Yeshua Explored
8th August 2023
False testimony?
Are we always people of absolute truth?
We are counter-cultural, we believe in absolute truth and that it is found in the Bible alone. Trouble is that we seem also to have many interpretations of what the absolute truth is, depending on which angle you view the Bible from. Here’s what I said in How the Church lost the Truth:
Jesus did a lot of stuff. Virtually everything he did was to fulfil the words of prophets of an earlier age. He healed, he taught, he comforted, he corrected, he put people right with God. In doing so he was able to point to his actions as fulfilments to the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, the Psalms and many other places. He was able to do so because there was a general agreement among the Jews of his day as to what these Scriptures were saying. They knew how to make sense of their Scriptures. The question of interpretation was not an issue as they all shared the same tools for reading these sacred words. Not so today. Over the last 2000 years of Christianity we have developed so many ways of reading and interpreting the Bible, it seems that we can make Scriptures say whatever we want them to say, without any regard to what they are actually saying. As a result, unscrupulous men have got rich, dastardly acts have been committed and communities have been led astray. All because “the Bible says ….”
It seems to me that when confusion and uncertainty reign, going back to origins is no bad thing. As Christians, who do we take as the ultimate authority? Jesus, of course. Then surely, in terms of the Scriptures available to him in his day (the Old Testament), we must read them through the eyes of Jesus, a 1st Century Jew. To do this we don’t necessarily need a knowledge of Hebrew and Aramaic, the written languages of Scripture in those days. What we do need is to get inside their heads and follow the thought processes that drove their understanding.
The trouble is that the modern Church is not so equipped, nether do many of its number seem interested in the Jesus mindset, but seem content to re-interpret the Hebraic mindset through 21st Century Greek structures and culturally “progressive” ideas. There is no real answer to this, looking at the church as a whole, until those in power actively seek to change. All I can do is provide a few signposts, which I have in my trilogy of books, Hebraic Church, Livin’ the Life and Shalom and hope that, when the penny does finally drop, they will have a place to start again (along with many other places, as I grudgingly concede that there are other books by other authors that are helpful too!)
A few years ago I heard many a “progressive” liberal Christian exclaim with confident certainty, there’s no way Brexit / Trump / Boris are from God! What they should be saying is that these “horrible subversive crazinesses” don’t fit in with their view of Who God is and what God does! Fake News may have got caught up in their thinking on a superficial level, but Fake Faith could be very much at the centre of their thinking, I believe. This is because, by my way of thinking, which I would like to think is the traditional historical Biblical position, God is not limited by our ideas of what He should be doing. God does what God does and if this includes mandating the European Referendum result and the improbable candidates for Heads of State of Western democracies, then it is up to us to ask, how do we fit in with all of this, rather than how can we stop this madness?
Liberal Christianity, triggered by Aquinas letting out the Aristotelian genie from the bottle, then fed by generations of rationalists and humanists, has surely chattered itself into irrelevance. Fake Faith thrives when Christians let go of the certainties and uncomfortable truths at the heart of our faith. God created the world in six days and then had a little rest. How do I know? The Bible tells me so. Noah and his family were the only ones to survive the worldwide flood. How do I know? The Bible tells me so. The Jews are still a People of promise and have not been rejected by God. How do I know? The Bible tells me so. Yes, these views are not shared by the majority of Christians in our country, but that just shows you how the Bible has been shoved to one side in favour of compromise and expediency. It’s an indictment on the Church. Those with Fake Faith may still be saved, as long as they haven’t jettisoned the key central truths of our faith, but they are never going to be effective in their witness in a post-modern world that feeds on their uncertainties and compromise and sees them as one of their own.
The Ninth Commandment may tell us, you shall not give false testimony against your neighbour, but could very easily be interpreted (due to the flexibility of Biblical Hebrew) as you shall not give false testimony to your neighbour.
Let us seek to be people of Truth in every way.
This is an extract from the book, Sinner’s Charter: Are the ten commandments for today?, available for £10 at https://www.sppublishing.com/the-sinners-charter-260-p.asp
