"Teaching God's Word to God's World"
2766 Airport Road, Peru, Indiana 46970, (765) 472-4111
We Christians believe in the goodness, wisdom, and justice of God.
We believe God is good enough to reveal His will, wise enough to preserve what He has revealed, and just enough to reveal plainly what He would have us to do or not do.
We, therefore, reject the concepts that would have His revealed will unknowable due to untrustworthy transmission of the text or unintelligible in content. We reject the idea that His will is to be subjectively interpreted so that it means one thing to one person and something entirely different to another. We reject the ideas that the Bible only contains the mind of God. To us the Scriptures are the Word of God.
We believe God is too good to not speak plainly to us, too wise not to make it understandable, and too just to allow it to have become unintelligible to those who seek to understand it.
We believe the difficulty is not in untrustworthy translations, but an untrustworthy interpretation of what He has said. Furthermore, we believe the difficulty is not in the fact that it is difficult to understand, but rather an unwillingness to believe what He has revealed. We believe subjectivism is the problem of interpreters, not the cure. We should accept what He has written rather than what we can make it say.
Since His thoughts are not my thoughts, and my ways are not His ways, I should expect His revealed will to run contrary to my subjective feelings. To expect His revealed will to agree with my “natural, gut feeling,” which admittedly has been defiled by sin, deceived by Satan, and educated by a world opposed to God, is nothing short of ludicrous.
We Christians believe that “secret things” belong to God,
but the things He has revealed, belong unto us and our children. He has revealed His law so that we can do
them. Deuteronomy 29:29, “The
secret [things belong] unto the LORD our God:
but those [things which are] revealed [belong] unto us and to our
children for ever, that [we] may do all the words of this law.”
We Christians think it the height of foolishness to expect to find the Bible revealing what is believed by a sin-cursed world and a Hell-bent society. Even when one reads a gifted and brilliant author, he expects to have his thinking challenged and enlightened. Shall not the Judge of the earth reveal true judgments? Shall not the King of all the earth give righteous edicts? Since Jesus is the Way, He will show the Way. Since He is the Truth, He will reveal the Truth. Since He is the Life, His Word will give Life. We expect what He reveals to be contrary to man’s religions and philosophies. The world through its wisdom knows not God. That which is “so-called” science is often nothing but a fool’s educated guess. Since these theories do not begin with the fear of the Lord, which is the beginning of wisdom, they are mere superstitions.
To us, then, God is too good to keep silent, too wise not to speak clearly so as to enlighten and not confuse us, and too just to allow His revealed will to be the problem rather than the cure for a confused and dying world.