When Joe was a young Christian he desperately wanted to follow God’s will for his life. He knew the Bible was the place to go to find it, but he didn’t know how to go about it. So, he decided that he would simply close his eyes, open the Bible and randomly point his finger at a passage. “Wherever my finger lands,” he thought, “will be God’s will for me today.”
So, with great anticipation, he closed his eyes, flipped open his Bible and put his finger down. He read, “and he went out and hanged himself” (Matt 27:5).
Not knowing what to make of that, he closed his eyes, flipped a few pages and tried again. This time the Lord’s “will” for him was to “go and do likewise” (Luke 10:37).
Completely baffled by this, he closed his eyes, flipped a few more pages and tried a third time. He found Jesus telling him, “What you are about to do, do quickly” (John 13:27).
Joe never expected discipleship to be so costly!
Obviously, this is a humorous story that, most likely, never happened to anyone, but it does illustrate the importance of knowing how to study the Bible.
As disciples who love Jesus and want to obey every command God has given us we need to be careful. We need to be careful to properly understand how to figure out which of His commands apply to us and which do not. We don’t want to end up like Joe, who attempted this without knowing what he was doing.
Some parts of the Bible are easy to understand, easy to apply, and cause us no real difficulty, but other parts of it are not as easy (2 Peter 3:15,16).
We will all be answerable to God individually and judged by the standards of His Word (John 12:48). Therefore, we don’t want to rely solely on our preachers, commentators or the internet to tell us what the Bible means and how to apply it. We want to listen to God Himself by studying His Word and be confident that we can pull the truth out of a text ourselves.
This series of posts are designed to help us do that.
Question: What other, off the wall and out of context things have you heard people blame God for? You know, the “God made me…” or “God wants me to…” type of things. You can leave a comment by clicking here.