Pick a Little Here…Choose a Little There

So often I’ve seen and heard people in the church “pick and choose” what to believe/endorse/enforce from the Bible. Walking down the halls of a Christian University sixty years ago you would have never seen a young man with hair past his chin, a girl with ear and/or facial piercings, or the multiple tattoos on the arms and legs and toes of passerby. Nowadays it’s commonplace. We all believe that killing is wrong…but we would never dare to put ourselves in the same category as a killer when we tell a little lie or secretly want to catch that married man’s eye. All three actions go against the 10 commandments, but they carry different weight…WHY? And who decided?

The church highlights and underlines in red anything that has to do with gay/lesbian relations as something of the Devil…something to be delivered from but within those same churches come the straight men who sleep around and cheat on their wives, within those same churches come the ladies who gather in groups to gossip about “so-and-so” and “what’s his name” and how they’re going to go to hell for this, that, or the other thing. What is the difference??

Is all of the Bible 100% true, to be taken at its word exactly as it is written? Was the great flood an actual event that really took place or is it simply a symbolic story told to teach a lesson or prove a point? And if it really did happen, how do you account for the fact that a very similar flood story is found in other literature? Who copied who? Or could they possibly be referencing the same event? Did God really allow for Job to be tortured by the Devil? Did the crucifixion actually happen?

And each church/individual seems to take their own (unique and different) experiences into account as they look for ways to synthesis the words/parables/stories of the Bible into everyday circumstances in the attempt to make them easier to understand in our context. It’s only natural that people do this – but when we do, we cannot possibly ALL be right…..can we even be sure that ANY of us is right? I’ve heard too many different interpretations on the same piece of scripture – seen a single piece of scripture pulled and torn and twisted until it fit somebody’s justification for this action or that belief and at the same time seen it pulled and torn and twisted in a different direction in order to fit somebody else’s agenda. We can't possibly all have the right answer.