Proverbs
24:21 ¶ 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 or mind, which
is the Holy Ghost, the soul, which is God the Father, and the body, which is the
Son of God, 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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