This is part two of a ten part series. The series begins Here.
9. Avoid commentaries. You don’t need a teacher. Context, culture, language, self deceit and justification are all irrelevant.
The beauty of believing things for the sake of avoiding change is that it doesn’t matter if you’re consistent. If conviction number 10 from yesterday’s blog (read it here) becomes difficult to defend you can easily swap to the other side and still remain untouched. Just be sure you swing completely. Any sort of moderate, reasonable position won’t do. When someone challenges your position that you need an expert, just agree. Completely. Throw out your commentaries, ignore teachers that challenge you. Be sure to quote 1 John 2:27, “But you have received the Holy Spirit, and he lives within you, so you don’t need anyone to teach you what is true. For the Spirit teaches you everything you need to know, and what he teaches is true—it is not a lie.” The beauty here is that if anyone challenges you that you are reading this out of context, and don’t understand it properly, you can simply repeat the scripture.
It helps here to pretend that Paul was knowingly and intentionally writing scripture only to you. Give him credit for an ability to communicate beyond anyone you’ve ever known. Your wife, your kids, your pastor and friends…none of them understand you as well as they might. They are biased by their own context, culture and so forth, but not Paul. After all he was inspired. As long as you put no effort into understanding the culture or context of the writing, it will be easy to make scripture say what you need it to say to avoid any messy paradigm shifts.
So while it is ok to rely on the experts to avoid reading scripture seriously, it is a bad idea to rely on help from people with more information if you are actually going to read scripture. Either rely on the experts entirely or not at all; that way you avoid learning anything useful for your life.