On Playing the God Card

CONSECRATE Wake up, sleeper, rise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you.  Jesus, I belong to you. I lift up my heart to you. I set my mind on you. I fix my eyes on you. I offer my body to you as a living sacrifice. Jesus, we belong to you.  Praying in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, amen.  HEAR 1 John 5:9–10 (NIV) We accept human testimony, but God’s testimony is greater because it is the testimony of God, which he has given about his Son. Whoever believes in the Son of God accepts this testimony. Whoever does not believe God has made him out to be a liar, because they have not believed the testimony God has given about his Son. CONSIDER It seems strange to put it this way, but in today’s text, as John moves through his closing argument, he’s making a move that requires extreme care. John plays the God card. Sure, he’s done it throughout his address in this sermonic letter, but he brings it hard here in the close. In making his case, John all at once has it much easier than we do, and yet much harder. It’s easier because John is an eyewitness. All that John speaks of is recent history. People are still meeting at the empty tomb in Jerusalem. The world is being turned upside down by the gospel. It’s harder because the New Testament wasn’t the New Testament yet. John and others were writing what would later become the New Testament. Nobody’s handing out Gideon’s pocket New Testaments with the Psalms on the street corner. Sure, there are all sorts of credible human witnesses. Then again, these false teachers are also making a human witness to the contrary. While Paul writes 1 Corinthians, a host of other teachers are writing “2 Opinions.” It’s why from the get-go John has been careful to say, “That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (1 John 1:1). We aren’t dealing with a “John told Paul to tell Timothy that Jesus was raised from the dead.” In our New Testament, we have the direct evidence. The New Testament we hold in our hands today is “God’s testimony,” as John phrases it in today’s text. It was written by the eyewitnesses. Have you noticed that John never blames unbelievers? Unbelievers are not the problem. The problem is those who believe a distorted or errant version of the truth. When it comes to the bona fide Christian faith, people aren’t typically misled by unbelievers. They are misled by so-called Bible teachers who don’t believe the whole truth and by self-styled Christian leaders who claim to treasure Scripture yet interpret the Scriptures to mean something they have never remotely meant before. Here’s the grave danger: false teachers readily play the God card under the pretense that the Holy Spirit is revealing new truth and new doctrine, which effectively translates into a form of new Scripture, and they place it on the same level as the Old and New Testaments of the Bible as we know it. They claim that the writers of the New Testament were doing in their day the same thing that these new teachers are doing now: interpreting an ancient text according to the new revelation of the Holy Spirit. In other words, as the apostles were interpreting the Old Testament, these new “prophets” are now interpreting the New Testament. According to their hermeneutic (method of biblical interpretation), the Holy Spirit can reveal new truth that contradicts Scripture. Do you see the problem with this? History is littered with these kinds of teachers. In their wake follow wave on wave of well-meaning people shipwrecked in their faith on the shoals of heresies and half-truths, bailing water from their boats with broken buckets. Here’s what I would like to say about that. Their testimony is human testimony. It is not God’s testimony. Be careful when people start playing the God card in ways that contravene God’s testimony as we have it in the Bible. In fact, because of the Holy Spirit–inspired way John and the other writers of the New Testament so judiciously played the God card, we don’t have to. We can simply stand on the testimony, and stand we must—not with our gospel guns raised to shoot but, as humble lovers of the truth, ready to quietly serve or boldly speak up as the calling of faith requires. False teachers can fairly be called enemies of the gospel. Even though Jesus demands that we love our enemies as ourselves, he won’t give false teachers a pass. We can’t give them a pass either; rather, we must challenge them by speaking the truth in love. Today’s verses remind me of the way Paul put it when writing to the Ephesian church, a church in the throes of false teaching: Then we will no longer be little children, tossed by the waves and blown around by every wind of teaching, by human cunning with cleverness in the techniques of deceit. But speaking the truth in love, let us grow in every way into Him who is the head—Christ. (Ephesians 4:14–15 HCSB) PRAY Lord Jesus, thank you for being the same yesterday, today, and forever. I am thankful that your teaching is also the same yesterday, today, and forever. Rather than bending your teaching to fit my understanding, I want to bend my understanding to align with your teaching. Come, Holy Spirit, and lead me into mature faith. I pray in your name, Jesus. Amen.