Abusing the Scripture

The more I listen to people talk about being Christian, and what is the Christian thing to do, and all about Christian values, the more I am convinced that there are a number of different ways to abuse the Scriptures. The first way that many people who are speaking publicly about being Christian abuse the scriptures are to never read them. Those are the Christians who claim we ought to follow Christian family values as defined in the Scriptures, but they do not say whether we ought to follow Abraham and his two wives and two concubines, David and Solomon with their many wives, Jesus who was single, and Paul who says he thinks it would really be better not to marry. There are the Christians like Glenn Beck who claims that Christians ought to avoid “social justice” and thereby given evidence of never having read the prophets, never having read Jesus, and never having read James where the constant focus is on caring for the widow, the poor, the stranger and the orphans. If you are going to claim to be a Bible believing Christian you ought,at least, to read the Bible.
The second way many Christians abuse the Bible is to read just the words. It is like pretending to know a song when all you have are the words. You do not get to feel the emotions of a song until you hear the music. If you look at a painting and all you see are colors, you miss the whole experience. You cannot get the power, the joy, the message of the Bible if are you have are the words on the page. You have to listen to the agony of the psalmist. You have to hear the courage of Jeremiah. You need to confront the anger of Paul when he denounces the hypocrites in Galatia. It is like reading satire without realizing it is satire. It is watching a sit com on TV. Without the sound. You have to listen to the whole story and catch the mood, the emotions, and the human interaction.
The third way to abuse the Scriptures is used by most of us. It is to only listen to the few passages we like. We have our only little set of verses that appeal to us and we seldom range outside those verses. This canon within the canon is a very common method of Scripture abuse among the liberal Christians. The work of taking the Scriptures seriously is really very hard work. We all ought to try it some time.