The Bible isn’t a buffet line. You don’t get to wander through the scriptures and pick a slice of pizza and ignore the broccoli. You have to take it all, or you’re deluding yourself. It’s easy to choose what you like and ignore the rest. Thing is, if you take one part to heart and distrust the pieces you don’t like, you are your own god. Keep in mind, God is a jealous God and won’t put up with competition from humans. “I Am the Lord your God. You shall have no other gods before Me.” That means you, me, your neighbor, spouse, pastor, and your favorite movie star or author. NO other gods – none. They can’t compete anyway, so the competition is so weak as to be nonexistent. As I wrote in previous posts, it’s the entire context that puts meaning into the Bible. Did you catch that? The Entire Context. Key word, ENTIRE. Taking Him at His word for one part of the Bible is good, but cutting out the rest will get you in trouble. So, when you read about God’s love, part of that love is judgment. A parent doesn’t let a child eat nothing but cookies because they love the kid. There are limits. God imposes limits on us not because He’s arbitrary, but because He loves us. He doesn’t want us eating cookies all day long. That’s kind of the answer to another question I raised previously. Why do bad things happen to good people? Because God doesn’t want us eating just cookies. The gate to Heaven is narrow, and He wants us there with Him. So He makes us eat the broccoli and limits the amount of pizza we take. If you don’t want the broccoli, and just pile on the pizza, you’ll get fat, lazy, diabetic, and die an early death. That’s not the way to Heaven. That’s not to say we don’t get the good stuff along with the veggies. As long as we’re looking for what God wants us to do, we’ll get good stuff too. God wants us to live life to the fullest as long as it’s on that narrow path leading to the gates of Heaven. Eat nothing but pizza, and you’ll enter the afterlife through the wide gate of destruction. The food might taste good now, but the results are not what you want. Eat your veggies.
Comments