Twisting Scripture

Scripture is hard to understand. Given that nothing in the Bible was written to anyone who is alive on Earth today, we should not be surprised at this. Many things that are in the Bible we may never understand, but the original recipients of the Scriptures (from the Hebrews starting in 1400 B.C. and up to the Christians in A.D. 70) did understand them.

Today there are people who trust their own knowledge, or the knowledge of someone alive today, more than the knowledge of those who lived in the days when the books of the Bible were written. It is a sad state of things that we are in. Let me quickly show you how easy it is to make mistakes by just taking a few Bible verses together (without discerning original context).

1) "Judas went out and hanged himself" (Matthew 27:5)

2) "Learn this lesson" (Mark 13:28)

3) "Go and do likewise" (Luke 10:37)

4) "What you have to do, do quickly" (John 13:27)

All four are Scripture verses. All four are from the gospels. They are even in the proper order of the gospels. That is a lot of evidence that these four verses of the Bible are telling us something! They are telling us, not to trust coincidences as being a "message of God". They are also telling us that just because someone quotes Scripture, does not mean that they know what those Scriptures actually mean.

St. Peter said that much of Scripture is hard to understand, and unstable people twist it to their own destruction. He also told us that private interpretation is never the right way to learn what God says. Not everyone listens to him though; after all, he was only the first Pope!