Stop Quoting the Bible

"I believe the Bible"

"It's what scripture says"

"We are a Bible believing church"

and my favorite...

"God said it, I believe it, that settles it"

Can we just stop with the rhetoric? When will we realize that we can use those words to justify just about anything?

Having grown up and in the SBC, I know what power those words have. The Bible was often a full stop when it came to arguments. Want to keep women out of ministry? Pull a few verses from the Bible. Want to support slavery? Pull a few verses from the Bible. Want to "prove" a literal six day creation or a new earth? Pull a few verses from the Bible. Want to argue your view of the end times? Pull a few verses from the Bible? Want to prove inerrancy? you guessed it, pull a few verses from the Bible. Want to exclude the LGBTQ+ community? Pull a few verses from the Bible. Want to prove God loves guns or the death penalty? Pull a few verses from the Bible.

We love our Bibles, as well we should. The Bible is the inspired, authoritative word of God. The Bible is how we know God and His faithfulness and His grace. The Bible is how the Holy Spirit convicts us. I love it so much I have read it through now 7 times. I love it so much I have devoted my life (and much money) into studying it and learning from it and teaching it. I freaking love the Bible.

And it is BECAUSE I love the BIble I say this...

Stop quoting the Bible.

I am serious here. If you are not doing the hard work of exegesis and hermeneutics and of reading for understanding, if you are not listening to the Spirit move and allowing the Spirit to teach and convict as you read the Holy Scriptures, you are doing more harm than good. You are not being faithful to scripture. If you are using the Bible to simply "prove a point" but are missing the overall narrative of a God who is crazy in love with you and relentlessly pursues you, of a God who redeems and justifies and who LIVES, you are doing it wrong. We do not take a few verses and create a theology around them, at least not a good theology. We look at the whole, we allow the whole of scripture to speak to our understanding. Who is God? What is his character? What has he done that proves He is faithful and gracious? Apart from the whole, we cannot grasp what a singular verse is teaching.

The word of God is a sword, but it is a sword we are to use on ourselves . We are to rightly divide the word with that sword in our own lives, allowing it to change us, not using it to draw blood from others. That is not the purpose of scripture.

Saying "I believe the Bible" means nothing when you refuse to use that same scripture to examine your own life and challenge your long held beliefs.

Instead how about spending time discovering the mystery it contains? Or sitting in the tension it teaches? Or simply going and doing what it says? When we open ourselves to the possibility that scripture is there to teach us and guide us and not simply to "prove" something, it becomes a more precious commodity; it becomes real and alive, and that is much more beneficial to the Kingdom of God than any "proof" it could offer.