does not say:

It is because of your correct decision that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

Pardon me… “10 Commandment pusher?” Where did that come from? I know of Tozer; but I don’t know his theology well. I simply thought that his words supporting the concept of using scripture to validate scripture were appropriate, correct, and.... scriptural! That’s all! Where in any of these quotations do you see the implication of, or support for “self-decision”?

In Christ,

Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

The decalogue is right in there with “nothing less than the whole Bible” which is why I asked!

Azenilto Brito - 30 March 2011 10:57 AM

[size=3]I wonder, what is wrong with the 10 Commandments.

In case you haven’t seen your curse 10 times already:

all who rely on the works of the law are under a curse, as it is written: Cursed is everyone who does not continue to do everything written in the Book of the Law

If I don’t rely on 10 commandments, and you don’t either, why keep quarreling about them unless you are self condemned?

Larry - 30 March 2011 03:01 PM

Dan Hagan - 30 March 2011 05:50 AM

Larry - 29 March 2011 04:50 PM

Dan Hagan - 29 November 2010 10:19 AM

“The Word of God well understood and religiously obeyed is the shortest route to spiritual perfection. And we must not select a few favorite passages to the exclusion of others. Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

Was Tozer a 10 Commandment pusher?

It is because of Him that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.  1Cor 1

Notice it does not say:

It is because of your correct decision that you are in Christ Jesus, who has become for us wisdom from God—that is, our righteousness, holiness and redemption.

Pardon me… “10 Commandment pusher?” Where did that come from? I know of Tozer; but I don’t know his theology well. I simply thought that his words supporting the concept of using scripture to validate scripture were appropriate, correct, and.... scriptural! That’s all! Where in any of these quotations do you see the implication of, or support for “self-decision”?

In Christ,

Nothing less than a whole Bible can make a whole Christian.”
—AW. Tozer

The Decalogue is right in there with “nothing less than the whole Bible” which is why I asked!

Well, as it is the written code that condemns and highlights our fervent need for the grace filled law of the Spirit (the commands of Christ), being the only law that gives life, then I guess we’re in agreement! Romans 7:5-7 (NIV)

Thanks for the clarification… I still don’t see the “self-decision” error in any of the quotes I shared though...?

Peace to you, Brother in Christ...!

Those who fingerpoint towards a neighbor with false allegations are the most cursed of all. And the DISHONESTY of that makes the situation even bleaker, for I have PROVED and duly DOCUMENTED the fact that I don’t rely on the law for salvation. This has been published here more than once (and I could republish it again, no problem), I mean, articles 9, 10 and 19 of the “Fundamental Beliefs” of the SDA Church. No hints are there AT ALL that imply this false accusation.

So, cursed are those who give FALSE WITNESS against his neighbor. That is the 9th commandment, but I can see that for those who learn and teach the ABOLITION OF THE LAW, this commandment means nothing. Of course, doesn’t it belong to an “abolished” law?

Now, it makes all sense. That explains the recurring FALSE WITNESSING by this man whose heart is full of a deplorable hatred, as he time after time shows here in his posts.

Beware: Many are watching, especially GOD (see Matt. 12:36).

Azenilto Brito - 30 March 2011 04:29 PM

Those who fingerpoint towards a neighbor with false allegations are the most cursed of all.

Do you mean like this false allegation?

Satan has taken full possession of the churches as a body. {EW 273.2}

Is she talking about her SDA churches, or some other body?

Tell me how that SDA teaching is true!

Temper it all with your double curse!