If you read the words of Paul you will be heavily influenced by his writings. He's a good writer and thinker. However, one thing is true about the new testament writers. All of them. They didn’t know they were writing scripture. Not one of them thought what they wrote would be added to the Old Testament as more books. It was done after their death.
I think that's important in order to understand Paul's words. At no point did Paul write to deal with 4 billion Christians at one time. He was always writing to a certain group of people with a certain set of problems. Many times his advice was to deal with a problem in that area but it wasn't meant for every person across the world. I’m not saying his words aren't important or useful today. I’m saying that we can’t take the words of scripture without understanding the point of why it was said.
Many times I've found in religion that people will take a bible verse and apply it to their life because words are very impactful. I don't think anything is wrong with that, I just think it’s overdone. The idea that every scripture can be applied to your life is dangerous. Mostly because life isn’t about you. You are not the point of scripture. You are not the center of the universe. The Bible is about God. Not you, not us, not even our generation. The Bible says God is faithful to the generations. God’s plan includes us but it's not about us. We are part of this but we are not the point. So when you use scripture and you make it all about your perspective, your traditions, and your upbringing, it can be very dangerous.
It’s how Christian preachers could preach about slavery being God's will back in the 1800s. They took one random bible verse and applied it like it was God’s will. And honestly, Paul was just talking. Many times in scripture the bible isn't giving direction it's just telling us this is the way the world is. There is a verse where Noah turns to one of his three sons and tells him that he will serve the other brother all of his life. Some people believe that the son was of a darker complexion and therefore may be of African descent. Plus his name was Ham. This was right after the flood so there is no race per se. But Ham is a pretty black name. So today, someone reads that and thinks, oh so slavery is meant to be.
When actually the bible isn't telling us that God approved for Noah to set his sons with ranks and divisions. Noah just did that. It's important to understand that the bible isn’t always telling us what God wanted but simply what men did or what Paul did. Honestly, they all did something wrong. I think the bible is trying to show us how our world is so messed up. At every turn of every generation, we have men that do some good but also do a lot of evil. Jesus is the first one and last to come to us that only did good.
I can't stress enough that no matter how good our world gets. No matter how holy we think we are. We still mess up horribly in how we treat each other. That was Jesus’s message. What's the point of all these laws if you don't treat people better? So jump back to Paul's writings and I don't think that God meant for us to use them as weapons. We are so strict with Paul’s writings that i think we missed the point of why God allowed it to be scripture.
How you read something is the most important part of reading. We shouldn't read scripture in order to use it as a weapon where you have to correct everyone. Where everyone needs to change. Where everyone else not in your group is always wrong. I think we miss the point of the scripture. It wasn't meant to start 50 different denominations in Christianity.
The reason we have so many different ones is that people take the Bible and make a God out of it. The Bible isn't God. Paul isn't Jesus. His words are used by God but they are not God. The point of scripture is not to make everyone live a certain way but to make sure everyone knows that the way we live matters. The way we treat each other matters. The way we use scripture matters. The way you think about your neighbor matters. Scripture was never meant to be used to make us hate people or divide each other. If your scripture reading leads you to that then perhaps you have focused on the words and not the point/spirit of the scripture.
Show me one Bible verse that's clear and concrete and I will show you another Bible verse that says the opposite. You can’t dumb down scripture to fit your moral compass. It's too massive. You can’t just base everyone on one bible verse from Paul. That's crazy. The Bible doesn’t contain everything God meant for us to know. It's a piece of what we should know. It's a foundational piece in my opinion but still just a piece. I’m not saying we should live outside of the bible, I believe we should live from it. Use it to encourage how we treat people, not judge them. Use it to grow how we live our lives, not micromanage our morals. I don’t have all the answers to life I just know that this ain’t it.
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