21 ¶ My son, fear thou the LORD and the king: and meddle not with them that are given to change: 22 For their calamity shall rise suddenly; and who knoweth the ruin of them both?
Both Henry and Gill put this in a political perspective having to do with betrayal and disloyalty and treason. From a purely physical standpoint you could certainly express it in this way. But, what about a spiritual application for Christians? At the time the New Testament was written there were no Christian kings and Christians were told to obey the laws of the land in which they lived and to not bring shame on the cause of Christ. There are more pressing things to consider than conservative and liberal issues and what kind of change the current President may or may not have brought to the White House.
Our king is God Almighty, the Creator of the universe, who is composed of three parts, as we are; the Spirit, which is the Holy Spirit, the soul, which is God the Father, and the body, which is God the Son, the Lord Jesus Christ, all three part of one but in God’s case only capable of acting independently and yet in perfect harmony with each other. We, as well, are composed of body, soul, and spirit but if ours are separated we physically die.
Our Lord, who is our king, gave us His words in book form to speak to us through and to enlighten and edify us with and by reading it each day, hearing it preached, and studying it we grow as His people. The Bible is so important to the faith of many that the famous and controversial Anglican, William Chillingsworth, said “I am fully assured that God does not, and therefore that men ought not to require any more of any man than this, to believe the Scripture to be God’s word, to endeavor to find the true sense of it, and to live according to it.”
He also wrote the famous line about the Protestant religion, which is the physical expression of the Protestant faith, “The Bible, the whole Bible, and nothing but the Bible, is the religion of Protestants.”
(as reported on page 363 of John Fletcher Hurst’s 1892 book, Short History of the Christian Church.)
But, in spite of 2,000 years of the majority of Christians using and believing in what modern scholars call the Byzantine line of Bible manuscripts and versions, in spite of the common usage among Christians of many important verses relating to doctrine, and in spite of the preponderance of historical and Biblical documentation underscoring the inspiration of God in both copies and translations of the true line of Bible manuscripts there are many today who would change God’s word.
These dividers and malcontents are willfully ignorant of how the Bible is divided, how it’s words are self defining, how it is designed to be read and understood, and how the Holy Spirit uses it to talk to the believer and to change his or her life. They view the Bible as merely an old book that “contains” God’s word but not necessarily IS God’s word, and only view the validity of a version or translation based on available manuscript evidence alone rather than looking at the larger picture of the writings of the early church “fathers” and the documents used by the churches of God throughout history. They attempt to describe what the Bible in one limited way just as a person might try to describe an elephant by describing only its tail.
We are not to meddle with them. Their own calamity is at hand. Just as those people in the realm of politics who are given to change, not for a specific reason such as correcting an inequity or an injustice, but simply for the point of their addiction to change, often come to ruin and drag others down with them, these Bible correctors have reduced the power and the value of the Bible, God’s words, to the level of a book of good advice and moral example.
Just as the young person is warned in these Proverbs written under the dispensation of the Law given to Moses about worldly politics in God’s physical kingdom on earth not to follow those who speak rebellion and treason, we must warn Christians to not allow so called scholars, with an agenda, to take the Bible that God has given them away from them.
The essence of Modernism is that all things modern are superior to all things of the past, that the past has nothing to offer us but a bad example. The essence of Modernism is to believe that if we have done it now, it is better than something our forefathers did in the past. And as Paul was taken to Rome to his death by two ships of Alexandria, Egypt so Christianity is being taken to its demise by two manuscripts of Alexandria, Egypt’s apostasy, the Codices Vaticanus and Sinaiticus, two among a small minority of around 50 manuscripts (out of thousands) that support the modern Bible versions in their addiction to changing the traditional text.
The Bible that we use is the fountain of our knowledge and understanding of God’s will. The Bibles that they use are the excuses for their own opinions and worldly, humanistic drivel that passes for sermons, creeds, and purpose led psychological innovations in the church. When the change agents get up in front of a church and announce they are going to speak from God’s error free word, they do not mean the one they have in their hands and they have no direct knowledge of the one they are referring to. Don’t meddle with them. Their opinions will be pure humanism and they will set up two conflicting authorities in Bibles that say different things and then they will offer to be the arbiter between those two opinions. The change agents of modern Christianity, in pulpits across the nation, mean to do what Satan has been unable to do for two thousand years, to take your Bible away from you, right out of your hands, and to render you totally dependent on them and their opinions to learn the things of God.
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