It is becoming more and more clear to me that today’s American Christians are biblically illiterate, choosing instead to follow their favorite Christian leaders and what they teach about the Bible, rather than reading the Bible for themselves.
Now, I know that the phrase “biblically illiterate” or something similar such as “they don’t know what the Bible says,” is often a charge made by one group of Christians who believe differently from other groups of Christians, such as the divisions between Catholic and Protestant Christians, and actually refers to “doctrine”, or some written form of something that describes what a particular Christian group “believes” that separates them from other Christian groups.
I am not dealing with different doctrinal beliefs at all in this article.
I am talking about what the Bible actually says, which anyone can determine for themselves by picking it up and reading it.
To give a non-religious example, take the Constitution and the Bill of Rights of the United States, the political documents that are supposed to define the legal code of the United States.
There is great debate as to how these documents are applied today in a court of law, but there is no debate about what is actually written in them, because anyone can look them up and see what they say.
So for example, while there is great debate today as to the meaning of “freedom of speech” as is written in the First Amendment of the Constitution of the United States, nobody is claiming that the First Amendment does not protect free speech at all, or that only the Government can determine which speech is allowed in the public space, and what speech is not.
That would be absurd, and make the First Amendment meaningless.
And yet, after I published the article on the founding of Israel in 1948 last week, stating that this political-military action was not a fulfillment of prophecy, but a massacre and ethnic cleansing, I had several people email me and tell me that massacring whole nations and participating in ethnic cleansing most certainly can be a fulfillment of prophecy, because God has done it several times throughout history.
If they gave any examples in the Bible to support their claim, of course they were ALL examples from the Old Testament, none from the New Testament.
This is clearly an example of being biblically illiterate, and not understanding the clear division in the Bible between the Old Covenant instituted by Moses with the giving of the Law (Torah), and the New Covenant which was instituted by Jesus by his execution on the Roman cross, and his subsequent rising from the dead and ascension to Heaven.
Which covenant with God are we currently living under? The New Covenant, which was fulfilled and has now superseded the Old Covenant.
If anyone makes a claim that God continues to deal with groups of people under this New Covenant period as he did under the Old Covenant, it would be the same as someone standing up in a court of law in the U.S. and claiming that the First Amendment was never actually written, and that there is no freedom of speech.
We can conclusively state that this is NOT true, based solely on the textual evidence.
Now what if the person in a court of law in the U.S. makes the claim to a judge sitting on a bench in a court of law that the Constitution has been changed today, a couple hundred of years after it was allegedly written, and that the First Amendment is a forgery, and that it was not in the original text of the Constitution?
Can we prove in a court of law that this is not true?
Of course we can, because the Constitution of the U.S. and the Bill of Rights were copied and even translated into many languages over the past couple of hundred years, so that if someone ever tried to change the original document, we would still have all the thousands of copies of the original Constitution and Bill of Rights for the past 250 years or so.
The same principle is true of the Bible.
