Recently those of you who have been on Facebook will have spotted this new trend where people will nominate each other to share their favourite Bible Verse and then nominate someone else who will share theirs and so on… I suppose its kind of a sanctified chain mail.
Thomas Jefferson had much the same idea when he was president and commissioned a special edition of the bible to be printed. With one correction, he took a razor blade and cut out all the bits of the bible he didn’t like. So naturally most of the Old Testament with its references to a God of judgement were gone, many of Paul’s letters were gone, anything Jefferson didn’t like was gone.
Essentially when we are selecting favourite verses of Scripture we are saying much the same thing as Jefferson did, perhaps not intentionally but we are doing it anyway. We are saying I like this bit but not that bit, this bit about God’s love speaks to me but this bit about God’s purity doesn’t.
The reason this is key for us to think about is because “all Scripture is God breathed and useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting and training in righteousness so that the man of God may be thoroughly equipped for every good work” (2 Tim. 3:16-17). All of the bible including the bits we may not like or the bits we find difficult is the word of God, is God communicating something of His character and nature to us.
If we lose our hold on the doctrine of scripture then all of our other doctrines really fall by the wayside as well, how can we be sure of our doctrine of man if we don’t take Genesis 1-3 seriously, how can we be sure of God’s plan of redemption, how can we be sure our doctrine of God is right if we don’t accept God’s revelation of Himself to us? If we lose sight of the importance of the doctrine of scripture then all of our other doctrines readily fall apart from there.
I’m not saying that sharing scripture and clogging up people’s news feeds with scripture is nessecarily a bad thing but I would question what it says about our doctrine of scripture? Are we valuing certain passages over and against another, when the truth is that all of scripture has been given to us for our benefit for our edification and as part of God’s revelation of himself to us?
