Have you read the Psalms Code?

A complete and free download in pdf format is available at:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/24346955/Psalms-Code

Enjoy.

I do not think it wrong to edit readings to those we attempt to comfort; this in no way diminishes the authority of Scripture. Rather, I believe we should use prayer to guide our attempts at using Scripture to bring comfort to others. I am a bivocational minister, and many of my parishioners are elderly. When I visit someone in the hospital, or at home, I ask the Holy Spirit to guide me in the words I use, and for direction in selecting passages from the Bible. I do believe there is a ‘comfort’ factor involved, and the approach I would use reading a passage such as Psalm 139 could indeed differ between a hospital visit and a sermon delivered in church.

It is often difficult to make an application for Christians from Ps. 139:19-22. I can understand the psalmist’s desire for God to judge the wicked who afflict the righteous, yet I cannot tell my parishioners that we are justified in expressing this hatred to those whom we consider wicked. Rather, I would mention Matt. 5:43-48, stressing that Jesus taught the old saying, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’ is now invalid; we are to be perfect, and perfection comes through love of all.

The Bible isn’t a nice book written for nice people. It is not a systematic theology written for an affluent niche market. It’s raw. It addresses with the full range of human emotions and the darkness of our hearts. How could it be real and not be messy? This is one reason I love it: It surprises me.

Even when I’ve encountered these seemingly ugly passages, I’ve never felt that I couldn’t identify with the authors. The rage of injustice is real. The oppressed aren’t pitiful, passive lambs. Feeling bloodthirst and anger is part of the package.

I remember being with others in a church meeting a few years ago to give guidance on the architecture for a building project. The architects showed a number of slides, including one of a concrete altar with a rusted iron cross in the background–and we suburbanites flinched. Evangelicals have a very hard time with the grotesque. We prefer the corporate to the corrupt. But more often than not, that’s where God is at work. The cross, properly understood, is ugly and obscene. And good.

May the Lord guide our understanding so as not to be on the receiving ends of such passages.

If we’re going to be students of the Scriptures, we certainly have to deal with “difficult” passages. Sometimes that means reconciling them with parts that seem to reflect the opposite. Sometimes that means just accepting that the issues may not be as cut-and-dry as we think. Nonetheless, we have a responsibility to deal with the text as individual passages, chapters, and books but also as an entirety. Sometimes that’s very hard.

There are parts of Scripture that will frankly never make it ino a sermon I preach. There are some things that just aren’t appropriate to that setting. Going back to the analogy from last week about the Scriptures being like a gun, we need to be responsible in the way we use the Scriptures. But that kind of “picking and choosing” doesn’t mean that the Scriptures aren’t being respected. In fact, I think having a venue where you can honestly tackle the hard stuff in a study environment is necessary for the local congregation. I just don’t think that environment is usually the pulpit during the weekly worship service.

However, the Bible is clear that God temporally punishes evildoers and will eternally punish those who oppose him. It doesn’t make God a sadist but reveals his whole nature as a God of love and a God of holiness. If it greatly disturbs someone that God will actually punish evildoers eternally in hell, I would tell that person he or she is not a true Christian (because he or she doesn’t believe in the true God). It is not the fundamentalists that make Christianity sick and insipid but Christians who embrace various forms of liberal theology, postliberalism, postmodernism, and emergent church theology.

I would not characterize what you have written as being a very constructive thing for one Christian to say to another. Many Christians, including myself, believe everything that is within the Apostles Creed and the Nicene Creed. We pray, worship, read the Bible, study the words of people more educated than ourselves. Yet, we can still disagree with our fellow Christians about lots of things, including why things were written in the Old Testament and how those writings should affect what we do now. There is a story in the Old Testament about a man who promises God that if God lets him be successful in battle, he will kill the first thing that he sees come through his door when he returns home. The man goes home and his beloved daughter walks through the door. He lets her go off with her friends for a few months before he kills her. Do you think this man was correct to keep his promise to God? Do you think God expected him to keep this promise? I am sure you know that my answer is no and no. Moral of that story: Don’t make stupid promises to God! And if you are so stupid as to make stupid promises…don’t keep them. And don’t do that again.

There are also places in the Bible where it says that God is kind to the wicked. There are many books in the Bible, many writers writing the books. We need to use study, reason, prayer to understand the best we can.