Not So Famous…

I’ve got a friend who is going through an extended estrangement from his wife.  In all honesty, without the miraculous work of the Lord in regenerating her heart, it’s going to be a divorce.  At this point, it’s pretty clear to me that it’s one of the 2 cases where divorce is permitted in the Bible.  In one case, one or both of the married people has to have committed adultery.  In the other, if the unbeliever wishes to depart, the believer is commanded to let them go.  Based on what she’s said, it’s clear that she hates the Word of God and hates the fact that God has commanded us to live in a certain manner.  Not as a means for our salvation, but as a response to what He has done for us.

Something specifically that she has been saying lately is that the Bible does not possess facts; that the Bible is not authoritative.  Normally, I would simply say, “Well, you’re not a Christian”, since all we know of Christ as a redeemer comes from the Bible.  If you remove the Bible…well…at best you’re simply a theist.  Someone who believes in a god or gods.  You can assent to the fact that Christ existed, a fact attested by numerous secular scholars.  You can assent to the fact that Christ died on the cross, which is another one of those secular facts.  But apart from the Word of God, you can know nothing about Christ dying on the cross to save His people from their sins.  (You might be able to infer the saving part, since Jesus means “God Saves”, but nothing about how that saving was accomplished.)

However, she continues to insist that she is a Christian.  She doesn’t know what the Bible teaches, apparently believing what her grandmother said when she insisted that “judge not, lest ye be judged” was one of the 10 Commandments.  She apparently doesn’t even know that the Bible contains the Old Testament, which was adopted as Christian canon from the Tanakh, or the holy scripture of Judaism.  She insists that she’s going to study religion, but won’t be told what to believe, preferring to find facts that one cannot find in the Bible. In the same paragraph, she states that Judaism is the first recorded religion and makes the most sense to her.  How can she discount the Bible, but then claim that Judaism makes the most sense? (Jews would be somewhat displeased to find that Judaism makes sense to her, who claims that Christ died for her sins.  I don’t think she knows this either.)

How can someone divorce the Scriptures from Christianity, and still claim to own Christ as their savior?  It makes less than no sense to us, to be honest.  I don’t know if she’s just saying the first thing that comes into her mind or what.  I’m not really looking for answers, though if someone has a plausible method for tossing the Bible and yet still believing that Christ died for them, I’d be interested in hearing it. I am not sure why I’m writing this except to say that she needs prayer.

She thinks that living by a “moral code” is enough to be a Christian.  She looks around and sees people living their lives like the Bible doesn’t matter, and then thinks that because so many people are doing it, it must be ok.  She gets angry when we quote Scripture to her, claiming that this is just our interpretation, yet provides no counter argument to “our interpretation”, preferring simply to ignore the Word of God.  She thinks that divorce is permissible (and might even be laudable) in cases where one or more people are unhappy in the relationship, yet she has not yet filed.  When presented with the allowable instances for divorce from Scripture, she ignores them, as usual, and insists that she can’t do something that won’t make her happy.  She ignores God entirely when we tell her that if we will obey Him, He will bless the both of them, preferring to say that our church is cult-like, and that we are insane for attempting to live holy lives.

She really needs prayer, but tells us that we need prayer.  (We agree…we need prayer….we’ve told her that, but when my friend is humble, she ignores his words again.)  Please pray that the Lord would convict her (and all of us) of our manifold sins.  That He would draw her to Him, and that she would repent of her disobedience to God.