Our new Wednesday night series, 31 Flavors Of Christianity, examines the beliefs and practices of America’s most common “Christian” organizations. I’m using the word Christian loosely here because many of these groups don’t resemble Biblical Christianity at all. We’ve only completed our second lesson and one thing is already abundantly clear, “How a denomination views the Bible will shape everything they do.” Our first lesson was on Catholicism, and how they hold “church tradition” to be equal with Scripture. Therefore they have all sorts of crazy doctrines without any biblical support. Why else would anyone believe that viewing a thorn from Jesus crown would put you on the fast track to Heaven? The next group we studied were the Mormons and well they have 3 or 4 extra books to “correct and complete” the Bible. This is how you end up wearing special underwear and hopefully get your own planet to populate in the next life. Here’s the deal, when you depart from Scripture alone as your standard of God’s revelation to man, your only limited by your imagination. Sadly that is what these false religions are built upon, the vain imaginations of sinful men. When your religion introduces new teachings and then prohibits you from comparing it with the Bible, you’ll end up believing some weird stuff. Like the Pope saying “Don’t eat meat on Fridays to remember Jesus on the cross but you can eat fish cause it’s not really meat.” Or what about Joseph Smith saying “that there are men living on the moon who dress like Quakers and live to be nearly 1000 years old.” Well if you believe that, you’ll have no problem seeing Utah is the new Garden of Eden either. While I could go on and on with the craziness of the Mormons and Catholics let’s get back to the root of their problem, a wrong view of Scripture. While many people will say the Bible is inerrant or without error, fewer and fewer are willing say the Bible is sufficient or all we need. Weather it is the church traditions of the Catholics or the angelic visitations of the Mormons both groups are looking for some other revelation to complete the Bible. The solution to all this nonsense is to compare what God has already said through the pages of Scripture with what people claim that God told them. This was exactly what the men of Berea did when they first encountered Paul’s teaching. They “searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so.” I firmly believe much of the error in modern churches would not exist if every “God told me...” was weighed with Scripture. We do not need a new word from God, we need to get reacquainted with what He has already said.
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