You're a Fool If You Try to Live by the Bible - Part 1

Also available in video format on YouTube Channel - E R Potter Podcasts Captions in English and Portuguese

“God’s Word for Our World” I chose that phrase as the generic title for my podcasts for a reason. God communicates with Man, and we, His creation, need to know what He has said. For 65 years my only real purpose in life has been to get people to understand and follow the Bible. I’ve picked cucumbers and worked in the US Consular Services; I’ve surveyed land, and translated correspondence from the President of Portugal. All of these were sideline jobs to support our church-planting missionary work overseas for 45 years. These podcasts are evidence that making God’s Word known is still the driving force in my life.

This will sound like I’m contradicting myself when I say with all confidence, “You’re a fool to try to follow the Bible”. Here is why I say the world is full of fools trying to follow the Bible.

1.           You’re a fool if you admire the Bible for the wrong reason. God gave the Bible to reveal Himself to mankind, and not as a classic work of ancient literature to be admired for its linguistic beauty. More commonly, the book has its own place in many homes…on the coffee table in the living room. Besides its pages filled in with genealogical information on the family tree going back many generations, the Family Bible is often richly illustrated with Biblical scenes painted by famous artists. As an ancient book, the Bible is revered. In Israel, we saw portions of the Dead Sea Scrolls over 2000 years old; in Dublin, a page of a 2nd-century Greek papyrus manuscript of Paul’s 1st letter to the Corinthians; in Mainz, Germany, there’s a Gutenberg Bible that was printed almost 600 years ago. All these Bibles and manuscripts are placed in air-tight, temperature-controlled cases with dimmed lighting. That’s not what God means when he tells us to keep His Word. He wants us to keep His word in our hearts and minds.

The Bible is not meant to be admired like a trophy from a moose hunt hung on the wall of the den; it’s not a religious icon to be set on a shelf. A member of our church once asked if the Portuguese Bible I used for the first 25 or 30 years could be put in a special commemorative display. Its pages are dog-eared, discolored from decades of fingerprints. Some of the pages barely stay in the binding so I eventually had to replace it with a new Bible. He felt that notes I made in the margin as I learned Portuguese and passages I underlined would be a valuable historical testimony to our work in founding the Funchal Baptist Church. It saddened me that he missed the whole point of the Bible. It is only truly valuable when its words are assimilated into the daily lives of its readers. If we sit at a banquet and only watch others eat, we will go away hungry. So many starve spiritually by thinking their admiration for what others consume will satisfy their hunger.

            For many scholars, the Bible is a collection of spiritual crossword puzzles to be solved, and it has no more effect on them personally than the solving of a Rubik cube. It’s a spiritual Sudoku. The Bible is not a set of complex assembly instructions like those that come with a model airplane kit. Owning a first-edition book by a famous author brings a certain satisfaction, but it’s not the same as knowing the author himself. The Bible is precious, but only if we have a close relationship with its Author. Awed by nature, from the microscopic to the cosmic, people too often end up worshiping the Creation instead of the Creator. “[They]changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed for ever.”  Romans 1.25 KJV

Now God has revealed these things to us by the Spirit, for…no one knows the thoughts of God except the Spirit of God. 12Now we have received …the Spirit who comes from God, so that we may understand what has been freely given to us by God. 13We also speak these things, …in [words] taught by the Spirit, explaining spiritual things to spiritual people. 14But the unbeliever does not welcome what comes from God’s Spirit, because it is foolishness to him; he is not able to understand it since it is evaluated spiritually.

Without the intervention of the Holy Spirit, such admiration for the Bible amounts to “Bibliolatry”. All the attention goes to what is written, not the One who wrote it. We worship the writing, not the Writer; we admire a masterpiece, without ever knowing the artist; the scale of a monumental building overwhelms us, but we know nothing of the architect. Even we preachers can be guilty of emphasizing the letter of the text to the point we neglect the purpose for it, which is to reveal the nature of the Person who gave it. We concentrate on the gift and ignore the Giver.

I present A. J. Jacobs as the quintessential example of one who tried to follow the Bible for the wrong reason. He’s a journalist and author, and as a Jew living in New York, he wrote a book, The Year of Living Biblically – One Man’s Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible. He has written several books in a style called immersive journalism, and this was an angle he could use for another book. In 2006 he came up with the idea of living one year trying to follow the Bible as literally as possible. The book he published tells how he tried to observe all the rules of the Bible. Not wearing clothes made of blended fibers, for example. As daunting a challenge as that would be in today’s world, the foolishness of the whole project was illustrated for me in the way he “fulfilled” the Biblical command to stone an adulterous woman. He figured almost any woman he passed on the street in New York City would very likely have committed adultery, so he picked up a miniscule piece of gravel off the sidewalk and flipped it at a woman as she passed by him.

            I read the book in Portuguese first and later in English here in the US. The book is entertaining, precisely because of the foolish situations he found himself in. It is revealing and sad because it represents the ultimate outcome of trying to follow the Word of God without even believing God exists. A secular Jew, Jacobs is an atheist. He was interested in the letter of the Bible only; the life-giving Spirit of its Author was absent.

2.     You’re a fool if you try to use God’s own Word against Him.

Imagine you’re suddenly faced with an assailant who threatens you with a sword or dagger. Would you just walk up and grab the blade, take it away from him and turn it on him? Not very smart, you’d say. What a foolish move!

It is infinitely more foolish to take the Bible, God’s Word, which is the sword of the Spirit and sharper than any two-edged sword, and handle it flippantly or carelessly. For secular Jews, like Jacobs, the Biblical rules and requirements are merely ethnic traditions handed down to preserve the Jewish identity. Religion, much less spirituality, has nothing to do with these requirements. His project makes light of the Word of a God he doesn’t really believe exists. Psalm 14.1 says, “The fool has said in his heart, there is no God.”

              That definition of a fool applies to another author l read recently. Bart D. Ehrman wrote Armageddon, what the Bible really says about the end, (Simon & Schuster, 2023). Ehrman and Jacobs come from very different backgrounds. Jacobs is a secular Jew; Ehrman was a born-again evangelical who studied at Moody Bible Institute. He went on to study Biblical languages to the point he stopped believing in the Bible at all. He has become an agnostic atheist. Ehrman, at least, makes no claim to follow anything In the Bible. For him, it is nothing more than human literature. I have more to say about that book in Part II. Both men treat the Bible with disdain, foolishly grabbing God’s sword and using it carelessly.

3.     You’re foolish if you think you can pick and choose which parts of God’s Word to follow.

Many people take a more moderate view and admit that the Bible has many good things to say. They believe there’s a lot of truth to what’s in it, but they can’t accept everything in the Bible as true. They’re left with the option of deciding what parts are true. The Bible becomes a subjective, ever-changing book. It’s true, but only to the extent each person believes in it. What’s true for you is not necessarily true for me.

              The Bible is truth itself, the hardcopy print edition of Truth embodied in Jesus, Who said, “I am the way the truth and the life,” Jesus doesn’t offer a Delicatessen Discipleship, where His followers get to pick what they want from the Word of God and push the less palatable “veggies” to the side.  

4.     You’re a fool if you approach the Word of God, even with the best intentions, and try to follow it by your own understanding and power. Even if you’re not like A. J. Jacobs, who undertook the project for essentially materialistic reasons (he says he did learn a lot about himself and the world around him in the process), you are still on a fool’s errand if you do it with the wrong mindset.

              Who hasn’t heard of The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis? The very title raises an alarm for me. In the 600 years since it was written, it has been considered a handbook for the spiritual life. Reviews I’ve read indicate that the title is accurate. Readers are told that the secret of a truly spiritual life is to imitate Christ, which sounds eerily similar to the WWJD (What Would Jesus Do?) movement of our days. Obviously, Jesus’s life and ministry are full of examples for us to bear in mind, but He didn’t come to put on a demonstration on how to live a Godly life; He came to be our life. Paul wrote, “I have been crucified with Christ 20and I no longer live, but Christ lives in me. The life I now live in the body, I live by faith in the Son of God.” Galatians 2:19-20  The only way we can live the way the Bible shows us is to die the way the Bible commands us. Only Christ can live the Christian life, and by dying to self, we must let Him live His life in us. Unless we are born again and the Spirit of God dwells in us, we cannot live a Christian life. It is foolishness to attempt to imitate Christ. I can’t even imitate my wife’s piano playing. That takes a skill I don’t have; living Biblically takes having a life different from the one we have ours by nature. Christ gives us His life that as a gift.

If you have taken the time to listen thus far, I ask you to think about how you approach the Word of God. Do you have the proper motivation? A love for God and the desire to please Him. Do you have the power needed to live Biblically? Does the Holy Spirit live in you? If you have not been born again by faith in Jesus Christ, any attempt to live according to the Bible will fail. As Paul wrote, “The letter [of God’s word] kills but the Spirit gives life.” 2 Cor. 3.6

                          One of my favorite verses is Hosea 6.3.  The prophet said, “Let us [get to] know God, let us pursue the knowledge of God.” In Part II, I talk about how born-again Christians can easily be fooled in the way they follow the Bible.