My parents taught me at an early age that the problem with telling a little lie is that you will have to tell four or five bigger ones to back it up. We have all heard of the proverbial slippery slope. It begins at the top with a small sin and winds up with us buried in muck at the bottom.
Christian leaders are not exempt; some of them teach that the Bible is like a smorgasbord buffet where you can choose those things you like and ignore the rest as out dated, irrelevant to us or not compatible with popular opinion. There is a self-proclaimed “Progressive Christian pastor” in southern California (his political beliefs obviously come before his spiritual beliefs). I won’t name him or his church because this is not an isolated case. He preaches that Jesus was a “person of color,” who was killed by “white power”. There are a lot of things wrong with that teaching, not the least of which is that no one killed Jesus. He made it clear that no one on earth has the power to take his life. He gave it freely as a sacrifice for our sins. Also, Jesus was a Jew by birth as well as by religion (on his mother’s side of the family). That made him the same ethnicity as the religious leaders and the crowd that demand his crucifixion. If, on the other hand, he is referring to the Romans as white power, Pilot found Jesus innocent and wanted to release him. This example is one of the most outrageous departures from scripture I have run into, but I’m sure it is not the first time scripture has been ignored or twisted in that particular church. It may have started with a single verse.
By the way, I don’t worship and follow Jesus because of his earthly appearance, which he receives from his mother. I worship and follow Him because of his spiritual deity he receives from his Father. The shade of his skin is totally irrelevant.
The enemy doesn’t come at us all at once. He turns up the heat very slowly and lets us adjust to the change and before you know it, just like the proverbial frog – we find ourselves in boiling water. He uses our ability to adapt against us. I heard a pastor tell that when he was very young his family moved into a house close to a railroad track. The first night there, a train hit its horn at the crossing and he jumped six inches off the bed. The next night he only jumped four inches and eventually he didn’t jump at all. The train would still wake him, but he would go back to sleep. As time passed, he slept soundly through the night. He compared that to the way Satan puts us to sleep in spite of God’s loud warning signals.
Jesus fulfilled the law and prophecies of the Old Testament. He validated the stories of creation, the flood and even compared his three days in the tomb to Jonah in the belly of the fish for three days. The New Testament is the good news account of His birth, ministry, death and resurrection. It also documents the formation of His church and the power of His Holy Spirit within believers. Questioning the validity of a single verse or passage of scripture puts the very deity of Christ Jesus in question as well. We must heed the warning signs and oppose any attempt to discount any portion of the Bible as outdated or irrelevant to us. We must not accept even the slightest attempt to challenge God’s word or deviate from it. The Holy Spirit within us will sound the warning alarm – may we never allow ourselves to become deaf to it.
D