Fraud

When I reread a section in Deuteronomy, a section in chapter 31 caught my attention: “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” (verse 16). 

I put the Bible down for a few minutes and let my mind drift to several 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, the supernatural gift of foretelling – instead of permitting the text to remain in the realm of the supernatural, liberal commentators tell readers that a later editor inserted this section a few centuries later. And so the text marking Israel’s rebellion was not a prediction of future events, but an historical detail of the past.

What that allegation does, of course, is to replace the supernatural with the natural. And sadly, 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.

I can only guess why such commentators suggest God’s word is rife with fraudulent ‘prophecies.’ Such accusations do nothing less than pervert God’s holy and inerrant word, and help destroy the faith of men, women, and children.

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 deceitful texts and contexts, who’s to say the concept of God Himself is not part of the fraud?

This race toward emasculating the Word of God is not a new phenomenon. As early as the first century, the Holy Spirit moved the apostle Paul to pen these words of encouragement to Christians:

“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).

Christian! There is far too much at stake for your eternal soul to let faithless commentators rob you of your confidence in the supernatural God and His supernatural book. The omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent God we serve is certainly able to ensure the accuracy of His words over the centuries. The eternal God who knows the future as intimately as He knows the past – for He remains above and outside what we call “time’ – He is eminently able to provide a word of future knowledge to any of His servants. 

He is, after all, God.