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NASB | John 3:16 ¶ "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. |
AMPLIFIED 2015 | John 3:16 ¶ "For God so [greatly] loved and dearly prized the world, that He [even] gave His [One and] only begotten Son, so that whoever believes and trusts in Him [as Savior] shall not perish, but have eternal life. |
Bible Question: You and I are not that far from agreeing on this subject. The disagreement comes from how truth is recognized. I say yes, we do need to test all scripture by Holy Spirit Feelings, as you have stated. I apologize if you interpreted me saying the opposite, and I apologize if it seems as if I am contradicting myself. I don't mean to do so. Please help me to understand. If the Holy Spirit Feelings tells us it's true, then it is true, because the Holy Spirit Feelings tells us so. But everyone isn't guided by Holy Spirit Feelings such as you and I, so how do they recognize truth when it is presented to them? Do they blindly believe anything that it written, and/or do they have ""UNHOLY SPIRIT" feelings? |
Bible Answer: Scripture is true, because scripture is true. All scripture is true because all scripture is true. This is what it means when it says all scripture is inspired by God. The given, is that scripture is true. God's Holy Spirit does not affirm some scripture as true, and other scripture is not true. God's Holy Spirit confirms the truth of scripture in its entirety as a whole category. Now, that being said can scripture be preached wrongly, to where it misses what a passage was saying and therefore be preached wrongly? Absolutely. So, the way I'm going to take your question is as if you had said, "Given that scripture is true, how do we know we are interpreting it correctly?" First, the Holy Spirit does indeed guide us through this. As Paul says in 1st Corinthians spiritual things are indeed discerned by the guidance of the Spirit. Second though we know that scripture does not contradict itself. How do we know this? Because all scripture is inspired by God, and God is not going to give contradictory messages when they are rightly understood. So whenever we look at any single passage, we have every other scripture in the Bible to guide us in what it can be saying, because it is informed in light of them, and it can not be contradictory to any of them. So how do we know? We study it hard in light of scripture, we pray for guidance, and it is this which God will be present with to guide us to all truth. So what we are armed with for telling the truth of scripture is the scripture. In 1 John 4, John tells us that we are to test the spirits, because many false ones have gone out. What does this mean? It means, as you have stated, many have false spirits guiding their reading rather than the Holy Spirit. But how do we know which is leading us, Holy or false? John here says we are to know by whether it matches what we know and confess to be true, that Jesus is God in the flesh. Now, I do not think he means here to limit it only to that one test, God in flesh. Rather he is giving us an iron principle, that we test the spirtual guidance in us, by the truth of scripture. The Holy spirit will not lead us contrary to Christ and the apostles' teaching. So how this plays out, is that we constantly pray and test everything as to whether it matches scripture, and in the midst of this the Holy Spirit will guide us to do so. It does not guide us in a vacuum, it guides us as we interpret scripture with other scripture. In Christ, Beja |