Truth Must Prevail, I

My new slogan moving into the 21st Century’s second quarter must be, Truth Must Prevail. The challenge becomes hurting or angering as few people as possible. Lifelong traits include damaging and enraging others, and that means both good news and bad. Being immensely comfortable and familiar with my own insulting behaviors allows me to see what may lie ahead. Because of that, perhaps God will allow me to head myself off, so to speak, or follow through without compromise if it seems inevitable.

Public dishonesty should be addressed publicly. Academic, intellectual, and popular nonsense all need swift correction. Deceit, being intentional, should be furiously assaulted, and idle ignorance may call for an idle slap in the erroneous face.

To demonstrate, let me begin with an example from the truth and integrity about my LORD and Savior, Jesus Christ. He is never wrong, nor can He be by my belief in Scripture, but even the most accurate theologians can confuse Him as the Word made flesh, particularly as He is reflected perfectly in the written Word.

Is the Word of God only the first five books of the Old Testament, as some Jewish scholars believe? Is the Apocrypha part of the Old Testament, as the Roman Church and Orthodox believers assert? If so or if not, how many books are included in God’s Truth? 5, 18, 66, 73, 80, 100 or more? What of the obscure books quoted in the Old and New Testaments? Jasher, Acts of Solomon, Enoch, and others are mentioned in Scripture or the Apocrypha, but have no Scriptural authority or recognition even among the most Scripture-insistent folks like me. It is easy to explain why the majority of Christians reject them. In fact, dreadfully easy! But still, some claim them as parts of God’s infallible word.

Others reject the notion that any book of any Bible is infallible. “Sufficient,” is how they express it. In the middle are those who may believe in solid evidence in some books, and enjoy finding everything potentially historical or spiritual assembled for various purposes to be good enough. Others will not even look at Maccabees or Esdras for fear of being spiritually corrupted, even if they read Reader’s Digest or the New York Times, neither of which is canonized.

Knowing this subject, and understanding it, might be important, but you are unlikely to know it really exists if all you do is go to church on Sunday. Who knows, you might be in danger of hellfire if you reject Bel and the Dragon, spoken of in some translations of the canonical book of Daniel.

Other Christian problems stem from human distinctions between truth and fables. Differentiating history from legend is weird if you consider the source to be, God’s Infallible Truth. If you fail throughout Genesis, Leviticus, and on throughout the Bible, you might add that God lied and distorted stuff to satisfy an ignorant people. Many Christians readily believe that Jesus walked on deep and stormy water, but deny the parting of the Red Sea or flooding of the whole earth. Picking and choosing is very common, indeed.

That remains necessary if you do not believe the Bible. In other words, there should simply be two categories: those who believe the Bible, and those who chuckle or smile knowingly at its whimsical stories, and the clever way that ancient primitives explained what they did not understand at all, like the Hindus and Chinese who balanced the earth on the World Turtle. In many “intellectual” Christian circles, billions of years replace the very assertive, “as through one man, sin entered the world, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned.” If folks were dying for hundreds of thousands of years before Adam, through species like the chimp proudly named Lucy, then Jesus’ atoning death can be considered nonsense, too. If Christianity is not Biblical, you do not accept the inerrancy of Scripture, and you need to justify yourself, because “Christian” means “follower of Christ.” Jesus Christ clearly believed and stated that “male and female created He him.” Starting with the same lump. One creature, one race, one Adam (the red people), one disobedient human.

That leads to the third Christian problem worth mentioning: the race card. Only politicians and bigots speak of racial differences within the Christian (or scientific) community. The human race is one. We are all sons of Adam. We are all sons of Noah, sons of Noah’s sons, Shem, Ham, and Japheth and their wives, who were all daughters of Adam. Bluntly, we are all Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

This entire list of information is only important for Christians who claim the veracity of the Bible. For me, most of it, especially the Pentateuch and the New Testament, which includes the same 27 books in virtually all of Christianity. If you are not among us, you are utterly free to believe anything you want. As mentioned above, this will certainly inflame a host of believers in vast parts of the Bible, and hurt others who prefer to feel bad because I so desperately misunderstand them, but please feel encouraged if you think you can Biblically defend yourself.

That is the truth. There is so much more.