I’ve been learning a lot lately from Duane Litfin and other evangelical scholars about the Gospel and who Jesus is. Recently, though, I’ve been reading the Bible and I was troubled for a while. I read some of the books of the Bible called “The Gospels”. These are the first four books of the New Testament and they tell about the life of the pre-resurrection Jesus. It really made me wonder why they are called “The Gospel” since they don’t say anything about the metaphysical significance of Jesus’ death and resurrection. They just talk about the mostly-irrelevant pre-resurrection Jesus. And the things he did really had nothing to do with the Gospel: quite the opposite.
This led me to question why these so-called “Gospels” are in the Bible at all. (I’ll be addressing that question more in future blog posts.) It’s just some activist traveling around helping the poor and the sick and preaching about social and economic equality or “justice”. Somebody who didn’t know better might read the Bible and think that those things were what Jesus cared about. They might not understand that it is only the post-resurrection Jesus that matters.
I was getting to the point that I was thinking that it is better to stick to reading the Bible only when I had a Concordance in hand so that I wouldn’t stumble onto some of the “justice” parts. But that backfired on me.
Here’s what happened: I decided to look for verses that talk about “righteousness” instead. Righteousness is much more important in evangelical theology than justice. But when I looked up the word “righteousness” in the Concordance, I discovered that almost every occurrence of the word “righteousness” in the Bible is a mistranslation of the Greek or Hebrew word for “justice”. I asked my Global Expert friend about this and he told me an interesting story.
When the Bible is translated into other European languages, those words are translated into the word for “justice”. It is only in English that this mistranslation occurs. The reason for this is that English translators like to follow the lead of the King James translation in many respects. King James had an interest in people caring about lawful behavior and not justice. King James’ translators had an interest in keeping their heads attached to their shoulders. This was all the doing of the Holy Spirit. Sadly, the Holy Spirit is not at work so powerfully in the lives of translators into other European languages.
Wow! What a story! Isn’t God good? Aren’t you glad you were born into an English-speaking culture and receive this blessing of the Holy Spirit?
Why are the Gospels in the Bible?
But back to “The Gospels”. Now I have a theory about why the Holy Spirit directed His Church to include “The Gospels” in the Holy Bible. See if this makes sense:
- Non-Christians don’t read the Bible.
- Christians (who read the Bible) know to ignore that part.
Now I understand. Part of our job as Christians is the keep “The Gospels” in the Bible and make sure that others don’t read them. It really is a perfect plan on God’s part.
Since non-Christians don’t know what the Bible says about the pre-resurrection Jesus and since we are certainly not going to tell them, there is no danger of anybody getting confused.
Since the non-Christians only know about Jesus what we tell them and show them by our example, they will only see the True Truth about the post-resurrection Jesus.
Since the Bible tells us nothing about the post-resurrection Jesus, we Christians rely on the revelation of the Holy Spirit through people like Duane Litfin to tell us which selected and small portions of the rest of the Bible are telling us about the post-resurrection Jesus.
I’m also learning that finding those small selections is more difficult than you might think. Thank God for His Holy Spirit! Because it is not just “The Gospels” that are full of talk about lifting up the poor, caring for the sick, releasing prisoners, peace, and such. Turns out the rest of the New Testament is full of that stuff as well. Fortunately, my pastor only read from the middle sections of Paul’s letters. If he had read from the beginning or end of any of Paul’s letters, I might have been led astray into thinking that the teachings of the pre-resurrection Jesus were important even after he died.
And it’s not just the New Testament either. The prophets all said the same kind of thing that the pre-resurrection Jesus said. Thank God evangelical pastors know how to find the verses that talk about other things.
Conclusion
So, here’s the moral:
- Don’t encourage your non-Christian friends to read the Bible too much because they might get confused by the fact that there is so much talk about justice.
- If your non-Christian friends want to read the Bible, make sure they only read an English translation.
- Don’t just randomly read the Bible. Only read the parts that some evangelical leader like Litfin tells you are the voice of the post-resurrection Jesus.
It’s harder to be a Christian than I thought. No wonder God said “the way is narrow and difficult that leads to life”… Wait, that was the pre-resurrection Jesus… Never mind.
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