Today’s Reading: Numbers 3; Mark 11
Are you allowed to be wrong about God? What about your theology? Can you be wrong about how you interpret or think about the Bible?
The Jewish leaders - the chief priests, scribes, elders, Pharisees, etc. - had already made up their minds about Jesus. They knew what they were looking for in a Messiah, and Jesus wasn’t it. Yes, He met all the requirements, performed all the miracles, fulfilled the prophecies, etc., but what kind of evidence is that??? Just because he is healing people, casting out demons, and raising people from the dead doesn’t mean a thing! Why not? Because what He taught didn’t line up with their expectations. They were sure they knew what God wanted, and they were sure of their own self-earned righteousness, so when Jesus came along challenging their assumptions about God, their theology about Gentiles, their interpretations of various laws and passages, and their own self-righteousness, whatever He was, He wasn’t from God.
We see the hypocrisy of it at the end of Mark 11 when they confront Jesus about where He gets the authority to do all that He is doing. He responds with a question about John’s baptism which forces them to deal with the evidence. If John was a prophet of Yahweh and he was declaring Jesus to be the Messiah, then on what grounds can they really set aside all the other evidence they have seen in the life and miracles of Jesus? They aren’t willing to publicly declare John was not a prophet, but they also understand the implications of agreeing that his baptism came from God, so they just refuse to answer. They were like the kid that is about to lose a game so they get angry, flip the board, and stomp off declaring, “I didn’t loose! And no, I’m not angry because I was about to loose! I just got tired of playing!”
These Jewish leaders were so unwilling to consider that they might be wrong in their understanding that they are about to pull a mob together to have the Messiah killed (sorry for the spoiler if you didn’t know how that was going to go…).
But what about us? Are we allowed to be wrong?
Obviously there are things which are clearly taught and about which we cannot be wrong without being heretical. Things like the deity of Jesus, His death and resurrection, or salvation by faith alone apart from works. But what about other things?
This is something that has been on my mind because my own views and understandings have been challenged in a pretty significant way over the last couple years.
For me, this started with a couple things. As I would read the Bible, there were a few things that stood out to me as seemingly contradicting other things I had been taught about the Bible, theology, God, etc. They could mostly be explained away as “problem passages” when I asked about them, but I have never been too comfortable with that notion. If you haven’t heard the phrase before, it’s referring to passages that, in a plain sense reading of them, seem to contradict a given view or theological system. Generally people will give an explanation for how the passage could be understood under their view, but the more of these outliers you have to explain away, the more red flags that should throw that maybe there are some holes in your system. I think of it like the scientific method. If you do an experiment and mostly get the results you like, but there are a bunch of outliers in the data, you don’t just explain they away and ignore them, you step back and ask if there is a different hypothesis that explains all the data, not just some of it.
In looking for fuller answers, I came across a series of interviews and articles that kept pointing to Dr. Michael Heiser’s book The Unseen Realm. I honestly went into it skeptical, but every point he made was deeply rooted in scripture and scholarship, and he painted a much more cohesive picture of the Scriptures and unifying theology than I had previously had. I have since become convinced that the framework he lays out in that book is what the authors of the Scriptures understood as well, and that has had the effect of upending a number of beliefs and understandings that I have held over the years.
Overall, I feel like in the past couple years I have come to understand the Scriptures a lot better now than I did before, and I have been reading, studying, and teaching the Bible for coming up on 15 years now. That book, and other things I’ve read or studied since, didn’t change my understanding of the gospel, or really of any of those core tenants of the faith, but they did give me a more wholistic view of the Word that honestly gives me a much better and fuller understanding of the gospel, the atonement, etc. But to get to that place there were a number of things I had to have the humility to admit I was wrong about. There are passages I have misunderstood, there are aspects of theology that I have been mis-taught, there are ways I have thought about God and the spiritual world that simply aren’t biblical, but come more out of things like John Milton’s Paradise Lost and have just become truisms over time in the church.
I’m not writing this to say everyone needs to stop what they’re doing and go read The Unseen Realm (though you probably should, or at least Supernatural). I’m writing this because a lot of Christians, and I have been one (and probably still am to some extent, but I’m trying…), hold onto their views about God, the Bible, theology, etc. as though they were the gospel itself. They allow differences in understanding or interpretation to lead to fighting and division within the Body of Christ, rather than letting those differences lead to curiosity and discovery together.
I need the humility to be wrong. I can be wrong about a very important piece of theology, and if it’s not the gospel I was wrong about, then it’s okay I was wrong. I don’t want to be like the Jewish leaders who were so sure of their own theology and understanding that they weren’t even willing to consider they might be wrong when the Messiah they were waiting for was bopping them on the nose with the evidence.
I’m not entirely sure where I’m going with this post this morning, but I’m really glad God has knocked my pride down a couple pegs in this area because it has made the adventure of getting to know Him in His Word that much more exciting to realize how little I really know, and just how far there still is to go, and I want everyone reading this blog to know that same excitement and joy if you don’t already.
I think maybe my point is that God might have really good and exciting things for us, but they might be outside of our expectations. If we don’t want to be like the Jewish leaders and reject or miss those good and exciting things, we might need to be okay with finding out we have not been entirely right about something we have held dear.
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