![]() No victory without an irreconcilable war with your favorite sin. That is how it goes: No new life without death to the old man. The sword of the Spirit both destroyed and redeemed me. But by God’s grace, that is not what happened. Not squeamish about swords, I was ready to fall on the sword of the LGBTQ+ rights movement. The Bible’s judgments depend on God’s word being “sharper than any two-edged sword, piercing to the division of soul and of spirit, of joints and of marrow, and discerning the thoughts and intentions of the heart” (Hebrews 4:12). It did not occur to me until much later that the Bible is even more judgmental than I had initially anticipated, and that this is part of its very good news. ![]() It was, as they say, a match made in heaven. They were trying to befriend me with the gospel, and I was trying to learn everything I could from them to prove the Bible dangerous in the judgments that it makes about sin and sexuality. ![]() I also was reading under the guidance of people wiser than I - Ken and Floy Smith, pastor and pastor’s wife at the Syracuse Reformed Presbyterian Church. “The Bible restores the soul, comforts the afflicted, emboldens the weak, and corrects the sinner.” I let them have their say and I hold my tongue, at least for the first time that I read through a text. Books, to me, are potential friends, and I let them teach me. To me, it is common sense that the best way to clear your mind while reading anything of value is by spending hours in one sitting listening to the book that you hold in your hands. I didn’t have a sophisticated reason for reading the Bible this way. I embarked on the Bible with this model, reading whole books at a time. That means that my particular hermeneutical interest was in interpreting how the parts of a book make up its whole. I was what was called a “whole book” scholar. My field of specialty was nineteenth-century British literature. I was sure that this would be a slam dunk. I started reading the Bible not to prove it wrong, but to prove it harsh, mean, judgmental, misogynist, homophobic, and patriarchal. When I first encountered the Bible over two decades ago - as an unbelieving professor of English and women’s studies, happily partnered in a lesbian relationship - I immediately perceived the Bible as a threat to my life. This is the main difference between a believing saint and an unbelieving sinner: the believing saint knows that repentance is the threshold to God, and he cultivates the humility to seek the grace of repentance daily, if not hourly. Through the power of the Spirit, the word of God brings a Christian into the humble posture of repentance. from the inward work of the Holy Spirit bearing witness by and with the word in our hearts” (1.5). As the Westminster Confession of Faith states, we embrace the Bible’s “infallible truth and divine authority. Its truth restores the soul, comforts the afflicted, emboldens the weak, and corrects the sinner. The Bible gives us power, and it does so by imparting to us the same power that raised Jesus from the grave.Īnd the Bible is pure and true as well. For a Christian, the word of God is inextricable from our identity in and union with Christ. The word of God meets the needs of sinful men like nothing else can.
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