The other morning as I sat on my back porch, I was filled with thankfulness at the view around me. But, in my opinion, the view was marred by one small thing. Not really, but sort of.
This spring, when we got our hundreds of flats of flowers that we plant for customers, there was one mistake. They sent red dragonwing begonias instead of white. My husband told me to keep them…that we would use them somewhere. In my head, I quickly reviewed my plans for each customer, as I wasn’t sure where we would use them, but we did keep them.
Since I had these red begonias that were just sitting there, I decided to use some red on my back patio. I haven’t used red…well, in perhaps forever. I am more of a “pink” person. But I thought this one year, it wouldn’t be a big deal, right?
Wrong.
I wish I would have planted my normal pink. I just don’t love red. Now, some of you feel the other way. You love red and don’t love pink. Or you love something different altogether…perhaps purple or yellow. We all have the colors we love and it’s so wonderful that we aren’t all the same. What a boring world this would be if we all liked the same things.
The freedom of opinion is a wonderful thing to have. But it’s not something we have when it comes to the scripture. Over the past few years, there has been a general trend towards making the Bible mean whatever it means to you. To believe that it doesn’t have just one interpretation.
So when Bible studies get together, they will ask questions like, “What does this verse mean to you?” Or the teacher will say “in my opinion, this verse means…”
But this isn’t how we should approach scripture. One of us doesn’t get to choose a certain interpretation because we like it, while someone else believes something different altogether.
As I once heard it said: You can be right and I can be wrong, I can be right and you can be wrong. We both can be wrong. 𝘉𝘶𝘵 𝘸𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯’𝘵 𝘣𝘰𝘵𝘩 𝘣𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵.
As soon as we believe that we can interpret scripture any old way we choose, we have undermined the authority of scripture. And I think that’s probably the whole point.
There has been a slow but steady effort to move Christians from the authority and trust of scripture. This has been replaced by personal authority (the individual gets to decide what a verse means) and trust in reasoning and feelings.
This change has happened so slowly that it is almost imperceptible. I think that is why so many have missed it. It’s only when we take a walk back through history that we can see this troubling change. It’s only as we study the future, according to scripture, that we see why this change had to take place.
We can’t change the world. And, most likely, we won’t change our churches or any large group of people in our circle. But we can recognize this and respond accordingly in our own lives, as well as to speak up about this as God gives us opportunity.