13. Bible: Putting the Word of God to the test

In my late teens, my faith had reached a crisis point. This is when I started delving into theology in earnest.

For those keeping score, here was the deal:

• I had grown up in a conservative tradition that tied me to my family and my culture. These Christian beliefs were the ground and foundation of my being.

• This tradition taught me that I was bad—from birth—and needed to be saved or I would be sentenced to eternal torture in the fires of Hell. God demanded certain behavior from us, and we owed it to God to obey or face the consequences of my evil.

• It did, at the same time, teach me that God was good, that God was love, that God was ready and able to perform miracles on my behalf, and even save me. But in every case, there was a cost on my part, namely my belief and obedience.

• Meanwhile, I was sinning regularly, and fighting a losing battle with the self-centered urges within myself that pulled me away from what I knew to be good. Despite my best efforts, there was no way I could be good enough on my own to get on the good side of God.

• And on top of that, I resented the situation I was in—it was like extortion—I had to be good or pay the ultimate price. How could I be a received into the Kingdom of God as a sincere believer with so much resentment seething within me?

• As a healthy, vibrant young man, I was not afraid of death, but I also believed that Jesus could come back at any moment—"like a thief in the night,” they said—and I didn’t want to be caught unprepared. I didn’t want to be left behind, or cast aside with the goats in the day of judgment.

However, my experience worshipping in different environments had shown me something, namely that none of the churches had it right:

• Evangelicals had all of the fellowship but little of the magic.

• Charismatics believed in the power of God but doubted that riches were an impediment to getting into Heaven.

• Mainline churches believed in love and charity but they seemed to forget sin and holiness.

• Catholics had all of the holiness, but missed the humility, and so on.

All of the churches missed something.

Once more into the family Bible

So I had it in mind that I was going to dive back into the Bible, and find out what Christianity was really, really, really about—even if it was nearly 2,000 years after the fact. I hoped to discover some mysterious new Christianity that was easier, simpler, and more accepting. I hoped to find out that all this time, all the churches had been wrong. I was going to prove that Christianity didn’t have to be so hard.

I had—and still have—in my possession, a Bible that is of great value to me. It has a well-worn black leather cover, with the front cover completely detached now from the crumbling spine but tucked into the table of contents. The yellowed pages within are tattered, dog-eared, underlined, highlighted, and annotated in ballpoint pen in the margins by 3 generations of seekers of the truth about God: my Grandpa Wilson, the preacher; my Dad, the evangelist, salesman, and rabble-rouser; and me, the skeptic and seeker.

The Bible is a 1936 edition of the Thompson Chain Reference Bible, King James Translation. The King James Translation is the one that many Christians consider to be definitive, although it did not come into being until 1600 years after Christ, and carries with it many anachronisms and biases of the day. Yet for generations of Christians, those verses with their “thee” and “thy,” are the only ones that sound like they were dictated by God.

In the Thompson Chain Reference edition, scholars from the Thompson organization have researched the Bible and found certain themes throughout, from broad topics such as Salvation to really specific topics like Tithing. Those scholars then identified every reference to that theme throughout the Bible and catalogued them.

When one wants to learn about a certain subject, one looks up the topic in the index, find the code number, and see a list of Bible verses, scattered throughout the Old and New Testaments, relating to that topic. Also, when one looks at a particular verse in the Bible, there are notes in the margins that tell you several other verses that are also related to this topic. One just follows the code number.

The Thompson scholars do make some theological assumptions, such as when one follows the story of Jesus, in making decisions about which Old Testament prophecies were in reference to Jesus, and which were about Kings and other historical figures at the time. However, if one agrees with the overall theology of the text and how it is arranged, the Thompson Chain Reference Bible can be a helpful way to follow a certain theme or idea through the Bible.

It was with this Bible in hand that I sat down on my bed, in my street clothes, with a yellow legal pad and a green ink pen, and began the research project of saving my own life.

Seeking a lighter yoke

I tore through the Bible, looking for the chapter or verse that would prove that it had all been a big misunderstanding.

I read about the Fall of Creation. I read about the destruction of the wicked world in Noah’s great flood. I read about the destruction of Sodom and Gammorah for their sins. I read about the giving of the law to the ancient Hebrew people. I zipped through the histories of the leaders and people of Israel, and God’s love for them when they obeyed God’s will and God’s wrath when they strayed from the commandments.

I jumped to the New Testament, hoping Jesus would tell me something different. I read how Jesus said the entirety of the law can be summed up in loving God and our neighbor. I read how not one “jot or tittle” of the law would be changed until all things were fulfilled—which could mean that once Jesus was crucified, the old law was done for—replaced with the law of love. I read how Jesus forgave people, and rescued them from punishment.

I read in John 3:16, which is famously scrawled on placards and bedsheets at the football game to let people know how to be saved, that “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten son…that no one should perish” God wanted no one to perish. That is God’s goal, not to punish most of us while a tiny elect group makes it to Heaven.

I read in Acts how Peter saw the vision that no food was unclean, not even bacon (which should be a holy sacrament). I jumped ahead to the epistles of Paul, where I read that the Law was no longer written on tablets of stone, but on our hearts. I read in Romans how we should let others observe their holy days, even if they are different than ours.

It was starting to look like I was finding the key to this easier, lighter-yoked Christianity, but I also found some stumbling blocks along the way.

Finding the road to Heaven is narrow

I read where Jesus said that the way he preached about was narrow, and that few would make it in, while the road to destruction is wide. I read about Jesus preaching about Hell—one that was hot, painful, and from which there was no escape. I read about how everyone would be judged by Jesus in the end. I read about how when the wheat was separated from the weeds, the weeds would be burned in a fire that never went out. I read how there would be some who say, “Lord, Lord,” thinking they did the right thing, only to figure out they did not. I learned how even sinning in my heart was considered a sin.

I read Paul’s long lists of sins, and got the message that our conduct—even in our barrooms and bedrooms—was just as important to this God as our avoidance of the sins that even sinners agreed were bad, like murder and theft. I read how the wages of sin are death, and how it is better to lose an eye or a hand than to have one’s whole body cast into Hell.

My heart sank as I realized there was no way around the fact that while the Bible contained parts I liked—and parts which seemed to directly oppose some modern versions of Christianity—there were still all of these hard-to-swallow words about how we deserved to be punished, and if we didn’t follow just the right steps to do so, we could easily spend eternity in a lake of fire while the righteous bathed in a cool river of crystal.

In my downcast state, I put down my pen and my paper, and looked over all of my notes, the frantic scrawling of a death row prisoner pleading for a reprieve.

And then it dawned on me. There was a crack in the façade, and just a little bit of light shining through.

This system was rigged against us, from the very beginning.

Something was wrong here.

Either we had something wrong, or this whole system was not only unjust and unfair—it simply made no coherent sense.

Like the mind puzzle of the fear of God being the beginning of wisdom, God being perfect love, and perfect love casting out fear, I felt like I had stumbled upon another divine mystery, but one big enough that the whole structure of my faith might just fall apart.

If God was so mad at us for being how we were, why did God make us this way? And if God wanted to forgive us, why didn’t God just do so, without all of the pageantry? And if we were saved by the power of God, how is it that we powerless humans could still screw it up?

Something was wrong with this system from the ground up, and I was going to try to get to the root of it.