One of our Core Values at Courage Church is “conversation” - we believe that there will ALWAYS be more to learn, and much of what we learn is done through conversations with others. This sermon is meant to be a springboard to thousands of conversations about the most important book in the history of the world.
In the age of google, anyone can simply google “contradictions in the Bible” and they get a whole list. They can search “Bible verses your mom hopes that you never see” and they will get a list of verses that, when read in isolation and with no understanding of its context, make God sound awful, even evil.
Where most of us know that this is not the case, the reality is that we are losing the next generation to the Bible, because they are not willing to accept the way that we brush off or shut down their hard questions, and the truth is, they shouldn’t. We need to do better.
Pastor Shane Willard lays out, in one of the most practical yet engaging messages that you will ever hear, some ways that we can better understand the Bible, which will lead to ways of better talking about the Bible that actually make it more beautiful.
Before watching this important sermon, prepare in advance to be challenged in ways that are uncomfortable to how you may have grown up learning about the Bible. And remember, we value conversations. This message was created not to give us all of the answers, but to get us thinking and talking about the Bible differently.
Many conversations have been sparked by this teaching already, and we hope that you will join in on it as we wrestle with why the Bible says what it does, and how it still has the power to change everything even today.
“sermons are not meant to be agreed with, sermons are meant to be wrestled with.”
series: Problems with the Bible
title: The Bible (inspired & inerrant)
teacher: Shane Willard
date: October 16, 2018
Why would God tell Abraham to kill his own son? And why would Abraham be so quick to say yes?
And why does the Psalmist pronounce a blessing on whoever bashes children’s heads against the rocks?
and what is up with the book of Job?
What kind of a God would give Satan permission to kill a faithful man’s entire family? Is God allowed to be random? Sometimes protecting people and other times allowing Satan to destroy them? And if He is, then why would we trust a God who is that random?
There are key verses throughout the Bible that atheists and others who attack the Bible love to point out to in order to ask the question: Even if God does exist, why would you want to serve a God like that? Another thing that they point out is the way that Pastors tend to skip over those verses when they are teaching, because they are unexplainable and would raise too many questions.
The problem with this is that it paints a picture, fairly, saying that the church manipulates certain parts of the Bible to say what they want it to say, while ignoring the parts that seem to contradict what we want it to say.
But we should not avoid the difficult passages, because even the passages that seem the most awful, when read in context actually shows us that God is not evil, He is on our side, and even though in our culture some of the things that the Bible says may seem awful, when read in accordance with its cultural context, we find that God’s people are the ones taking the largest leaps forward in all of human history for human rights.
You can’t read a poem like it is history.
You can’t read history (something that happened) as if it is a law.
People have problems with the Bible, because they don’t know how to read the Bible.
