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Meat And Bone
A recent article on www.abcnews.go.com was entitled, “Kristin Chenoweth: Christian and Gay Rights Supporter.” The article explains how she is comfortable talking about her Christian faith and her support for homosexual rights: “I read my Bible and I pray and all of that. I really do,” she told the gay-interest publication. “But at the same time, I don’t think being gay is a sin. Period.”
Chenoweth grew up in Oklahoma’s Bible belt and says that her grandmother is her inspiration. She describes a friend of hers growing up who was homosexual: “I asked my Grandma Chenoweth, ‘How can it be that he’s going to hell? I just don’t think that correct.’ And she said, ‘Well, Kris, I read the Bible like I eat fish: I take the meat, and it serves me well, but I don’t choke on the bone.’”
(You can read the entire article at http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/entertainment/2011/09/kristin-chenoweth-christian-and-gay-rights-supporter/)
It seems that we live in a day when people of all walks of life—even people in the Bible Belt—take what they like out of the Bible and toss out what they don’t like. We like words such as “The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want,” but stop up our ears when we hear other words from the Bible such as “Repent!” Grandmother Chenoweth’s words, “I read the Bible like I eat fish: I take the meat, and it serves me well, but I don’t choke on the bone” may sound good and sensible until you look a little closer.
The real problem is that we should never “read the Bible like” we eat anything. We should read it as God’s Word. And to say that we can toss out what we consider to be “bone” while swallowing what we consider to be “meat” is problematic, because who determines what is “meat” or “bone”?
Suppose I like that new vehicle you just bought, and I decide I don’t like it that the Bible says I’m not supposed to steal. Is that a bone that I can toss out? Or when the Bible tells me that I am to love my enemies—do I choke on that one?
Or do I see that ALL of God’s Word is exactly that—His Word? Do I recognize the Bible as being 100% God’s Word to us today? If I don’t, then the entirety of God’s Word is in question, because who decides which is true and which is not? I don’t have that right. You don’t have that right. Nor does anyone else we know. We either accept all of it as truth—“meat”—or none of it.
A. W. Tozer addressed this once by saying, “If you would follow on to know the Lord, come at once to the open Bible expecting it to speak to you. Do not come with the notion that it is a thing which you may push around at your convenience.”
In this day of darkness, let us as faithful believers in Christ not be guilty of dissecting God’s Word and throwing out any part of it that makes us uncomfortable or with which we happen to disagree. Let us stand firmly under the banner which proclaims without apology that the Bible is God’s Holy Word—even the parts we don’t like. If the Bible calls it sin, then it's sin. Regardless of what some celebrity says.
--Rocky Henriques, www.timothyreport.com
