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Some years ago10 I was in a store where they were putting on a kind of trade show for major home improvement supplies such as windows, flooring, and so on. I needed windows, so I stopped at the booth of a seller of windows. The salesman bragged that his windows used unbreakable tempered glass—the same kind of glass used for car side windows. He handed me a glass sample and challenged me to break it. It was attached at a corner by a chain to a whole bundle of samples. Keeping the samples on the chain was mistake number one; it invited people to hit the opposite corner. Mistake number two: he did not know to whom he had just handed a challenge. That piece of glass was doomed even if the aftermath was a crater in the concrete floor. I slammed the corner opposite the chain on the concrete floor, and the glass exploded into the little “balls” typical of broken tempered glass and they were everywhere. Flabbergasted, he put a whole window on the floor and said, “Watch this.” Famous last words and mistake number three: he stepped on it. CRUNCH! It was ordinary fragile window glass. I gave him some sizes to bid on, but for some odd reason, I never heard from him again.
Unlike regular glass, tempered glass cannot be cut or drilled. It will always be in the shape in which it was manufactured until it is broken. Sometimes people who are in a car wreck find their doors jammed shut, so they try to break a window to escape. But usually the tempered glass is too strong for them. However, tempered glass has a weakness. If you put a lot of force on a small area, such as the corner of that hapless salesman’s sample, it takes far less force to break it, and when it breaks, the whole thing shatters into small pieces. It is truly a case of all or nothing. It is for this reason rescue responders sometimes carry an automatic center punch with which to break tempered glass windows. This is a tool normally used for making small dents in steel or other metal. It puts a lot of force on a small area, so it can break tempered glass. Any Framework Hypothesis is an automatic center punch against the Holy Bible.
To speak more exactly, the Word of God is eternal, invincible, and unyielding against all the forces of Hell, nuclear weapons, and exploding stars. But in a real sense our relationship with the Holy Bible is all or nothing, just like tempered glass. It is super strong and can keep us safe on one side while Hell is on the other side of the window. But if we allow any lies to replace faith in Christ’s Word at any point, that protective window can shatter. It is like this: if we cannot trust God to tell a straight and true story in the simple narrative of Genesis chapters 1 and 2, how do we know which other parts of the Holy Bible we can trust? How do we know whether we can trust Him when He says, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life” (John 3:16), or “For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God, not a result of works, so that no one may boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them” (Ephesians 2:8–10)? In other words, if God is either in error or is lying in one thing, how do we trust Him in other things? But, of course, God cannot lie and knows all things perfectly. “God is not man, that he should lie, or a son of man, that he should change his mind. Has he said, and will he not do it? Or has he spoken, and will he not fulfill it?” (Numbers 23:19). “And no creature is hidden from his sight, but all are naked and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Hebrews 4:13). “Oh, the depth of the riches and wisdom and knowledge of God! How unsearchable are his judgments and how inscrutable his ways! For who has known the mind of the Lord, or who has been his counselor?” (Romans 11:33–34). If we refuse to trust Him in any one thing, we now have to pick and choose from the Bible using our own feeble wisdom and deceitful hearts. “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” (Jeremiah 17:9). We can no longer forcefully say, “God said it. That settles it.” The effects may not be immediately felt or visible, but the rot, corrosion, and gangrene silently begin. If you have been convicted by your conscience, remember that God is full of grace and mercy: “Just so, I tell you, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance” (Luke 15:7). We must be careful to realize that, while it is quite acceptable to form doctrinal statements or paradigms based upon our study of the Scriptures, we must not take a simple narrative and twist it out of shape from what God intended to say in order to either suit our fancy or put a Band-aid over our lack of faith in God’s Word.
A subtler problem is that, once a believer is tricked into disbelieving one part of the Bible by means of some sort of clever argument, his or her relationship to God’s Word is corroded and corrupted. The believer comes to lack confidence in his or her ability to read and comprehend Scripture accurately, and it thus becomes easier to rationalize away or ignore certain teachings. In the first case above, it is trust in Scripture that Satan attacks; in this second case, it is the believer’s confidence in his or her own ability to accurately read and interpret the Scriptures that the devil is attacking.11
10My stories are true in the main, but are from senior memory, and in some cases I had to guess to fill in forgotten details or change details to protect confidentiality and so on.
11It is worth noting that there are many other issues in our day where the devil and his henchmen are seeking to hand believers an automatic center punch and get them to use it against the precious resource of God’s Word as applied to our lives.
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