Be Careful When Quoting the Bible

By Wayne Harmon

There is an old joke about a man who sought the Lord’s leading each morning by letting his Bible fall open and reading the first verse he saw. One morning he opened to Matthew 27:5 and read that Judas “hanged himself.”

Shaken, he closed his Bible and tried again, and read in John 13:27, “That thou doest, do quickly.”

His third attempt at divine direction led him to Luke 10:37, “Go, and do thou likewise.”

Some people like to make a point by saying, “The Bible says,” and then quote a verse, giving the impression that God agrees with them. These people see the Bible as a collection of rules and guidelines. To them, “The Bible says,” is the same as “God says.” But not everything written in the Bible is “God says”.

When someone uses a passage from the Bible being used to make a point, I ask three questions about that passage:

“Who wrote it?”

“To whom was it written?”

“Why was it written?”

Yeah, we can say, “It’s the Bible. God wrote it!” But that is being simplistic and just plain lazy. We need to learn about the person the Holy Spirit used to write each part of the Bible. We need to know to whom it was being directed. We need to why it was written.

It is easy to excuse bad behavior and wrong decisions with a misquoted Bible verse. The following true story is a good example of what I’m talking about.

A group of elders in a church called the pastor to a special meeting to inform him that he was being fired.

Their reason? He had violated I Thessalonians 5:22 (KJV), “Abstain from all appearance of evil.” He was seen going into a motel with a woman who was not his wife. In order to avoid chaos in the church they decided that the prudent thing to do was to dismiss him quietly.

First of all, that is NOT what I Thessalonians 5:22 is talking about. Paul (who) wrote to the believers in Thessalonica (whom) to encourage them in the face of persecution and deception by false teachers (why).

False teachers were claiming words of prophecy; special insights from God. These frauds were seeing success on two fronts. People either believed these false “words”, or they dismissed all words of genuine insight and encouragement.

Paul tells them not to shut out the Holy Spirit, but test all prophecies. Hold onto those words which were good, and abstain from the evil when it appears.

That’s all Paul was saying. Yet these elders tried, judged and convicted their pastor on the basis of this one verse taken horribly out context.

Oh, yeah. The pastor’s crime? He didn’t have room at his house, so he was taking his mother to a motel during her visit.

Copyright 2014: Wayne Harmon