Over the years, I have come to see a troubling trend in Christian circles. We in our fallen flesh continuously forget where our true focus when reading Scripture should lie.
We often trade that which has made us redeemed for that which condemns us. We embrace a lesser way of understanding Scripture. Therefore, as fellow brothers and sisters in Christ, let us grow as a family with better attention to what our heavenly Father wants us to pay attention to. My challenge both to myself and to others is to begin to further develop our minds and recognize what that truly is.
Since the beginning of our shared faith, as evident throughout Paul’s writings to the churches, we have continuously seen those who wish to return to a lesser understanding of the Word of God. Never-ending departure occurs again and again and again.
We keep trading the redemptive freedom in Christ to go back to being a slave to the law. We keep making ourselves prisoners and throwing ourselves against a spiked wall, much like those in Super Mario Bros. We are just jumping along, and then suddenly we see a nice little prize and jump into an unending abyss of despair and probably spikes, resulting in the catastrophic ‘game over.’
Similarly, we forget that we are no longer under the law, and, for some inexplicable reason, we feel compelled to search the Scriptures and listen to countless sermons on how we can live better, which ends up making much of our faith into that of pagan motivational garbage.
We as broken people saved by a loving God are no longer striving to make ourselves better. We were dead, lifeless, Super Mario Game Over with no restarts. God revealed himself to us through his promise in Christ. Galatians 3:25-26 says, “Now that faith has come, we are no longer under the supervision of the law. You are all sons of God through faith in Christ Jesus.”
Thus, we no longer have to fear that we are going to hell or are lesser because we are bad people. God has got that covered with the precious blood of the perfect lamb.
Again going back, the trend has been in many instances to look for how we can apply Scriptures to our lives, which leads to our continuous struggle with practical theology. We look to see how we can get stuff from the Bible and apply it to our own day and age, and frankly, I have never been more at the bottom and stagnant in my spiritual growth than when I have forgotten how to read and interpret the Scripture.
Scripture points to Christ at every turn and on every page. It is a redemptive historical narrative that shows how God has chosen a depraved people who desert him at every hardship and yet in his great love saves them and gives them eternal salvation and rest.
God made us fellow heirs of his own kingdom along with Christ. We went from complete death to being made members of the royal family. That is the power of Christ in you and me, and we see the testament to this power throughout the Scripture.
The Scripture does contain truth about how we should live and what the laws are to follow, but if we do not put Christ at the center of our interpretation, we miss the point. We fall back into the hole of our own unworthiness.
James 2:10 says, “For whoever keeps the whole law and yet stumbles at just one point is guilty of breaking all of it.” Scripture should not be merely used to state how we should view one particular subject; instead, it should be the fire that drives you every day to see how Christ has loved us so much despite our inability to do anything right.
God brought the Israelites out of Egypt and is continuing to bring his people into the ultimate rest through the death and resurrection of Christ. When we try to solely live by the law, remember the real focus, as stated in Exodus 13:8: “On that day tell your son, ‘I do this because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.’”
We are the children of the promise who are now more children of Abraham than many of those who complained against God when he provided for them in the desert will ever be. We were brought out of the land of Egypt, out of the darkness of our sin. This is my testimony and this also is yours. Scripture proclaims to us the story of our salvation, and thus, we should not be overcome with the practical interpretation of how we need to behave. Scripture applies to our lives already as the story of our death and resurrection with Jesus on the cross and from the grave.