Monday, June 24, 2013
345 - The Bible's Grasp of Touchy Subjects
Spirituality Column #345
June 25, 2013
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville
The Bible’s Grasp of Touchy Subjects
By Bob Walters
June 25, 2013
Current in Carmel – Westfield – Noblesville – Fishers – Zionsville
The Bible’s Grasp of Touchy Subjects
By Bob Walters
“There is nothing new under the sun.” –
Ecclesiastes (repeatedly)
Extraordinary
technical, intellectual, spiritual, financial and civic innovations mark human progress. Yet while mankind’s physical footprints across
the millennia have changed, humanity’s heart has stayed largely the same; eager
to push aside God’s perfect eternal agenda in favor of mankind’s imperfect carnal
appetites.
“Everything is meaningless.” – Ecclesiastes
(repeatedly)
Solomon would
understand. Identified as The Teacher in
the Bible’s Old Testament book of Ecclesiastes, Solomon was a king with all
wisdom and unimagined wealth who disobeyed and dishonored God. “Meaningless,” Solomon ultimately observed,
was a life without obedience to God.
In our living
history today we have a divine savior in Jesus Christ (whom Solomon couldn’t
have imagined) to give us meaning, as well as the Bible to guide us and explain
God’s love. Yet even with unprecedented
access to God’s truth, mankind still, like Solomon in his temple, minimizes God’s
moral input.
We take the easy
route: go with the flow, live and let live, don’t judge. We subordinate the divine perspective of
scripture to our human perspective of lust, power, greed, sloth, ego, style,
and self-expression. We may occasionally
trip over honor, courage, and love, but typically on the touchy subjects of sex
and choice society refuses to assert morality with a firm and loving grasp of
the ultimate good and the real truth that comes only from God and is clearly
expressed in a well-studied Bible.
Read Genesis,
read Matthew, read Romans – read the whole thing. In our sound-bite media age of abbreviated
intellect and politically correct inanities, the Bible still requires a full
reading to be understood and a full hearing to be appreciated. That represents near anathema in our digital
era of expedience, convenience and instant communications. The Bible’s truth is to be grasped because it
is God’s. It takes time, trust, faith,
study, a sense of purpose – our entire life – to properly define our existence
in God’s context. A relationship with
God is huge, eternal and true; not finite, temporal, and expedient. We want “brief,” forgetting that wisdom takes
time.
Only a dishonest
preacher, populist demagogue, spurious philosopher or horribly lax and
politically-driven Bible paraphrase can work their way around scripture’s plain
proscription of homosexuality and sexual license, its firm declaration of the
sanctity of family and marriage, and its unrelenting, unequivocal, and
unbending witness of God’s love and righteousness. Solomon, at time’s end, would understand God’s
holy grasp.
Truly, Jesus
Christ is something new under the sun for the human race whose hearts too willingly
grasp at fleeting worldly passions.
Without God,
everything truly is meaningless; and without Jesus, truly nothing is new.
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