Those Pesky Habits

I was talking with a friend yesterday who - even though being raised in church, and having read through the bible twice thus far - just encountered First John for the first time last week. He said "I mean really encountered it. Like you read about bears, see bears on TV and at the zoo, but one day, you meet a real live bear in the back country. That's what I mean 'encountered'."

Yeah, I would certainly call that an encounter, too! It was several years ago that I, too, 'encountered' First John. As a youngster steeped in Southern Baptist doctrine, I rarely got past 1 John 1:9. Really. I don't know why. Maybe it was due to the habits of Bible Sword drills in Training Union on Sunday nights. Maybe it was because I, like so many others developed my theology from habit hearing only, instead of what I read and studied myself. It took real determination to learn what God means in Isaiah 55 to change that complacent theology.

Then, as a young pastor, while seeking God for understanding of 'church politics', I stumbled into First John - the whole letter, as a conversation, not a collection of verses or theological content.

We, in the modern church in America, too often miss small things of great importance. Like the word 'letter'. King James calls several segments of the New Testament 'epistles'. We tend to call them 'books'. And in the use of those nouns, we miss what these portions of Scripture really are.

They are letters. They are intimate conversations with us. They aren't books, that they would be incomprehensible. They aren't novels that they would take too much time to read. They aren't magazines that they would promote a popular view. They are letters, written to you, and to me, and to those who have gone before us, to let us know about God's great love for man.

John's first letter is no exception. The trouble is, almost all decent translations and versions use the liturgical divisions of Chapters and Verses, so understandably we miss that these are letters.

Here's a quote from Don Stewart on the Blue Letter Bible website - one of several really good web-based Bible reading and study pages (no, I'm not gonna endorse any one site over another).

It must always be remembered that the divisions into chapters and verses are human-made. They are sometimes arbitrary, and they sometimes interfere with the sense of the passage. The first step in Bible interpretation is to ignore the modern chapter and verse divisions.

So, here's what I did one night long long ago using Quick Verse under good ol' Win3.1. I opened the good old-fashioned King James Version, and copied all the text from 1 John into my word processor. Then I deleted all the chapter and verse notation. Then I read the letter as a letter.

It's far easier to do that, these days. Most bible software will let you drop the notation during copy, and some will display for reading without the chapter and verse notation. But, 'back-in-the-day', it did the trick for me. And what a letter! I pray that each of you encounter it, too!

Back to last night's conversation with my friend... He sent me a URL that he found as a part of our discussions on what we believe and why we believe it. It's primary topic is 'The Unpardonable Sin'. That one can elicit an uncountable number of 'rabbit trails' during an open study meeting, but it's definitely a topic your own studies should research. This page is actually pretty good! The author does an excellent job with the topic, including some wonderful back-ground work to build one's understanding of what the topic really is. :)

Blessings! Oh, and if you feel challenged when you read this page, ask the Lord about it before you make your decision about the page.


TJMac