Subject: Study Bible |
Bible Note: Dear fcs375, You wrote, "I firmly believe that one must study God's word first and foremost, asking the Holy Spirit to teach them and meditate upon it, and sometimes may require one to read over and over again. Good sound commentary has it's proper place in study but should be secondary" (sic) Yes, secondary, but not utterly neglected -- so that we won't "be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men" (Ephesians 4:14b). (Remember that one of the worst trickster's we'll face is our own heart.) Sadly, most people who make these kinds of assertions of divine solidarity really mean that they will neglect orthodoxy for some kind of pious, personal walk with God. It is no surprise, therefore, that being "untaught and unstable [they] distort the Scriptures" with dire consequences (2 Peter 3:16). Nor should it surprise us, therefore, to discover that we have gotten what the Spirit warned us about in Ephesians: Long after the Lord helped the church deal decisively with heresies like Arianism, Manichaeism, Pelagianism, Monarchianism, Montanism, Gnosticism, etc. etc. we are up to our ears in all those things. They go by different names, of course -- if they bother to be named at all; but such teachings are now more commonly espoused than is sound doctrine (2 Timothy 4:3-4). And they are espoused by people who claim to have the Spirit's teaching. We will repeat history if we fail to learn from it; or, perhaps in this instance, by lightly esteeming the gifts plundered by Christ for the church (Psalm 68:18; Ephesians 4:8) of the past, we will fail to repeat it. As my pastor often says: there are two ditches on either side of the road. Let's take care lest we fall into one ditch, while striving to avoid the other. In Him, Doc |