I GOT BREAKTHROUGH!!!

PRAISE GOD!

Hang in there with me to the end, if you would. I know my posts are long. Please be patient

First, you may be aware of my controversial views on the Bible. I need to reiterate that my journey with the Bible has been a long one! And I need to reiterate that my motives, unlike some in the world, have been to reconcile with difficult things in our Bible, being honest with the evidence I discover, and to hold onto an honest faith.

Today I had a breakthrough in how I believe the Bible actually works. That probably sounds strange. But I’ll explain what I mean.

If you’ve ever been reading say the book of Romans, or any New Testament book, and found the author quoting something from the Old Testament and then you go to that exact passage in your Old Testament and read it, you might have experienced some confusion because what the New Testament says about that passage doesn’t match what your Old Testament says.

This is a natural and common experience.

What is actually going on when you discover that the New Testament’s “version” of the Old Testament version in your hand don’t add up, is a process involving TIME and CHANGES.

We often treat the Bible like it was written by one person sitting at a table at one time in some trance where words were being downloaded to them. And though we may not acknowledge we believe that, it’s still the way we think about our Bible and the way we read it.

What we’re actually missing is the real world lives of humans going about daily life, just like you and me. Only we just see a very tiny part of this process in the actual words found in the Bible.

In truth, from the time of Moses till the time of Jesus, “how” people read and interpreted scripture “changed.”

Let me explain what I mean, okay.

When king David in the Psalms was writing about his victories over the Philistines and speaking about “ascending the throne” and trampling on the “heads of the enemy” and being exalted to “God’s right hand” he was speaking about himself. BUT over a 1000 year period that verse came to be attributed to Israel’s final “king David figure” the Messiah.

What I’m saying is that David was “really” talking about his own victories BUT as society moved and changed over the next 1000 years this passage became connected with the Messiah.

What I’m trying to communicate is that we all read and interpret the Bible from our own limited cultural context in our limited present time. But a different people living 500 years from now will understand those passages according to their own world view and cultural context.

And this happens as a natural result of TIME and CHANGE because we all are stuck “in time” and only see the world through “our eyes.”

What I’m saying is that every author of scripture was limited to their cultural context in time so that what one author like Isaiah or Jeremiah was writing to Israel during the time of the writing becomes SOMETHING ELSE 600 years later simply as a result of time and changes in knowledge, experience, and developments in language especially between Hebrew and Greek.

What I’m saying is that when you and I read our Hebrew Old Testament, and then move to reading our Greek New Testament, we just skipped over a massive time gap that involved real humans having real daily experiences and growing in knowledge and understanding AND in how they read and interpreted passages of Genesis to Malachi.

This is a universal human experience that happens in all societies whether it’s Israel or America since the beginning of humanity.

Understanding this real process that we see in our Bible will help explain why we have so many different camps of Christians who see the Bible in different ways. It’s because different authors are writing about different things in different settings and in different times in history.

And what I’m saying is that somehow the Holy Spirit makes verses of scripture that meant one thing at one time in history to mean something else at a different time in history but we are completely unaware of this process unless we’ve tracked it.

Yes, I’ve tracked it. But not because I’m smarter or better, but because my brain tracks details like a computer program instead of how most people think. It’s not pleasant, but it’s great at picking up on very small changes and finding patterns that eventually connect the dots.

Like I wrote in one of my blog posts awhile ago, you and I have books one and three in a series that should include book two. Meaning that book two is that 400 year gap between the Old Testament and New Testament that if we had, and if we understood, it would bridge the real life changes that occurred in how the Old Testament was being read and interpreted and the changes from the Hebrew language to the Greek language that occurred due to time and which resulted eventually in our New Testament.

Understanding this real “process” should help explain some difficult passages that when treated as something that suddenly dropped out of heaven into the mind of the authors, only creates new Christian “camps” whether it’s Preterism, Amillenniumism, Pre-tribulationism, Post-tribulationism, and all the rest that have come about as a result of only having “part” of the picture and assuming that the authors of our New Testament understood more than they really did.

For they, just like the authors of the Old Testament and like those writing during the 400 years not included in our Bible, were real humans with real limited minds who were writing based on their cultural context in history. And we, the Church, have not taken that into consideration

The End