Start With the Fundamentals
The authority of the Scriptures is a fundamental Truth for the kingdom of God. The King has spoken. His words say that all the Bible for all the people all the time in every place expresses “Who God Is” so we recognize Him when we know Him, “How God does stuff” so we recognize His Providence when He gets involved in history, and “What God expects and anticipates” as fulfillment of Law and Prophets.
Recognizing that the Creation Story is as vital as the Revelation of Jesus Christ, we can fill in the middle between with “The Eternal Purposes of the Father.” When we do, we always come back to the central theme of “God Became Man.”
Recognizing that when we diminish the Creation Story, we also diminish Jesus and the Ultimates revealed in the Revelation, we must take a bold stand against the entire spiritual conspiracy against Christ known now as the spirit of antichrist.
Recognizing that God through Holy Spirit incarnated Truth through human writers and languages, we maintain a three-pronged faith in the process: 1) We read the Bible knowing this is God’s Word; 2) We read a Bible without mistakes, with solutions for every “tricky” part that appears to call into question inerrancy; 3) We read the Bible knowing that God wrote it through inspiration and protected it through Providence so that we are reading what God wants the kingdom citizens to read as His Message to His people.
Recognizing that when God speaks, He speaks Eternal Truth, we read what God thinks, applied in a strategic process that produces a planned outcome, that God reveals what He is up to in history, so His people cooperate with Him in strategy and production. We can know what God is doing and how to work with Him through trust, shared passion, submission, and obedience to God and His strategic plan.
Contrary Thinking and Strategy
We are not ignorant of the existence, methods, and spiritual condition of God’s enemies. They produce “this present darkness” from a uniquely different kingdom of darkness, controlling the masses of humanity with lawlessness and rebellion against God’s thinking and strategy. His enemies are all answering to rulers, authorities, and cosmic dominators operating in the spiritual arena over and around the Earth, cast out of Heaven, but in operational mode since Eden.
So, the Bible is God’s Word, not a truth about the Truth, and the thinking of God coupled with the revelation of the strategy of God operates in opposition to, as a direct opposite of, and in a contrary spirit to the works of darkness. The Bible is systematic in thinking, responding to the presuppositions of God, but not exhaustive in revealing all that God thinks. The Bible reveals enough of what God thinks that we can think His thoughts and mature in a mindset that mines His presuppositions as ore dug from the deep places of the Earth.
The Bible is God’s Word. It does not contain God’s Word. It is God’s Word. This truth is not a cause to worship the Bible, but the God of the Bible. Worship of the Bible is as idolatrous as bowing to an image since the Bible is not a collection of Gnostic magic or a set of keys to unlock hidden knowledge. It is a revelation of God and how He does stuff so that we have God’s Word on “How Things Really Work in the Spirit.”
Revelation Pitfalls
Only when we begin and end with the Bible can we ascertain through the capacities of spirit what God says in the here and now, judge what we discern, hear, see, or experience in spiritual reality. We do not begin with any other revelation experience. We experience the Truth of the Bible as a starting point for experiencing spiritual reality.
We do not just believe in God without a Bible message to identify God, or we may believe in the wrong god and open our lives to the greatest deceptions of imposter impressions of God that are not God at all. We do not believe in a belief or system. We believe in facts recorded as history, accepted as reality, and fundamental to a mindset and world view consistent with God’s thinking and strategy.
We cannot reject the Creation Story and believe in the God of the Bible. We do not need to remove all the mystery from the Creation Story – and we cannot do so – because we are not Creators. We cannot remove all the mystery from Nature because we are not Creators. We cannot remove the mystery from humanity because we are not Creators.
When we attempt to do so, through theory and systems of thought, as numerous as the stars in the heavens above the Earth and the grains of sand on the seashores of thousands of coastlines, we end up in greater confusion. When we use these systems to govern our cultures, we become brute beasts and engage in dangerous, inhuman, and beastly activities that erase the line between animals and humans. We live as if the “How Things Really Work in the Spirit” aspect of the revelation has little bearing on the natural world.
The pitfalls of the idolatrous systems appear in the limitations they put upon the Bible as a whole, deemphasizing portions needed to fill in the complete mindset of God, and telling God who He is and how He does stuff.
For example, systematic thinking that infers or postulates cessationism has been used to explain away significant portions of the Bible. People read Jesus’ life and ministry but see no “How Things Really Work in the Spirit” for them because someone told them that once Jesus ascended to Heaven, He started doing things differently, fading out everything He set up and turning the church over to men. This system of thought empties the kingdom from the church and the church from the kingdom. This tells us all that no apostles and prophets function in the kingdom anymore. This tells us that miracles, signs, and wonders were something Jesus did that we do not do or expect to see done since the Bible was completed and Holy Spirit does not act like that anymore.
You will find nothing in the Bible to support these ideas. You will accept them at risk of telling Jesus to be quiet or just share His experiences as “God used to do stuff in that way but not anymore.” You read the Gospels and believe stuff happened like this in Jesus’ day, but now God does stuff the way people who design and define “church” want them done.
You will find that this very thinking opens the Bible to every error known to satan, turns the obvious upside down, and aids rebellious people in lawlessness, carrying a Bible to a showdown with God about His own Word!
This one system of thinking is but one of the many variations on a theme. The theme is that the Bible is incomplete without add-on features from brilliant experts. The more the experts talk, the less authority the Bible has on the lifestyle and culture of the Kingdom of God.
