Taken Captive

I recently read a section in Deuteronomy that caught my attention. It’s from chapter 31 and verse 16:

“The Lord said to Moses, behold, you are about to lie down with your father‘s; and this people will arise and play the harlot with the strange gods of land, into the midst of which they are going, and will forsake me and break my covenant which I made with them. Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be consumed, and many evils and troubles will come upon them.”

I put the Bible down for a few minutes and let my mind drift to a number of liberal commentaries I’ve read over the years regarding passages like this one. Instead of permitting the text to speak for itself – in this case, Moses is exercising the supernatural gift of foretelling – instead of permitting the text to remain in the realm of the supernatural, liberal commentators tell the readers that a later editor inserted this section of the text a few centuries later – when Israel’s rebellion was not a prediction of future events, but a past historical fact.

What that insertion does, of course, is to replace the supernatural with simple history to make it SEEM like a prophecy.

I can only guess why such commentaries promote fraud. A lie. A perversion of God’s holy and inerrant word.

The Books of Moses are not the only books of Scripture wherein liberal commentators slice and dice away the supernatural. They do it in virtually every Old Testament and even many of the New Testament books.

No wonder so many people today take the Bible with the proverbial grain of salt. Why bother to read it – except perhaps as ‘literature’, but certainly not the inerrant word of Almighty God?

Indeed, if the Bible is full of fraudulent texts and contexts, who’s to say the concept of God Himself is not part of the fraud?

I hope you will not be deceived by the reckless ideas of anti-supernaturalists. I also hope you will take the words of the great rabbi and apostle of Jesus to heart:

“I say this so that no one will delude you with persuasive argument. . . . Therefore as you have received Christ Jesus the Lord, so walk in Him, having been firmly rooted and now being built up in Him and established in your faith . . . See to it that no one takes you captive through philosophy and empty deception, according to the tradition of men, according to the elementary principles of the world, rather than according to Christ. For in Him all the fullness of Deity dwells in bodily form, and in Him you have been made complete, and He is the head over all rule and authority . . .  (Colossians 2:4-10).