Condemned by the Bible?

Condemned by the Bible?

Afraid of God’s Word

In the previous webpage, Supernaturally Confirmed Unforgivable or Damned by dreams, Visions & Miracles: When Supernatural Signs Contradict Biblical Truth, we investigated some of the implications of Almighty God having supernatural enemies who will do their utmost to cheat us out of enjoying the salvation that is freely available to us through Jesus. We noted that one of their tactics is to try to dupe us into believing oppressively strong and convincing feelings of anxiety and condemnation; tempting us to believe our feelings rather than keep clinging to faith in God’s promise to freely forgive all who seek it through Jesus.

These spiritual enemies have other insidious tricks to undermine our faith in God’s promise to cleanse us from all sin. The one we examined in depth in the previous webpage was their use of lying dreams, visions and miraculous signs suggesting that we are damned, unforgivable, apostate or whatever.

Now it is time to explore yet another common tactic they use with evil cunning: seeking to distort our interpretation of God’s Word; maliciously twisting into a source of torment what our loving Lord intended to be for our comfort and encouragement. In the previous webpage we noted in passing how when Jesus was tempted in the wilderness, the Evil One actually quoted the Bible in an attempt to confuse and deceive the Son of God, and Jesus’ response was simply to quote another Scripture.

Let’s commence our counterattack by exploring the primary factor that makes us vulnerable to misinterpreting various parts of Scripture.

Bible scholars make much of the fact that for correct understanding of the Bible one must understand the culture of the hearers, the historical context, the nuances of the original language, and so on. This is undeniably true for any document but what is even more critical in discovering the real meaning of any communication is to thoroughly know the heart of the writer/speaker.

For example, some people continually insult their friends and yet mean none of it. It is simply their sense of humor and they actually have a heart of gold and are filled with love and respect for those they seem to keep slandering. Some people might find this unbelievable, but it is true and you have probably met people who jest like this. Some have a twinkle in their eye when they dish out slanderous insults – thus making their real feelings more obvious – and some don’t.

For another example: some people needlessly panic and are hypochondriacs or alarmists, whereas if certain other people reveal the slightest hint of concern, it needs to be taken very seriously.

A mind-boggling array of other characteristics must be correctly discerned in a person before we can have any certainty of understanding his words. How intelligent is he? How patient? How selfish? Is he usually focused on long term goals or just the short term? Is he given to plain speaking or does he sometimes speak in riddles? Is he prone to saying no when he actually expects his hearers to realize he is simply being coy or testing them and secretly hopes they will realize he actually means yes? Does he usually seek to undermine people or to build them up? How much does he change his way of speaking according to the audience he is addressing? What if we are far more sensitive than the people he is addressing? On and on we could go, listing the vast number of character traits we must understand about a person before we can be sure we have correctly understood his words. Unless we thoroughly know a person, it is disturbingly easy to grossly misunderstand his words and actions. In short, to understand the Word of God, we must understand the heart of God.

For this reason, we must give top priority to understanding God’s heart. We need to take very seriously the Bible’s affirmation that God is good, patient, kind, loving wise, and so forgiving that Jesus was tortured to death to secure the forgiveness of those whose hateful sins crucified him. Everything in Scripture must be read from this perspective or we are likely to grossly misinterpret various scriptures and end up needlessly upset.

Suppose you had to spend every moment of the day and night alone with a stranger for a week and you were told confidentially that the person is a violent beast of a man – sadistic, deceitful, irrational and unpredictable. Your fear and suspicion would affect your interpretation of everything he says and does, and of every creak and sound you hear in the dead of night. You probably would never get close enough to him to discover that all you were told about him was a pack of lies.

If, on the other hand, you had been told this man thinks highly of you and is warm, kind-hearted, trustworthy and the best friend you could ever find, you would see everything he says and does in a totally different light and would get much closer to him and discover far more about who he really is.

This reflects the dilemma plaguing those who come to the Bible terrorized by the fear that God is angry with them and that he is harsh, cruel, demanding and longs to throw people into hell. Their fear and suspicion will distort their interpretation of every Bible passage they read; preventing them from seeing the Lord as the warm, loving, forgiving, kind-hearted person he really is. The only way of breaking this impasse is to keep doggedly reminding oneself of all the Scriptures affirming God’s love, goodness, eagerness to forgive, and so on, and keep working on reading God’s Word from this perspective.

I will help you with that in a moment but first I should point out that evil loves exploiting every natural weakness it finds. The two most common natural reasons for people being needlessly afraid of God are:

1.     Having been starved of unconditional love as a child

In order to grow up psychologically healthy, every child has a desperate need to be continually nurtured by unconditional love. Being brought up by cold, demanding parents who unwittingly cause their child to feel insecure and unloved unless they perform, can leave emotional wounds that can last a lifetime unless deep healing is found. Being brought up in this way distorts one’s expectations of other key people in one’s life, including one’s image of God. For help with this, here are two links (that lead to still more links), but please first record the web address of this webpage so you can later return and complete this important series.

Changing Your Self-Imagine

How Much does God Love Me? Receiving a Personal Revelation of God’s Love for You

2.     Suffering from an anxiety disorder

Being afflicted by an often-undiagnosed medical condition that produces excess anxiety is the second most common natural reason for people being needlessly afraid of God. To understand how this causes people to keep doubting God’s love and acceptance and wrongly feel that God must be angry with them, first record the web address of this webpage so you can later return and complete this important series, then see Scrupulosity: Continually Feeling Guilty & Unforgivable.

Dark forces are continually trying to mess with our minds and blacken God’s name. God’s solution is not to silence the lies but to let us choose whether we will believe them or believe in the love and integrity of God. The Lord longs for us to stubbornly cling to the truth about him, even if everything within and without seems to scream that it cannot be true. That is what faith is all about, and faith has always been God’s way and always will be. Faith is not absence of doubt but doggedly holding on despite overwhelming torrents of doubt.

Even when every force opposed to God keeps screaming that it cannot be true, the following is the truth about God that we must keep clinging to like a barnacle’s grip on a rock in a terrifyingly stormy sea.

As the world’s oceans exceed a raindrop, the Lord of lords exceeds your wildest dreams. He is everything good you have ever dared hope for, and infinitely more.

The most stunningly beautiful, exciting, fascinating and adorable person in the entire universe is so head-over-heels in love with you that he willingly endured a torturous death just so he could be your best friend, enjoy your companionship and pour all his inexhaustible riches on you for all eternity.

Much that passes for romantic love is selfish and fickle but true love is utterly selfless and endlessly faithful. Love is blind. It overlooks a person’s faults because it keeps seeing the best in a person. It keeps believing in the person and keeps on giving and giving and giving and forgiving and forgiving and forgiving. And since God’s love is infinite, everything he does is driven by incomprehensibly stupendous love.

It might be beyond your ability to sense it but the Lord loves you so totally that no one could be more devoted to anyone than he is to you. He loves with all his heart. This makes it impossible for him to love anyone more than he loves you. There could not possibly be any greater love than how he already feels for you. He could not love you more if you were his only friend in a bleak and lonely universe; if you were perfect in every possible way; if you were the most exquisitely beautiful person ever to exist.

We have examined in general why people can end up mistakenly thinking that parts of the Bible are saying they have no hope spiritually. In the next webpage we will probe Scriptures in which people seemed to have been given no hope of salvation. We will make the surprising discovery that even in these extreme cases God was actually still reaching out in love and offering them hope.

Next Webpage: Rejected by God? Could You be Damned and Without Hope?