The Bible Is A Tool For Life

Heaven and earth shall pass away: but my words shall not pass away. - Mark 13:31

When I was a kid my father referred to me as "snake hips", which roughly translated as "You're gonna wear suspenders until you grow a waist and are able to keep your pants up with a belt."

Boy, how I hated those elastic snappers. Luckily, my mother bought only the best quality suspenders so the guardians of my modesty never failed me. A school mate, Elwood Albright, was not as lucky. His parents were too poor to buy suspenders, so Elwood's mother had to pin his shirttail to his britches. Every once in a while you'd hear a lot of yelling and commotion in the back of the class and you knew even without looking that one of Elwood's safety pins had suddenly come unhinged.

My childhood suspenders remind me of the Bible. The Bible is a suspender that holds up our faith. Without God's Word to guide us through life, we'd all be like five-year-olds cast adrift in a hostile kindergarten.

My father had another saying. "A tool for every purpose...," which translated as "I don't care how well you think it works, don't use the telephone book as a hammer." In many colleges and universities there is a course called something on the order of, "The Bible As Literature." But when you take Scripture and dissect it into its literary components and disregard the message, you defeat its purpose. It's like driving a nail with a phone book.

When you take the claw off the claw hammer to make it lighter, you defeat the purpose of the claw hammer. When you file the teeth off a ripsaw so no one will get cut, the ripsaw no longer works. Proper tools can be rendered useless by "improvements". God's Holy Word is the proper tool for Christians. But a person can grossly misuse the Tool by "improving" it.

For instance, you can remove all references to gender so that every character in Scripture -- including God Himself -- is referred to as an "it". You can twist its meaning around to make the Word sympathetic to your personal agenda. Or you can use Scripture as the tool God intended -- as an infallible, Divinely-inspired instruction manual for Christians.

Obviously, if I would have removed the spring from one of the alligator clips on my childhood suspenders, it would have weakened the whole affair and I would have yelled like Elwood when they inevitably gave way and belted me on the side of the head. Likewise, alter God's Word with worldly wisdom and you don't have to be a prophet to know what would happen.

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Ed Price spent 35 years in print and broadcast journalism. He is author of 15 books. After becoming an ordained minister he settled with his wife on a farm in the mountains of Southwest Virginia, to study God's word and to write. Ed and Patty are the parents of three girls, have one grandchild, and cater to the every whim of two spoiled cats.
© 2008 Ed Price - All rights reserved. Visit his website, The Loving Heart.

This column is used with permission.