Redefining Christianity

Imagine walking into a bookstore and browsing the shelves. Maybe you’re there to buy a certain book, maybe you just happen to be there and you’re walking the aisles looking at the books for no real reason. Whatever your purpose for being there you find a book you want, buy it, and take it home.

When you get home you sit in your favorite spot, examine the book a little better, and then you start to read.

If you aren’t a book reader then maybe you’re online, looking through your favorite websites and you come across an article that sounds interesting. Even though it’s long you settle into your chair and start to read.

There in front of you…in your book, or on your computer screen…is the story or article as the author wrote it. All laid out in black and white. You can clearly see from the very beginning that the writer had a purpose to the story or article. You can understand where they’re going with it. You might like exactly what they’re saying or maybe you think…if I had written this I would have written it this way. But there it is in undeniable script, plain for all to see, exactly as the writer wanted it to be.

If you call someone over and have them read it they will see it exactly the same way you do because you can’t misinterpret what is said. It’s plain for all to see. Scrolling down to the comment section, or looking up reviews online, will show you that all the other people that read it got the same thing from it. If it was a news article about tornadoes in Iowa there won’t be comments on a dog saving a toddler from choking. If it’s a book about the civil war the reviews on it won’t tell you that it’s a great instructional book on learning to play golf.

Those things just won’t be there because all of the readers got the same information from what they read. Whether they liked it or not they will have understood what it was about and they won’t see something in it that wasn’t there.

But the Bible seems to do just that to people. In my home right now there are at least ten Bibles plus several New Testaments. If I went out to the vehicles I could come up with a couple more Bibles. There are a variety of versions to choose from…King James, New International, New King James, English Standard, and probably one or two more. It doesn’t matter which Bible I pick up, which version it is, when I read it…it always says the same thing.

It doesn’t change.

Last night I spent a couple of hours with two different Bibles in my hands. What I read last night will be the same when I pick those Bibles today. The words won’t have changed, the message won’t have been altered. The letters on the page will all be in the same order, they won’t be all mixed up and turned around to say something different or nothing at all.

Where it said…Enter by the narrow gate…it will still say enter by the narrow gate. It won’t have changed to 'come through the wooden door' or 'walk over the downed fence'. Nor will it have turned into…

Gate narrow the by enter.

Retne yb eht worran etag.

Both of the sentences above say exactly what the original did…enter by the narrow gate…but I wrote the first one in reverse and spelled all the words backward in the second. Something so small makes big changes. It confuses things. It mixes them up. It takes something that was easy to read and makes it hard or impossible to read.

And it confuses the message being delivered.

If every time I set my Bible down the words I was reading changed and mixed up I would be a lot less inclined to read it again tomorrow or next week. If I was reading about Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus and laid the Bible down just when Paul hears Jesus if when I pick my Bible up next time to take up where I left off if I start reading and I find myself in the middle of Abrahams life I may not be real inclined to read my Bible.

Or maybe I was reading about Moses and the Israelites fleeing Egypt and I got to the parting of the Red Sea and had to put it down. When I go back expecting to pick up where I left off instead of Mosses I find an article on how to grow poison ivy I’m not real likely to keep reading. But worse than my disinterest would be my shock and confusion. What happened to the Scripture that was supposed to be in my Bible? Where did it go? And more importantly...what’s wrong with my Bible?

I think I’d be less surprised if I opened the Bible and saw…

Sldfln weourelnr jwoeitufsldhf  woutflskdn sdlkguorftgn  ejrtoir tgheort tyhre   threos th  th I ther theoi theiowa hjtoaiujn. Wortu, woetur, thweoinl, wsleirunseyr sheroein driue, sehrtoeindf ,trbn ahfeirn siernhlo.

At least if I saw nothing but a jumble of words I would assume the problem was with my eyesight or brain but if the Scripture was all mixed up or if it changed from Scripture to gardening articles I would be left in complete confusion.

Here I am holding the Word of God in my hands, expecting to read the history of God’s people or instructions for how I’m supposed to live my life and instead I read about growing poison ivy then something is seriously wrong.

The Bible never changes. It’s always the same. The words on the page don’t get mixed up or say something one day then say something else the next day. And yet…that’s exactly what some say it does.

I grew up in and out of Baptist ‘Church’ buildings. I learned about God at my mother and grandmother’s knees. The Bible was something I’ve been exposed to all my life. Unfortunately I’ve also been exposed to the belief that everyone that reads the Bible gets something different from it. Not only that but I was taught that if you read the same verse 100 times you can get 100 different things from it. What you see in it this time you may never see again.

I now know that this is only slightly true. It is true that there are some things that may seem more relevant today than tomorrow. I may get more meaning out of one thing than another today.

But…Scripture isn’t changing. What’s being said isn’t changing. What’s written on the pages of my Bible isn’t changing.

God isn’t changing.

My mind is simply applying more significance to one thing than to another. Even when I do that though I still see the same thing in Scripture every single time I read the verse. It’s there, written in black and white, the same way every time I open the Bible to that particular verse. It doesn’t change.

Yet there are many that are doing just that. They are changing what the Bible says. Whether they know they’re doing it or not they are changing it, changing what the Lord has written down for us, to suit themselves. Someone I know says that God is love. That’s it. That’s His sole description. This person sums up all of what God…what Christ…is in those three words ‘God is love.’

To come to that conclusion they had to completely change or ignore the many verses on God’s wrath and vengeance that are in Scripture.

I once heard about a man on an airplane that was talking to the person next to him. When the plane landed as they were finishing their conversation this person told the man that they believed God is whatever each person wants…’and I believe God’s a very nice woman.’

 I don’t remember where I heard that its possible it may have been in a story or a joke. I can’t say for sure if this was a real encounter between real people or not but it has stuck with me all these years. And honestly it doesn’t make any difference if it was a joke or real because it’s truth either way. It’s truth in the simple fact that so many people do see God that way. Whether they come right out and say it or not. Whether they think God is a man or a woman, Spirit or human, they have in their heads an idea of what God is and most of the time it isn’t the God of the Bible.

In the same way when…if…they read the Bible they take from it the things that support the idea of who and what God is to them. They have an image in their minds of what God is like and therefore they see only what they want to see.

If God is love then He can’t be angry, vengeful, or full of wrath so what happens to the verses that says He is? They ignore them, skim over them, or just plain can’t see them. They can’t handle the thought of God being wrathful so they attribute the Old Testament to being irrelevant to today. It doesn’t matter. It’s just stories, just history. It shows what life was like before Jesus but God isn’t that way anymore. Jesus changed everything. God is no longer like that toward people.

Those are real statements…real beliefs that I was taught while growing up. Most likely my grandmother, who was a preacher’s daughter, was the one that said them. I grew up with the idea that the Old Testament was there for our entertainment and to show us what God used to be like. Wrath included. It’s past tense. It doesn’t matter.

God as love is only one example of what people do to support the image of God they have in their minds. The idea that God is love and only love seems to be a big part of the belief that most if not all professing ‘Christians’ have today. And most preachers support that belief. Fire and brimstone sermons have become a thing of the past. Sermons that make people squirm in their seats because of the truth’s they deliver are rare.

Just as rare as the Christians that want to hear those hard Truths.

If a person doesn't like the idea of hell being real...it isn't. It's only symbolic. They remove hell from the life of a 'Christian' because they don't want it to be a real place. They change or twist Scripture to get it to say what they want it to say. They explain away the verses that say hell is real.

But those aren't the only false beliefs held today. They aren’t the only lies that are masquerading as Christianity today. There are so many different beliefs. Whatever a person believes, whatever they want God to be, that is what He is for them. And for some…God is a woman despite the fact that Scripture clearly states otherwise. For others they don’t believe in creation. They disregard the book of Genesis.

To disregard Genesis is to remove the beginning of all things. It takes away God as the creator. And when you do that you take away the entire basis of Christianity. If God didn't create the world, if He didn't create man then you remove from Christianity the power of God, the right of God to do with His creation what He sees fit.

In today’s society of anything goes those beliefs have carried over onto God and Christ. When man is who and what defines what is right then man changes God to be the way he wants Him to be.

I remember as a child my mother and grandmother wouldn’t go to a ‘church’ building if they didn’t have a dress…something they rarely owned…because women were to wear dresses in ‘church.’ That was a belief held at that time, where we lived, in the ‘church’ buildings my mother and grandmother attended. Women wore dresses. It was that simple. It was expected. At best they were looked down on if they didn’t, at worst they weren’t welcome in the building. Somewhere along the way that changed in most ‘church’ buildings. Most likely because the leaders discovered that expecting women to be in dresses during services was keeping people out of those services so they relaxed their standards. Now we have come as you are services where any form of dress is okay. That includes immodest clothes that shouldn’t be allowed.

But anything goes…in beliefs…in services…in dress. And no one will say different because  to do so would be to risk losing someone from the congregation or it may 'turn them away from God'. And so…the standards are relaxed. They are no longer defined by God, no longer defined by what the Bible says, now standards are defined by what man wants and what man says.

And man gets what man wants because he has so changed what the Bible says that the disciples would not recognize ‘Christianity’ today. That is because today anything that includes God or Jesus in the belief is labeled as Christian. Men that gave their very lives for Christ would not recognize most of ‘Christianity’ today because there are so many definitions of what Christianity is.

When in fact, there isn’t. Most of the beliefs masquerading as Christianity are misunderstandings at best and outright lies at worst. And yet they are labeled as ‘Christian’ because it’s what the people want. To call them lies, false teachings or anything else would be to make the people that hold to that particular belief unhappy.

I know someone that says they are pagan. This person has told me that their belief allows them to believe in anything they want. They can, and do, essentially write their own belief system. They make it up. They choose what they want to believe in and what they don't want to believe in. There are no standards, no absolutes, no this is the way pagans believe. It's up to them. It's anything goes.

So much of Christianity today is that very same way. Christianity should be defined by the standards set forth in Scripture, the real standards, as they are in black and white. Here it is. This is what we believe. This is what the Bible teaches. You either believe this way or you aren't a Christian. That's how it should be...but that isn't how it is. Instead Christianity is a broad term that covers so many different beliefs and a 'Christian' may choose what they believe. They may have to switch 'church' buildings if they change the way they believe. But somewhere out there is a 'church' that shares, or will accept, whatever they believe. And that church will label them as 'Christian.' That 'church' will assure them that they are still going to heaven. That 'church' will support them in their belief and will tell them that what they believe is okay in God's eyes.

And they'll change what the Bible says to reflect those beliefs.

Some of those changes will come only in the things said and taught. But others go to the extreme of actually changing the Bible to suit their beliefs. I understand now that you can get a 'Bible' that is gender neutral. Because people don't like the distinctions the Lord placed on men and women they have actually changed the Bible so that it reads in a way that takes those distinctions away.

To me it sounds a whole lot like 'Christianity' is following in the same beliefs as the pagan belief. To be a pagan...at least the way the type that the person I know is...means believing in anything you want, setting your own beliefs, making your own standards. This person has told me numerous times that they should write up a book with what they believe in it so if they ever needed it  to gain religious exemptions they would have it.

Modern 'Christianity' has done the same thing. Right down to rewriting the Bible to be what they want it to be.

It would be the equivalent of buying a book at the bookstore, not liking the way it reads, and rewriting it so it becomes the story you want it to be.

Do you see anything wrong with that?

It's exactly the same kind of wrong that happens in 'Christianity' today. Whether a person truly rewrites the Bible or simply changes the verses in their minds to fit what they believe, they are making a new 'Christianity.' One that suits the beliefs, desires, and ideas of the person. It is not Christianity. It is not about Christ. It is about man. 

And they keep doing it. Keep getting away with it because anything goes. Even when true Christians speak out against what they're doing it isn't enough to stop them...and it never will be because Scripture warns us that it will happen. We can't stop it even if we tried. 

And so it keeps happening, 'Christianity' keeps getting changed and redefined. Scripture keeps getting changed and mixed up to suit the ideas of men that do not, or can not, believe the Truth.