Word for Word

Christian Post reported on Monday that a recent poll by Gallup revealed that only 30% (roughly) of all Americans believe that the Bible is literally true. Part of me leaps for joy as I honestly thought the numbers were unfortunately slimmer. Yet, part of me is saddened knowing that their study shows a decline in churches to believe the Word as true.

According to the survey, about 3 out of 10 Americans continue to profess belief in a literal Bible today, which accounts a 10 percent drop over the past three decades. More than 1,000 adults were asked to describe their view about the Bible with 28 percent responding that the Bible is the "actual Word of God and is to be taken literally."

Poll results saw a 45 to 49 percent increase among those who said the Bible is the inspired Word of God but not everything in it should be taken literally. However, the survey also recorded a larger increase of Americans who said the Bible is an ancient book of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by man (13 to 19 percent).

On another article I found that they recently discovered a rare version of the Bible that was commanded written by none other than Adolf Hitler.

In May 1939, on the Furher’s command, a theological institute was founded in Eisenach with the purpose of contributing to “dejewification”. Its employees edited biblical texts, removing non-Aryan passages. Dozens of works printed by the institute were published in over 100 thousand copies of the new Holy Scripture. It was assumed that this work would become a standard household book amongst Germans.

The article goes on to say that the Nazi Bible includes two extra commandments (though all the commandments have been redone) and states that Jesus was crucified after a war with the Jews. Now that is what I call messing up the Word of God.

So why did I group these together? There first was simply a passive laziness with the Bible. It shows that people in general are being indoctrinated to believe that only parts of the Bible can be believed and that those parts are not the fundamentals that Christians of the past have been taught to believe.

The flipside is to show how someone tried to force the Bible to read other than it does. They tried to not just translate it differently but rewrite it.

A modern parable was once spoken at my church about a woman who sat in the front row of her church every Sunday. When the congregation got a new pastor they found that he mentioned weekly something in the Bible that shouldn't be taken literally or didn't apply to our lives in the modern world. So each Sunday this woman would read the scripture the Pastor mentioned and rip out the page if the Pastor said it didn't apply to her. After the course of a few years the woman found that she had only a couple handfuls of pages left in her once beautiful Bible.

It comes back down to taking a stand. Setting a line in the sand that can not be crossed. The Bible is the infallible Word of God or it isn't. Whether we choose to take parts of it as fable or whether we purposefully try to rewrite what we are actually doing is saying that I don't believe what it says and I'm not going to listen to it.

Will you believe that our God is infallible and so too His Word or will you believe that the Bible is not the Word of God? I would like you to choose the former and regretfully accept the latter but please don't try to meet me half way.

Links
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Christian Post article
Article on Hitler